Art, the Life Sciences, and the Humanities: In Search ofa Relationship Robert Ztuijnenberg Over the last decades there has been a distinctive effort in the arts to engage with science through participation in the actual practice of science. ' Exchange proj ects between artists and scientists, such as artist-in-lab projects, have become common and a large number oforganizations have emerged that stimulate and initiate collaboration between artists andscientists. ' Research funding organiza tions in thehumanities,such asthe British Arts and Humanities Research Coun cil (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), have also initiated all sorts of research programs that explore and support inter actions between art and science. ' Asa result, artists have grown more involved with scientific concerns and practices, and their increased interactions with scientists have also become a subject of study within the humanities. Why do artists openly seek to gain access to the domain of the sciences? And why do scholars in the humanities value collaboration between artists and scientists so much that theyare willing to spend research time and money on it? This interest in science, I argue in this preface for Ingeborg Reichle's bookArt in theAge of Tecbnoscience,' underscores that the arts and the humanities are searching to establish a new relationship with the natural sciences as well as with each other. Art and Science T he relationship between thearts and thesciences hasbeen subject to permanent change over the past two centuries.

Art, the Life Sciences, and the Humanities: In Search ofa Relationship Robert Ztuijnenberg Over the last decades there has been a distinctive effort in the arts to engage with science through participation in the actual practice of science. ' Exchange proj ects between artists and scientists, such as artist-in-lab projects, have become common and a large number oforganizations have emerged that stimulate and initiate collaboration between artists andscientists. ' Research funding organiza tions in thehumanities,such asthe British Arts and Humanities Research Coun cil (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), have also initiated all sorts of research programs that explore and support inter actions between art and science. ' Asa result, artists have grown more involved with scientific concerns and practices, and their increased interactions with scientists have also become a subject of study within the humanities. Why do artists openly seek to gain access to the domain of the sciences? And why do scholars in the humanities value collaboration between artists and scientists so much that theyare willing to spend research time and money on it? This interest in science, I argue in this preface for Ingeborg Reichle's bookArt in theAge of Tecbnoscience,' underscores that the arts and the humanities are searching to establish a new relationship with the natural sciences as well as with each other. Art and Science T he relationship between thearts and thesciences hasbeen subject to permanent change over the past two centuries.

Scientists, scholars, and artists consider the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences. Popular culture in this “biological century” seems to feed on proliferating fears, anxieties, and hopes around the life sciences at a time when such basic concepts as scientific truth, race and gender identity, and the human itself are destabilized in the public eye. Tactical Biopolitics suggests that the political challenges at the intersection of life, science, and art are best addressed through a combination of artistic intervention, critical theorizing, and reflective practices. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, contributions to this volume focus on the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences and explore the possibility of public participation in scientific discourse, drawing on research and practice in art, biology, critical theory, anthropology, and cultural studies. After framing the subject in terms of both biology and art, Tactical Biopolitics discusses such topics as race and genetics (with contributions from leading biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins); feminist bioscience; the politics of scientific expertise; bioart and the public sphere (with an essay by artist Claire Pentecost); activism and public health (with an essay by Treatment Action Group co-founder Mark Harrington); biosecurity after 9/11 (with essays by artists' collective Critical Art Ensemble and anthropologist Paul Rabinow); and human-animal interaction (with a framing essay by cultural theorist Donna Haraway). Contributors Gaymon Bennett, Larry Carbone, Karen Cardozo, Gary Cass, Beatriz da Costa, Oron Catts, Gabriella Coleman, Critical Art Ensemble, Gwen D'Arcangelis, Troy Duster, Donna Haraway, Mark Harrington, Jens Hauser, Kathy High, Fatimah Jackson, Gwyneth Jones, Jonathan King, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Rachel Mayeri, Sherie McDonald, Claire Pentecost, Kavita Philip, Paul Rabinow, Banu Subramanian, subRosa, Abha Sur, Samir Sur, Jacqueline Stevens, Eugene Thacker, Paul Vanouse, Ionat Zurr

Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science has played the role of muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) as the interdisciplinary exploration of art–science. This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge- making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world. This handbook provides scholars and practitioners already familiar with the themes and tensions of art–science with a means of connecting across disciplines. It proposes organizing principles for thinking about art–science across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. Encounters with art and science become meaningful in relation to practices and materials manifest as perceptual habits, background knowledge, and cultural norms. As the chapters in this handbook demonstrate, a variety of STS tools can be brought to bear on art–science so that systematic research can be conducted on this unique set of knowledge-making practices.

An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion. But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology. With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death. On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities—those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means—and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless. As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life. Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions. Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding. On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions. Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?

