Art and Science

ArtSci - ISSN 2515-8767 - © ISTE Ltd

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Born in the interstices between science, art and technology, research-creation has gradually created its own territory — a space that has granted interdisciplinarity the right of citizenship. It became an autonomous field at the turn of the 21st century, with the emergence of the first institutions specifically devoted to its development, dissemination and funding. Through successive bifurcations, it progressively distinguished itself from art–science practices, which, though producing high-level works of high calibre, too often reduce the encounter between disciplines to an ancillary or operational relationship, at the expense of genuine integration. In this article, we explore the potential of research-creation as a site for the production of knowledge through intuition, experience and sensibility. We propose, through a poetic and phenomenological re-centring of our relation to the world, to consider it as an alternative to the loss of meaning and mastery of knowledge brought about by the ever-increasing technologization of our living environments.

Research-creation is a porous framework that brings together arts and technologies, anchored in an academic context. We will argue that research-creation promotes recognition of artistic activity as producing unique forms of knowledge, different from those based on scientific methodology. This scientific methodology has inspired research-creation to legitimize itself, which led to the temptation to use its codes and modalities, particularly in terms of the academic writing required. We will question whether this disciplinary borrowing is wise, since artistic practice does not share the same goals and intentions; any attempt to standardize or discuss these practices remains fragile given the uniqueness of their approaches, which lie outside of thought articulated through language. We will attempto establish why the research-creation label became necessary at a moment in time, and we will highlight the importance of these practices in in order to resist the discourses, stemming from industrial technoscience, advocating efficiency and utility, which have spread like a new dogma throughout our societies.

The core of the Grame project, a national center for musical creation, founded in 1982 by James Giroudon and Pierre-Alain Jaffrennou, is the exploration and development of knowledge and technologies in the service of artistic creation, particularly in the fields of music, performing arts and multimedia expressions. This communication shows how this objective of art/science synergy will be translated over four decades by relying on a research team installed at the center of a system facilitating interactions between the problems and questions of composers and the methodologies, concepts and tools driven by research. In this spirit, particular emphasisis shed on a series of innovative tools accessible to artists and on the mediation of scientific and technological knowledge towards the public, particularly schools, by trans-mitting it through creative actions.

During the 1950s/1960s, the evolution of musical creation was stimulated by its confrontation with new technologies. It emerged profoundly disrupted. By observing its not-so-distant history, it appears as a crucible precursor of research-creation that can today be considered a real avant-garde in the field. From the first radio experiments in concrete music to the beginning of computer music, from the first groups of artists, researchers, technicians to the emergence of creation and research studios throughout France, the dynamics of the interaction between research and creation has never ceased to blossom. This paper bears witness to this history and observes the modalities of all kinds that have allowed its emergence, its developments, and its swarming, up to the recognition by the establishment of the public policies of the National Centers of Musical Creation. It also seeks to show the dynamics that result from this, currently at work and which aim to construct a civic approach to the relationship between arts, sciences, technologies and society.

Art and science intersect in our distant past, that of the first artists of humanity. Even though it has traversed millennia to reach us, prehistoric art remains highly fragile. To ensure the preservation of decorated caves, they must be closed to the public and thus made invisible. How can this paradox be resolved? For about forty years, the success of replicas of decorated caves has proven that they are credible solutions. Through an iterative process between research and mediation, the replica feeds on scientific data and, in return, offers researchers food for thought about their practices.

The relationship between the mineral and the living has always been a subject of debate, but nowadays it is of growing interest, probably due to scientific advances that have blurred the classical distinction between living and non-living. The first part of this article explores various passages from mineral to living: in ancient stories (Genesis and Greco-Roman mythology) and contemporary role-playing games on the one hand, and in the emergence of life on the other, as understood by science over the centuries. The second part focuses on the reverse passages, from the living to the mineral: several possible mineralizations of organisms, in vivo (biomineralizations) and post-mortem (fossilizations, petrifications), with their artistic and literary revivals, are thus addressed. The third part evokes the proximities between the mineral and the living: natural proximities (in particular those involving epiliths such as lichens) or due to humans (from prehistoric cave paintings to Arte povera). We will finally see how certain writers and artists reach a true intimacy with the mineral world in which they project themselves and find themselves.

Baartman was a woman of the indigenous Khoisan people of South Africa. In 1810, when working as a housemaid in Cape Town, she was coaxed to travel to England to be shown as a savage African, the "Hottentot Venus". She was exhibited as an ethno-erotic freak in Britain and Paris. After her death in late 1815, her body was dissected and George Cuvier published lurid details of her anatomy in an 1817 report. Her remains were kept, and periodically displayed, in the Museum of Natural History (Paris) until finally being repatriated to South Africa in 2002. The tragic story of Baartman’s exploitation has been the subject of many books, films, and articles. Here the focus is on two relatively poorly documented aspects of her exploitation by both artists and scientists. First shown is the artistic exploitation through an exhibition of the depictions of her by the artists of satirical prints, a very popular medium in Baartman’s time. The depictions of her, always in profile with greatly exaggerated buttocks, became in satirical prints, a generic portrayal of African women. In line with the orthodox racism of the early 1800’s, the depictions emphasized the differences between and Europeans and African peoples, the "otherness" of Africans. Secondly, in an exhibition tracing the use of images and characteristics of her, especially (but not only) her skull and brain, the scientific exploitation of Baartman will be shown. The features of her morphology were used to support the divisive view of the inferiority of African peoples. This began with an 1816 report on her visit to the Professors of the Natural History Museum and Cuvier’s 1817 report on the dissection of her corpse, and continued on well into 1970’s.