[csaa-forum] Transformations issue 26 now released

[Warwick Mules]

Transformations announces the release of Issue No. 26  ‹ Thinking in the
Arts-Science Nexus.

Access the issue at:

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/26/editorial.shtml


Thinking in the Arts-Science nexus

The arts and the sciences have a complex history of both conflict and
entanglement. As C.P. Snow¹s controversial writings regarding the ³two
cultures² demonstrate, disciplinary fiefdoms in education curriculum and
research, not to mention the strictures of grant funding bodies and the
research priorities of universities and governments, often seek to keep the
sciences separate from the arts and humanities.

To take a small example; current debates over ³STEM vs STEAM² in education
curriculums ­ that is, the question of including the Arts in the Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics cluster ­ reflect just one facet of
the broader disciplinary struggle, but they clearly signal the political and
economic weight that is brought to bear on the relation between the arts and
sciences. Here in Australia, the office of Australia¹s Chief Scientist has
for a number of years strongly called for increased attention to the STEM
disciplines in curriculum design, on the basis that Australia¹s future as an
innovative nation hinges on such attention. Understood within this context,
the question of the relation between the arts and the sciences is not simply
an issue of disciplinary boundaries and abstract categories because it is
frequently highly politicized, and posed for strategic rather than
philosophical purposes.

Despite this political and economic dimension however, the immensely
fruitful exchange currently happening in the space where art meets science
suggests other possibilities. The art-science nexus has been revitalised by
new thinking in neurobiology and biotechnology as well as quantum physics,
sweeping away mechanistic ideas of isolated subject-object encounters, and
replacing them with force fields, immanence, events, affect and becoming.
The prominence of artists like Eduardo Kac and Tissue Culture and Art (Oron
Catts and Ionat Zurr), whose works use genomic and biological sciences to
pose ethical questions of global importance, testifies to the relevance, and
value, of contemporary enquiry into the art-science nexus.

The papers in this issue of Transformations address this enquiry in many
ways. Concerns regarding how science may appear to employ art as a kind of
³aesthetic science communication,² or how art may appear to use science to
³legitimize² its concerns, are addressed and problematised as artists and
theorists explore the richness of a middle path where neither pole is
prioritized. From jeweller-physicists to plant-thinkers, and via x-ray scans
and nano-particles, the authors in this issue explore not just the points
where artistic and scientific knowledges and practices have intersected, but
what this means in terms of finding new methodologies, ontologies and
epistemologies for the hybrid forms that emerge when art and science
commingle.

Editors: Grayson Cooke, Erika Kerruish, Warwick Mules, Elizabeth Stephens.

Articles:

Shimmering Data and Ecological Collaboration: Paying Attention to Intruding
Ecological Situations
Justin Derry

Plant thinking as geo-philosophy
Prudence Gibson

Bio Art and the Biotechnological Singularity
Tom Kohut

Reflections on Public Art + Science Reasoning
John Fraser, Fiona P. McDonald, Nezam Ardalan

Beyond Bifurcation: Thinking the Abstractions of Art-Science after A. N.
Whitehead
Andrew Lapworth

External and Internal Topographies: Art on the Uncanny Limits of Scan
Technology
Fiona Fell

Labpunk - Curiosity, Intra-action and Creativeness in a Physics-art
Collaboration
Anita Milroy, Margaret Wegener, Ashley Holmes


Access the issue at:

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/26/editorial.shtml




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