An international Workshop  10-11 October 2016
Istituto Svizzero in Rome
via Ludovisi 48

Over the last ten years, art and science have become fashionable candidates for promoting various and variously renewed forms of interdisciplinarity – be it in instrumental, dialogical or experimental terms. At times conducted under the aegis of cutting-edge science, at times opening up new research fields (e.g., artistic research), “institutional impression management” (Goffman) in terms of art-science collaborations nurtures diverse narratives, many promising initiatives and as many retrospective rationalizations, often dangling between scientism and aestheticism, productivism and criticism. Each site-specific intervention, so it seems, requires the situated achievement of its own rationale, multiple or singular. Distinctive motives for practical engagement in new configurations of art-science collaboration thus remain to be worked out each time anew, if indeed at all. To address the instable “nexus of sayings and doings” (Schatzki) in emerging art-science collaborations, this international workshop brings together leading scholars, contemporary artists, and upcoming (artistic) researchers. The principal aim of the workshop is to take stock of recent developments in art-science collaborations, make explicit some of their intriguing paradoxes, and identify some of the key challenges for future work. What are the “states of the art” of current art-science collaboration? Which key connections remain open, if not to be made, in the emerging, already wide-ranging, yet often fragmented field of art-science collaboration? And what legacies, literatures, and lines of work do they prolong, recast and sometimes invent? These and related questions will be of key interest during the two-day workshop.

The workshop is public and free of charge. Language will be English and Italian, simultaneous translation will be provided.