Vol 9 - Special issue

Art and Science

Guest editor

Nicolas Reeves, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

List of Articles

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.

At the turn of the 2000s, our laboratory was invited to participate in the founding of the Hexagram Institute, a Montreal organization dedicated to research-creation in media arts and technologies. This meant that our work had already been identified as falling within this field, the definition of which, at the time very uncertain, was the subject of active discussions. Although they have gradually become clearer over the past quarter of a century, its limits remain relatively vague, particularly with regard to its status in relation to other artistic fields such as art/science or digital arts. However, as is the case for many creators-researchers, the retrospective analysis of the projects conducted by our laboratory reveals several elements likely to contribute to clarifying the objectives, methodologies, and frame of reference of research-creation. This is the case for the artistic exploration program Point d.Origine, the subject of our work for several years. Its central element is a small object called the Harmonic Lantern, whose design and implementation took place at the confluence of scientific and historical research, technological development, and creative experimentation. This article describes the origins and challenges of the program and summarizes the steps that led to the Lantern’s final design.

This text explores the environmental and societal climate crisis as the transition from a well-ordered world of processes involving nested but distinct scales of time and space to a singularity where all these scales have converged in a kind of generalized globalization: the instantaneous and the secular, the local and the planetary, the individual and the collective. The world on the other side of singularity is discontinuous and unpredictable, and the fictions of art and science research will then be useful in preparing our choices of trajectory at the many crossroads ahead.

In the late 1960s, educational reform in Quebec led to the integration of art schools into universities. The presence of artists within faculty led to a rethinking of artistic practices in the academic environment as forms of research, forcing the development of new epistemological paradigms. The emergence of research-creation as a research approach has opened a whole new field of possibilities for the arts, humanities and sciences. The Hexagram network for research-creation in art, culture and technology was founded in 2001, at a time when research-creation was becoming institutional-ized, recognized and financed by major provincial and federal research funds. Today, Hexagram is a hub for international collaborations in research-creation in art and science.

This essay attempts to define the contours of artistic research by relying on the writings of Manning, Massumi and Borgdorff. I propose a set of methodological, epistemological, and poetic considerations situating artistic research at the intersection of arts and sciences, contributing to new forms of knowledge and critical reflection. I also address the tensions resulting from this hybridization, which produces artistic artifacts blurring the boundaries between art and science and transgressing their existing paradigms of production. Finally, I illustrate the different forms that artistic research can take through my own choreographic creations and my underlying research in human-machine interaction.

Is Research-Creation a valid and legitimate mode of knowledge production? This was a question posed as the theme of a panel discussion at the 2023 de la mise en culture de la science à la recherche-création that took place at the École des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). This paper focuses on contemporary research-based creative practices. Rather than arguing the validity of such practice, or examining whether creative practice coupled with research methods equals knowledge production, the purpose of the paper is merely to share, from a practitioner’s point of view, three case studies that speak to if, what, and how knowledge was produced in the creative process of these projects. Engaging with the critical perspectives of scholars, such as Loveless, Chapman, Gänschirt, and Groat and Wang, the discussion begins with insights from the 2016 ZKM exhibition on Frei Otto’s architectural models and expands to share the authors’ pursuits of two of their own creative projects. At the heart of these projects is the interdisciplinary arts-charged creative process, which propels the practice onward as a quest to know something we didn’t know before. A key aspect of all these projects is their focus on questions of significant cultural and societal importance. The journey toward the answers intermittently intersects with science, engineering, and other fields beyond the arts.

This paper explores the tensions and opportunities arising from interdisciplinary collaborations between engineering and the arts. It highlights the feeling of imposture felt by practitioners working at the interface of these disciplines, due to divergent epistemological frameworks and sometimes unequal institutional recognition. The author, through his own career, analyzes how these collaborations enrich research and innovation while posing methodological and identity challenges. The article highlights three major contributions of these collaborations. First, they constitute a pedagogical lever, allowing students to broaden their approach to problem solving and to develop critical and creative thinking. Second, they accelerate access to audiences and users, by using artistic works as interactive prototypes to test the acceptability and relevance of new technologies. Finally, they promote a position of critical innovation, where the encounter between engineering and art generates new questions about the uses and impacts of technologies. Through case studies such as the DESSAIM project (dance and robotic swarms), La Mariée mise à nu par le binaire (interaction between bodies and exoskeletons) and the Tryphons (cubic aerostats) the author demonstrates how these collaborations foster critical thinking and technological innovation. He concludes by arguing for increased institutional recognition of transdisciplinary approaches and for strengthening educational programs that integrate art into engineering.