Organization and Newness: Discourses and Ecologies of Innovation in the Creative University offers a view from a perspective of organizational education on the ‘new’, which analyzes the production of the ‘new’ within organizations, in relation to the inherent learning processes. Fundamental for this perspective is the question about the changeability of organizations, especially when these are not viewed only as instrumentally established regulatory structures but rather as social constructs. The contributions of this volume contour the complexity of newness in organization and form a bridge from critical analysis of imperative discourse of newness, to programmatic pleas of an organizational pedagogy, which is normative in nature, for a reconfiguration of organizational and societal relationships. The issue at hand shows how tightly the question about newness is constitutively woven into the self-conception of organizational education and pedagogy.

After Taste is an inquiry into a field of study dedicated to the reconsideration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of the concept of Taste. Taste is the category, whose systematic, historical and actual dimensions have traditionally been located in a variety of disciplines. The actuality and potential of the study is based on a variety of collected facts from readings and experiences, which materialize in the following features: One concept (figurative Taste), two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental) and three interrelated dimensions (systematic, historic and actual) are presented in three volumes. As such, the study presents a salient comprehensive companion for wider readership of humanities approaching conceptions of Taste for the first time. Moreover, After Taste is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject. Since its appearance and apparently short triumph some 250 years ago, the concept of non-literary Taste remained the linchpin of aesthetic theory and practice, but also a category outreaching aesthetics. Taste as the personal unity of the production, theory and criticism of art and literature, which was still largely taken as a given in the eighteenth century, has meanwhile given way to a highly-differentiated art world, in which aesthetic discourse is placed in such a way that it can seemingly no longer have a conceptual or linguistic effect on general opinion making. The critical role of “Taste judges”, ratings and rankings in the feuilleton, politics and social media on the one hand and the responding search for new canons on the other have had a huge impact on the academic and popular discourse today. However, Taste’s impact on society is in fact all-encompassing and yet, without getting even close to the “magnetic North” of the academic compass. After Taste fills the gaps of systematic research by a comprehensive tracing of the emergence of the doctrines, discourses and disciplinary dimensions of Taste up to the peak of its systematic and historical trajectory in the eighteenth century and onwards into the present day. The guiding goal is a post-disciplinary rehabilitation of the contested category as a preparation for its productive usage in emerging academic and popular contexts. Three intertwined research hypotheses form the guiding goal of an overall study of the agencies of Taste, its institutionalizations and expert cultures: The (1) first part provides a missing systematic perspective on the concept of Taste as a key factor for understanding the human faculties, value theories and practices of valuating. The (2) second part traces the events at the peak of Taste’s systematic and historical trajectories up until the late eighteenth century and verifies the historiographical hypothesis about the instrumentality of Taste for the production, reception and distribution of culture. The (3) third part reconstructs the major moments in which the contested concept of Taste experiences its post-disciplinary rehabilitation, in preparation for its future productive usage in the academic and popular discourses and practices. It shows how the category of Taste became the foundation, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines, confirming the hypothesis of the immense impact and actuality of Taste in the contemporary world.

Why do Japanese artists team up with engineers in order to create so-called »Device Art«? What is a nanoscientist's motivation in approaching the artworld? In the past few years, there has been a remarkable increase in attempts to foster the exchange between art, technology, and science - an exchange taking place in academies, museums, or even in research laboratories. Media art has proven especially important in the dialogue between these cultural fields. This book is a contribution to the current debate on »art & science«, interdisciplinarity, and the discourse of innovation. It critically assesses artistic positions that appear as the ongoing attempt to localize art's position within technological and societal change - between now and the future.

In global terms, creative industries are on the rise, as are new media investigations in art and initiatives that encourage innovation in the arts, for end-use in the economy. However, there is a significant lack of critical reflection on this form of creative production. This important book points out the dangers and downfalls that accompany such a boom of the creative industries and the subordination of art to the economy and politics. Specifically, it shows that art, as a mode of social and aesthetic practice, is losing the very thing which it has striven for so desperately in the course of modernity: its independence from other spheres of human activity.

This book explores the emergence of a new subdivision in Bio-art — Dendro-art, the interrelationship between humans and plants, the recreation of vanished species of plants, the ecological education of the population, and, more broadly, environmental protection. The innovative quality of this work lies in the fact that many aspects of the phenomenon of Bio-Art are looked at from a new angle: the author of the present study is herself an artist who has received academic training in the field. Therefore, she able to examine the works of bio-artists both from the “inside” and the “outside”. The conclusions drawn from the study may be of use to students, scholars, and teachers preparing courses in art studies, technology, and natural sciences. The study materials may also be used for setting up exhibitions and compiling catalogues on various types of Bio-technological art.