Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3

Return to Contents»

Immersion and Intervention: Convergences in Art and Science Research / Edited by Hervé Regnauld and Alan Ramón Clinton

Traditionally, at least in practice, "humanists" have viewed nature and culture as separate spheres, while scientists have tended to view nature as a global milieu in which humans are immersed. The extent to which science has retained its humanism and to which philosophy has made a "post-human" turn presents new opportunities for rethinking the history of artistic and scientific practices as well as their potential futures. It is no accident that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have written about both "minor science" (characterized by hydraulic turbulence) and "minor literature" (characterized by Lucretian, tactical "swerves"), both of which produce previously unforeseen molecular objects, events, and molar recuperations.

This new philosophical situation causes us to be interested in several topoi which are not mutually exclusive:

Historical revaluations of the supposed separations of art and science.
Immersion as such: if both humanists and scientists are, inevitably, immersed in the environments they analyze, what are the relationships between, for instance, landscape (as a part of the environment), art (as a representation of landscape), and scientific landscape representation? How are both scientific and novelistic descriptions of human neurological states fictive/narrative in nature as well as illuminating?
Swerves and Collisions: as science and the arts produce cultural objects of unpredictable trajectory, what sorts of collisions happen or have happened by chance, what new cultural objects result, and how are these introjected, incorporated, or dissolved in the historical and phenomenological Umwelt?
Interventions: following Van Fraassen's (2002) idea that both art and science intervene in the world in more or less wilful (rather than merely empirical) ways, what sort of collaborations between these two modulations of human endeavour might occur in the future, for good or ill?

This issue covers the following types of submissions: a) new interpretations from art historians and historians of science; b) analyses of specific collisions between art and science disciplines; c) philosophical and theoretical (re)articulations of art and science in light of their mutual immersion(s); d) works and or manifestos from artists and scientists who have moved outside their original disciplines; e) descriptions or demonstrations from scientists and artists who have or are collaborating on research projects.

Return to Top»