ArtScience involves understanding the human experience of nature through the synthesis of artistic and scientific modes of exploration and expression.Root-Bernstein, Robert & Siler, Todd & Brown, Adam & Snelson, Kenneth. (2011). ArtScience: Integrative Collaboration to Create a Sustainable Future. Leonardo. 44. 192-192. 10.1162/LEON_e_00161.
In recent years, the exchange of knowledge, techniques, and materials between science and art has become more important than ever. Scientists and engineers are increasingly drawing on the techniques and practices of art and design to probe, experiment with, and conceptualise their work in more creative and critical ways. Likewise, artists and designers are more likely than ever to incorporate the various knowledges and practices of the experimental, theoretical, and computational sciences into their research-based work, seeking the academic context as a context for the production and reception of their work and understanding themselves as hybrid ArtScientists.
We are asking how art and science imagine the future and how they may do this together, as well as how they have historically done so. Significant artistic experiences have been at the basis of many inventions in the academic world and outside. Developing experimental habits and the formation of minds to imagine the future otherwise in a context of acceleration, multivalent transitions and ecological emergency: such concerns can neither be addressed by one discipline (nor by art) alone.
At the IAS we aim to support collaborations that truly advance both art and science, and that provide new ways to deepen understandings of complex challenges of all types.