By Kathy Ruoran Li, Junior Project Manager, Art-Science
The 6th Art x Science Dialogue, Art-Science, Quo Vadis (“Where are you marching?” in Latin), featured two practitioners in the field of art, science, and technology, a.k.a. AST. Iris Long is a writer, curator, and researcher at Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), and the recipient of 2018 Hyundai Blue Prize for curators. Irène Hediger is head of the artists-in-labs program (AIL), a project part of the Department of Cultural Analysis at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).
Irène Hediger began her talk with an introduction to the program. Since 2003, artists-in-labs has been facilitating artistic research by way of long-term residencies for artists in scientific laboratories. It brings artists and scientists together in their national and international residencies, and encourages collaborators to challenge their comfort zones to explore questions of our contemporary world, and creates opportunities for cultural and intellectual exchanges.
Hediger describes the environment they create as an “in-between space”, or “space of possiblities”. Artists and scientists alike enter the space of not-knowing, of uncertainty, and ambiguity. Coming together from entirely different professional territories, disciplinaries, and expertise, what links them is their reciprocal interests in new experiences and their willingness to accept the difficulties inherent in the confrontation with the unknown.
During this process, the central role of Hediger and her team is to create a best possible enviroment for collaboration, with a significant amount of preparation work taking place a long time before the residencies start. This includes negotiating and managing expectations, and introducing the science group to the diversity of the contemporary artistic practices nowadays. Such process helps the collaborators see things through each other’s eyes and critically engage with each other, which is a key factor to success.
Hediger then gave two examples of residencies that grew into a long-term and impactful collaborations.
In 2011, Christina Della Giustina spent 9 months at the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL). A trained musician, Giustina channeled her interest in sap flow in trees and converted the scientific data into a musical piece, as well as a book where she reflected on our relationship with the nature. Hediger pointed out that scientists tend to focus on a very small piece of a discipline and forget the big picture. During Giustina’s residency, she challenged the scientists on that and brought them together in a different way. One participating scientist commented that when an artist comes in and asks questions, it “stimulated efforts to gain an overall view on the understanding of the functioning of forest ecosystems and to identify important gaps in knowledge.”
After the initial residency, artists-in-labs continues to bring the processes and result of an individual exchange into the public realm, which leads to first an installation at the botanical garden, then an interdisciplinary project at a primary school, and later at the Montreux Jazz Festival 2015. Earlier this year, Giustina finished a PhD out of these projects.
A second example is of an international residency. Marie Griesmar, a Swiss artist, went to the KAUST Red Sea Research Center’s Reef Genomics Lab, and then went on to another residency at Swissnex in San Francisco. Having done these projects together with scientists on reef ecology and reef restoration, Griesmar founded RRReefs in 2020 with ocean scientist Dr. Ulrike Pfreundt. The organization strives to rebuild coral reefs sustainably and scientifically with an artistic vision and has received two SEIF Tech for Impact Awards.
In these residencies, collaborators do not cast aside their identities or their artistic or scientific disciplines. They create possibilities in the field of tension that arise from the confrontation between the respective disciplinary knowledge, as well as their social and cultural contexts. It is, as Hediger put it, always an endeavor, with unpredictable outcomes.
In 2019, artists-in-labs launched the pilot of its master series, giving master students in Zurich universities opportunities to explore their field of study with a transdisciplinary approach, and link theory with practices of artistic research. Some of these experiments already made an impact on the study concept at ZHdK: for those who want to pursue academic careers, artists-in-labs provides first encounters with research practices and is exploring transdisciplinary approaches towards PhD programs.
At the end of her talk, Hediger reflected that artists-in-labs aims to promote a new way to understand the challenges of today, to bring together different perspectives, and stressed the importance of really opening up and being prepared for conversations and challenges.
Iris Long began her talk by pointing out the current tendency to take metaphors from the science and tech world despite the perceived difference between the two’s practices and tracing it to as early as the historically renowned “9 Evenings” in 1966. We established “labs”, “incubators”, and “R&D” platforms, and equipped the artists with “advanced technology.”
“9 Evenings” was an event that gathered 10 artists and 30 engineers, which attracted 10,000 audiences, and consumed 8,500 “working hours” from Bell Labs – a term still relevant today when measuring the cost of time and energy.
Long then introduced one of her recent projects, Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse, hosted by Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai as part of their Emerging Curators Project 2O2Online. The project started with a 6-month research, followed by a week of showcases in the forms of online webinars, one-day WIP (work-in-progress) exhibition, off-site reading room events and podcast shows. Its key concern was around an emerging, yet ambiguous tendency of “how art flows interdisciplinarily”.
A diagram on Blue Cables in Venetian Watercourse’s website visualized the research conducted by the team.
During the research phase, Long conducted a study of the AST landscape through case studies of 11 Chinese artists’ AST programs worldwide, either through residencies, incubations, or commercial commissions. 17 groups of practitioners-in-residency came together to articulate their versions of inter-/cross-/trans-/anti-disciplinary exchanges. Long interviewed and discussed with them the different roles artists played in the projects, the support and guidance they received, and the limitations and bind they encountered.
While it appears that artists are in a quite promising situation right now with numerous opportunities regarding residencies, R&D resources, and exhibitions, challenges presume. While some artists were quite positive and benefited from the inspiring “chaotic” environment at incubators, some voiced their concerns, such as the disconnection between the artist’s proposal and its funders, the feeling that the scientists’ role was often marginalized in these collaborations, or sometimes the artists’ role being downgraded as merely doing the visual communication for science knowledges.
Blue Cables’ online residency was a research-driven online community that encouraged exchanges of ideas. 17 groups of artists with a diverse area of focus participated in the 2-month residency that include events such as roundtables, workshops, and lectures with researchers, curators and artists working at the intersection of AST.
Residency Mindmap
As an extension of the residency program, the offline show borrowed the idea of WIP (Work-In-Progress) to exhibit a draft-like assemblage of the residents’ progress. It showcased the materials generated during the residency that did not fully take form and gave voice to the practitioners. Long also raised new perspectives, such as whether artists could be involved in the publication of a science paper, or whether a keynote or workshop could be considered as the delivery of residency programs.
During the Q&A session, Hediger further explained the process of establishing artists-in-labs residencies. Due to time constraints, we could only take a limited number of questions. If you have further questions for our speakers regarding art-science collaborations, please email us at artscience.china@swissnex.org. We will try our best to forward them to the speakers.
Click here to watch the recording.