The Art+Science Meeting Project is being realized since 2011 by the LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdansk.
The Art+Science Meeting project presents art and science through an expanded exhibition, workshop, publication, meeting and debate program as two different perspectives of the same reality. The interdisciplinary open to discussion character of the project gives a possibility to present the achievements of world’s most outstanding artists who create in the area of science and technology. It also allows a wider look on the contemporary civilization for which science and technology are progress conditions but still remain opaque to most people.
Prof. dr hab. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński (project’s artistic director)about Art+Science Meeting:
“The transformations that can be observed taking place in the work of artists, a multidirectional hybridization, is increasingly guiding art towards, among other things, wide-ranging areas of research in both the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the direction of those disciplines known as the hard sciences. Today, the leading tendencies in art are multidisciplinary and transboundary. Progressive art is taking up the tasks of cultural studies, a trend most commonly seen in critical theory, as well as in creative dialogues between art and biotechnology, genetics, computer science, nanotechnology, research into artificial life and artificial intelligence, and many engineering disciplines.
This is not merely the result of new, independently formed aspirations on the part of art, but also reflects the outcome of a series of coincidences, the influence of a variety of factors, the rise of different social and cultural trends. Among these is undoubtedly the process of transformation that notions about science – its status, instruments and methods of operation – have undergone in the 20th century. The evolution of the theory of science, from Ernest Nagel and Karl Popper to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and the resulting relativization and contextualization of the results of scientific research, have led to the well-founded conclusion that science in its traditional (in the modern sense) understanding should no longer be viewed as the only sphere of social practice producing cognitive tools and knowledge. It should thus come as no surprise that as a result of these processes, art, or at least that part of art which is burdened with a sense of responsibility for shaping reality, is taking up new challenges, adopting new roles, rejecting the simplistic, traditional distinction between objective science and subjective art, and aspiring to fulfil the role of a research community, to act as a source of meaningful and valuable knowledge.
The ties between these emerging areas of art and science are no longer based, as has been the case until recently, on only the popularizing of or critical reference to the research accomplishments of science. Art can be, and often now is, itself both a realm of and method for research. Numerous works of art, mostly from the area of new media, although not only, are now engaging in tasks that lie between traditional notions of artistic creativity and scientific and cognitive activity. Such works, on the one hand, have reanimated an alternative scientific epistemological tradition that was abandoned during the Enlightenment; on the other hand, they move artistic practices into scientific laboratories. The results of these migrations include artistic trends such as bio-art, robotic art, transgenic art and nanotechnology art. The hybrid works coming out of these trends, which possess a combination of artistic and scientific attributes, bring a new, meaningful quality to both science and art. Above all, they introduce new and significant characteristics into the social environment in which these trends are developing.
Today’s art, which maintains a close structural relationship with modern media technologies and scientific paradigms, constructs objects of artistic experience in a manner quite different from that of traditional media art. It is historically unparalleled in nature, proposing new strategies for negotiating meaning, and – above all – new and novel means for engaging audiences. The most recent artistic creative work tends to draw on not only the paradigms of art, science and technology, but also the structure of the information and network society, and the determinants of participatory culture, as it endeavours to participate in the processes that are shaping the framework of our future.