Dedicated to sharing knowledge, particularly on science and society issues, the Quai des Savoirs in Toulouse has chosen to open up a large space for Arts-Sciences creation. This is reflected in the construction of an Arts-Sciences-Society residency program that allows for encounters with the center’s audiences, the organization of seminars between artists and scientists to initiate questions or meetings, and the creation of the Lumières sur le Quai festival around an artistic and scientific itinerary with a dozen installations. These initiatives encourage different perspectives, transdisciplinarity, and questions about the world of tomorrow, by inviting artists, scientists, and citizens into the Science-Society dialogue. This dialogue is built through the continuous attention paid to creating an environment adapted to the presentation of each project: meetings with artists and scientists, mediation for the public, creation of soundtracks, and documentation of the residencies to allow everyone to discover the works according to their desires, from contemplation to appropriation.

How can we create opportunities that will enable meaningful and mutually productive interaction between artists and scientists? Several answers to this question can be drawn from the history of art-science practices in the last decades. However, no systematic study of this issue has yet been undertaken. The experience of the Laboratoria Art&Science Foundation, founded in 2008 in Moscow by the author of this article, allows us to draw some initial conclusions and initiate a preliminary classification of the interdisciplinary methodologies that have been created and implemented by visiting artists and researchers over the fourteen years of the Foundation’s operation (2008-2022). Our approach is based on a comprehensive and in-depth interaction between artists and scientists, in which the curator plays a central role as facilitator and catalyst for dialogue. Several complete cycles of arts-science interaction have thus been able to take place, from the definition of issues during the first meetings between artists, scientists, and philosophers, to the production of complex projects, including the conduct of research-creation experiments and the dissemination of their results at conferences, or exhibitions in museums or galleries. Among other things, we have created joint arts-science production platforms involving renowned artists, such as Marina Abramović, Thomas Feuerstein, Theresa Schubert, Sergey Shutov, and many others. More than thirty international exhibitions have been organized, and partnerships have been established with major centers such as the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo, Brazil), Sensi Lab (Melbourne, Australia). Three main methodologies emerged during this period: the implantation of the artist in a scientific laboratory; transposition, namely the use of artistic concepts and ideas as a basis for scientific experimentation; and third-order observation, which consists of a mutual and integrated observation of the work processes of artists and scientists. This article describes each of these methodologies in detail, through selected examples, and shows how they can be used to bridge cultural and transdisciplinary divides. Artists, philosophers, scientists, and engineers thus find themselves in a position to conduct a joint activity that is productive, enriching, and equitable, based on mutual attention and the realization of the potential of each type of thinking when implemented within a collective practice.

This work explores research-creation in a challenging context in Lebanon, where economic, social, and political crises have deeply altered living and working conditions. In the face of deteriorating basic services and economic tensions, innovative digital fabrication practices have emerged, enabling autonomous and sustainable local production. Through the creation of structures such as Bits to Atoms, Post Industrial Crafts, and BeirutMakers, we have explored the potential of digital tools, notably 3D printing and robotics, to redefine the roles of the designer and the artisan. The projects undertaken are rooted in applied research, where the use of local and recycled materials (polycarbonate, wood, aluminium) addresses immediate needs while seeking to minimise ecological impact. Through experiments on both small and large scales, from the production of everyday objects to urban interventions, this approach questions the boundaries between design, craft, and industry. Finally, in response to the crisis, the «beyond-commission» approach enabled the financing and enrichment of projects, opening up new avenues for ethical and resilient design that can adapt to economic constraints while reinventing the potential of digital fabrication in hostile contexts.

This paper looks back at the collaboration between an artist-researcher and a researcher-writer around the question of extractivism, approached here from a sensitive, organic perspective, via the association between video installation, photographic gesture and textual production. Enterrer l’infini (Burying the Infinite) forms the third and final gesture of a triptych whose creation spanned ten years, in a series of gestures of offering and mourning. The latter are part of the perspective of repairing our relationships with living environments, meeting voices inscribed in the entire thickness of the Earth’s crust, from polluted soils to accumulated sediments and even exhausted mining deposits. Here we return to our respective journeys, the conditions of emergence of the triptych Milk, Blood and Tears, to come to the description of the device Bury the infinite, and weave perspectives by asking ourselves the following thing: as the extractivist era comes to an end, what precisely should we be mourning about?

This article reproduces almost verbatim the closing plenary lecture given by the author at the end of the one-day seminar De la mise en culture de la science à la recherche-création, held at ENSAD (Paris) on May 23, 2023. The author’s thesis is that art can contribute to what he calls mise en culture de la science (put science into culture), and even to its REmise en culture (bring science back into culture), since if we refer to the past, science and culture, particularly during the Renaissance, are very difficult to distinguish. There are still distinct scientific institutions at the time, and the treatises of major artists such as Dürer and Alberti, particularly in geometry, have practically nothing to envy from the mathematical treatises of the same period. The following centuries, from the 17th to the 20th, will see the establishment of a progressive separation between strictly scientific and artistic activities, in a schism that will materialize on the institutional level. Using examples chosen from contemporary visual arts production, the author shows how art can contribute to this remise en culture by broadening the scope of meaning of scientific discoveries, by proposing non-discursive metaphors and by opening up the possibility of developing a "concrete epistemology." It can also induce, and even catalyze, a critical perspective that is particularly necessary today.