{"id":58,"date":"2012-08-05T11:56:18","date_gmt":"2012-08-05T11:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/?p=58"},"modified":"2012-08-16T15:05:04","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T15:05:04","slug":"fellow-experimenters-in-art-and-science-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/2012\/08\/05\/fellow-experimenters-in-art-and-science-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Fellow experimenters in art and science part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarah Craske<\/a>, one of our Chain Reactionists, put me onto this one: BioARTCAMP<\/a>.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a video<\/a> of the project.\u00a0 BioARTCAMP was a project run out in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, bringing together artists and scientists into an unfamiliar and necessarily improvisatory environment.\u00a0 This simple act of transportation has a transformative effect on the behaviours and relationships of the participants; because it\u2019s no-one\u2019s \u2018own\u2019 space, they have to figure out the rules and aims of what they do completely afresh.\u00a0Paul Vanouse, for example, has to figure out how to do PCR in the forest.\u00a0 He has to go without the modern kit: to go back to before the automatic machine<\/a> we\u2019re exploring in Chain Reaction!<\/em> was invented.\u00a0 He heats up his water-baths laboriously to the right temperature \u2013 over the campfire \u2013 barbecues will never seem the same again \u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Heating up water baths for a PCR the old-fashioned way … on a campfire<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0One unexpected element of the video is seeing children run around the camp \u2013 whoever saw that in a\u00a0lab or even in most artists\u2019 studio?\u00a0 In another social reconfiguration, scientists and artists alike are kitted out in the same professional \u2018uniform\u2019, a hi-vis jacket decorated with a brassiere image on the front (complete with Canadian maple leaf).\u00a0 And then there\u2019s just weird stuff around the place, like a fridge inside the body of a goat or deer of some sort.<\/p>\n

In their turn, these social rearrangements reconfigure relationships with nature, which is after all the stuff of both science and art.\u00a0 The feminised uniforms are echoed in the mating experiments done at the camp by Marta de Menezes<\/a> (another Chain Reactionist) who unpicks the binary notion of gender with her seven-gendered organism.<\/p>\n

Dr Jennifer Willet (director of BioARTCAMP) comments:<\/p>\n

The lab itself is an ecology \u2026 The laboratory is in fact teaming with life.\u00a0 When we manipulate life in the lab we are in turn manipulating ourselves and our ecology.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What BioARTCAMP does is to get people thinking about how these manipulations can be humane, witty, creative, fun.\u00a0 Artists and scientists alike partake in the same social project, that is, of choosing natural manipulations.<\/p>\n

Above all I respect the political angle of BioARTCAMP, which is based in an appreciation that both art and science are at root social projects, and that good science communication digs beneath the science to its purposes.\u00a0 Here\u2019s Willet again:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really interested in a social and political analysis of technology.\u00a0 I\u2019m fearful that as a culture we\u2019re \u2026 falling into a future that is not being determined for our best needs or for our ecology\u2019s best needs, but instead for the economy\u2019s best needs, and for the best needs of business men.\u00a0 So with a project like this I\u2019m driven primarily by the images it will create \u2026 secondary to that I am driven by the political and social economy of the arguments that we are making with those images.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We could do a lot worse than this for a vision of science communication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Craske, one of our Chain Reactionists, put me onto this one: BioARTCAMP.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a video of the project.\u00a0 BioARTCAMP was a project run out in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, bringing together artists and scientists into an unfamiliar and necessarily improvisatory environment.\u00a0 This simple act of transportation has a transformative effect on … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20347],"tags":[20359,130401,20361,20360,20358,20362],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sciencecomma\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}