Proposition
A coordinated encounter between two, each taken seriously on its own terms, produces something neither can arrive at in isolation.
Adding artists to diverse academic research projects has become a part of reinventing European universities. Most of the time such initiatives position artists as amplifiers of scientific developments, rather than equally methodical researchers and compelling authors of their own.
At the same time artists struggle when it comes to making a distinction between scientific developments and their application, in particular in regard to novel technologies — in part because the reasons behind such developments are not sufficiently legible outside the very niche communities dedicated to specific projects.
This however is a recent habit with a short memory. Art and science collaboration share a long history of mutual influence when it comes to process and discovery, and even which questions are worth asking in the first place. The new institutional language of “collaboration” tends to obscure rather than lead with this, placing academic science as the more elite site of knowledge production and art as its synthetic arm for outreach.
Our work leads with a theory that a coordinated encounter between two, each taken seriously on its own terms, produces something neither can arrive at in isolation.
As a partner
w·art·hog is a professional and institutional partner with a long track record of past collaborations, responding to interdisciplinary concerns and structural problems of art and science collaboration by pairing art and science specifically to formulate shared methodologies. Its objective is to reinvigorate art and science education, then work towards shared definitions of what constitutes a propositional value.
In addition to working on diverse projects, we build educational modules, do project-specific supervision, and conduct extensive on- and off-campus symposia.
These programmes are open to students in social and natural sciences who want to understand the cultural context of their research, engage with existing paradigms in their field, and work alongside people trained differently. They are equally relevant for art students who want to gain laboratory access, acquire proper research training, and expand their network beyond their immediate discipline. We engage with students across humanities, cultural geography, contemporary art, design, social sciences, environmental sciences, and animal sciences.