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Short abstract

Drawing on several art and design doctoral research projects at the Bauhaus Uni Weimar, this paper proposes “boundariness” as a postdisciplinary methodological framework for collaboration, extending Star’s pragmatism to boundary agents, spaces, images, and practices.

Long abstract

For art and design researchers, boundary objects (Star and Griesemer) offer a tangible, flexible, aesthetic, and highly effective instrument for collaboration that differ from other theoretical objects, such as epistemic objects (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger), hybrid objects (Bruno Latour), or hyperobjects (Timothy Morton). The pragmatist framing of the boundary objects approach to research collaboration enables artists and designers to contribute to multilateral knowledge transfer processes without diminishing their claims to epistemological autonomy or creative novelty—a common concern among artists working in interdisciplinary settings who resist becoming mere translators of scientific knowledge. At the same time, interdisciplinary collaboration often entails boundary work (as described by Thomas Gieryn and later Henk Borgdorff) that emerges within both conventional art-world spheres, and within academic institutions that may not fully recognize artistic practice as a research methodology. This presentation proposes boundariness as a conceptual framework for understanding how artistic research operates within inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations between art, science, technology, and society, leading to new configurations of e.g. boundary agents, boundary images, boundary processes, boundary spaces, and boundary practices. Drawing on eight years of directing the PhD program in Art and Design at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the presentation reflects on several doctoral projects as empirical cases through which these new configrations may be experienced and articulated. By conceptualizing boundariness as a post-disciplinary methodological sensibility of practice-based research, the presentation contributes to ASTS debates on how creative collaboration can generate new epistemic and relational spaces while negotiating the infrastructures that enable—and sometimes constrain—such work.