Recomposing Art and Science (artists-in-labs) || Overlapping Waves and New Knowledge Difference, Diffraction, and the Dialog between Art and Science

摘要： Hierarchy and stereotyping still appear to determine the relationship between art and science today, even if the attitude towards scientific research processes and artistic practice has changed in the meantime, leading to a new assessment of these different epistemic cultures. The images of science as universal, objective, and steadily advancing, on the one hand, and of art as predominantly individual, dominated by subjectivity and intuition, on the other, have lost considerable credibility and become less distinct. The various deconstructions of science in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from linguistics and postmodern relativism and placing emphasis on historical contingency and the social construction of scientific findings, theories and objects of knowledge, were not the sole cause for this development, but also more recent investigations of scientific practice inspired by anthropology. Constituting knowledge “no longer within the abstract space of conceptual history and the history of ideas”, they present it “within its contingency and local situatedness, within the historic context of its production” (Rheinberger, Wahring-Schmidt, Hagner 1997, p. 8). Furthermore, the capacity of art to generate knowledge and engage competently in research has been increasingly recognized over the course of the last decade, while emphasis has been placed on its rational and intersubjective aspects. Regarding the relationship between art and science, the present discourse on artistic research clearly shows, however, that certain presumptions and hierarchizing comparisons still persist. For example, artistic research is frequently analyzed in a one-sided manner and construed as something that generates implicit, practical, or sensual knowledge — a knowledge that is difficult to verbalize and rather shown or felt, a knowledge that, although credited with cognitive and rational qualities, nevertheless must be distinguished from a theoretical-discursive knowledge (insight through terms). We must cast a critical view on these generalizing and polarizing descriptions.1 Based on sensible and conceptual differences, they go hand in hand with the reflexive reference to a concept of scientific research with which artistic research contends and from which it feels compelled to distinguish itself. This operation frequently entails the concern that scientific research practices could ultimately take the upper hand and deprive artistic research of its specific artistic-aesthetic qualities.