Online Course by Node Center with Isabel de Sena
Duration: Nov 17 – Dec 8, 2020
Fee: 154€
Max seats: 32
Enroll before: Nov 12, 2020
Dedication: 3 hrs/week
The introductory class delves into the ongoing debate around C.P. Snow’s seminal lecture, “The Two Cultures”, in order to discuss the urgency and particular demands of working at the intersection of art and science today. The second explores previous waves of engagement within the field and relates them to the current upsurge of interest, while the third addresses curatorial positions to complex issues around ethics and autonomy, as well as common pitfalls in actual practice. The last session takes a more pragmatic approach in discussing what curators can do to safeguard the quality, value and integrity of art-science projects, and thereby cultivate an environment in which interdisciplinary collaborations can become meaningful.
Program
Week 1 – The Third Culture: An Ongoing Debate
- Introduction to interdisciplinary curatorial approaches: motivations and potentials
- The conflict of methods (a myth?): positivism versus interpretivism
- Tracing the debate through C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” (1959)
- Beyond generalization: The particularities of different fields of science (biotechnology, human enhancement, neuroscience, quantum- & astrophysics, environmental engineering, etc.)
Week 2 – Historical & Contemporary Perspectives
- Waves of engagement: interdisciplinary artistic approaches in the 20th & 21st centuries
- State of the art: curatorial tendencies, thematic focal points and potentials characterizing the field today.
- Dissolving niche culture: curatorial approaches that can counter the increasing specialization of ‘Art-Science’ as a discrete category
Week 3 – Positions: From Spectacle to Meaningful Engagement
- Responsibility, integrity and ethics
- Curating as knowledge-making, not “Public Outreach”: potentials and traps
- Removing the smoke screen: decoding and translating specialist language and imagery
Week 4 – Setting the Frame: Practical Guidelines
- Initiating collaborations: marking boundaries while cultivating the unexpected
- Disciplinary politics and regulations, obtaining licenses and navigating geo-specific policies
- Curating the unknown: residencies and new commissions
- Keeping a finger on the pulse: websites, journals, magazines and social-media platforms
- Sites and audiences: awareness and adaptation
- Concluding discussion: shifting perspectives and outstanding questions
