Since the early years of Science and Technology Studies, there have been strong links between STS and the literary, visual and performative arts, and circulations between the two have undergone a fruitful trajectory: Institutionally most prominent might be the collaborations between Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel in their three ZKM exhibitions or the establishment of a ´Master en arts politiques` (SPEAP) at the Médialab of Sciences Po. Meanwhile, in academic writing, said links have led to new literary forms (Ashmore 1989) in the field of STS. Today, STS practitioners experiment together with artists from diverse creative disciplines such as visual and fine art, performance, media art or even culinary art (Marres/Guggenheim/Wilkie 2018; Rogers et al. 2021; Salter/Burri/Dumit 2017; Voß/Guggenheim 2019). Recently, Monopol, the leading art magazine in the German-speaking world, named Donna Haraway the most important person in the art world today. Other artists such as Ólafur Elíasson and Tomás Saraceno are working at the intersection of the arts and the sciences with great success.
Accordingly, over the last decade, there has been a broad discourse on the funding and conduct of arts-based research or research creation that has connections with STS theory and practice (Borgdorff/Peters/Pinch 2020; Sormani/Carbone/Gisler 2019). With creativity being front and centre in innovation policy, the realms of STS research and art further melt together. ´Studio Studies` (Farías/Wilkie 2016) established research into creative practices in studios of different kinds in analogy to the investigation of scientists and engineers at practice. Finally, and more generally, one can refer to the travelling concepts from STS to the arts and vice versa, with theoretical constructs such as the ´cyborg`, ´intra-objectivity`, ´improvisation`, and ´dance of agency` coming to mind.
This session wants to create time and space to speculate on these circulations, to report on ongoing research at the intersection of STS and the arts or for performances of creative STS. We seek for contributions – from presentations to performative interventions and other alternative formats – that engage with
- STS research in the field of arts and creative practices
- Arts-based research on science and technology
- Experimental and creative methods in STS research
- Travelling concepts and practices between art and STS
Please send your abstract (300 – 500 words) in either English or German until October 16th 2022 to the panel organizers:
Nadine Osbild, STS TUM, nadine.osbild@tum.de
Matthias Wieser, AAU Klagenfurt, Matthias.wieser@aau.at
More information on this call for abstracts can be found here.
An overview of all calls for papers/abstracts for the STS-hub.de in Aachen (March 15-17 2023) can be found here.