ABOUT
In the context of multiple global crises—such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and growing political populism and instability—the sciences and the arts share similar urgencies. While new scientific insights often demand swift action from politics and society, for example to prevent biodiversity loss or avoid tipping points in the climate crisis, the arts often aim to engage with society beyond the enclosed realm of the art field itself and therefore tend to ground their practices in robust knowledge. As a result, science, art, politics, and activism have moved closer to one another.
Due to these urgencies and their direct impact on human and non-human well-being, values, emotions, and feelings are no longer so easily separable from science, while the arts increasingly incorporate knowledge forms of diverse origins. Artist-scientist collaborations create spaces where both disciplines enrich one another: the arts can make emotional and experiential dimensions more visible and trigger empathy, while scientific approaches provide systematic frameworks for understanding complex phenomena. Through visualization, the arts render abstract scientific processes, time scales, or observational layers more tangible and accessible, while scientific methods can help document, analyze, and amplify artistic interventions and their societal effects. Together, they inspire new methods and approaches, challenge disciplinary boundaries, and open up spaces for critical dialogue that neither field could achieve alone.
The goal of the symposium, together with exhibitions and screenings, are threefold: first, to give these collaborations a platform and make them visible; second, to create a space for exchange around the guiding questions of (i) where the motivation to engage in such work originates, (ii) what these collaborations facilitate, and (iii) what the main challenges are; and third, to offer discussion on how to work across disciplines, particularly in art-science contexts, and how to engage at science-policy interfaces.
This is an independent subsite of Zurich University of the Arts and more particularly of the Master in Transdisciplinary Studies program.
For corrections, questions, and suggestions please contact info.mtr@zhdk.ch
Zurich University of the Arts
Pfingstweidstrasse 96, P.O. Box
CH-8031 Zurich