Against a backdrop of climate emergency and relentless technological change, artists and scientists can play a role as “pathfinders”.
Created in 2017, the Arts & Sciences Chair brings together École polytechnique, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs-PSL and the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, with the ambition of strengthening links between academia and civil society.
This partnership between an art school, a science school and a foundation functions as a program of collaborations between researchers, artists, scientists and designers, to create a common discourse around our interdependence with our environment: climatic issues, relationships with the plant world and technologies, materials in motion, etc.
A space for research, training and mediation
The Arts & Sciences Chair aims to combine academic excellence with an open approach to the general public in three ways:
- research-creation to bring together scientific and artistic narratives in transdisciplinary projects;
- teaching and training to involve researchers and students from both schools;
- mediation and dissemination, with the aim of offering new ways of presenting and disseminating knowledge to all audiences.
The arts & sciences Chair presents its research projects in the form of interdisciplinary encounters, using a variety of formats: conferences, art installations, study days, workshops, children’s workshops, etc.
The Chair is seeking to promote new ways of presenting research-creation, for example, new formats for traditional scientific poster sessions, the creation of an interactive cartography of arts/design/science journals, or the development of an interactive journal presenting research in arts/sciences and design.
Projects that question our relationship with the environment, both human and non-human
The Arts & Sciences Chair explores our relationship with the climate and the living world (in particular our relationship with water and plants), with matter and technology, promoting productions that combine art, science and design, in a collaborative and socially responsible approach.
Its aim is to offer aesthetic and reflective experiences that stimulate the imagination, and poetic forms that bring together artistic and scientific research around contemporary themes.
Here are a few examples of actions related to the questions :
- climate, with events such as the Useful Fictions research symposium: an intensive week of collaboration between artists, scientists and designers aimed at building new narratives around ecological thinking by questioning the notion of measurement, considered as a “useful fiction” but neither definitive nor absolute.
- human-machine interaction and matter: in particular “Behavioral Matter”, an international public research-creation workshop
- of plants, matter and the living: installations by Aniara Rodado questioning our relationship with plants, the “Devenir Plante” workshop and colloquium, the “Behavioral Matter” international workshop, the Vertigo seminar “Behavioral Matter: composing with the living” and the “Dissect” evening…
- new media and digital editions: experimental poster sessions
- space
- luminescence: Thomassine Gieseck’s artistic residency at École Polytechnique’s LadHyX laboratory on a research-creation project on color change induced by the use of gold nanoparticles; work by researcher and choreographer Jeanne Bloch on the problem of indoor light pollution.
Photo: Samuel Bianchini – Behavioral matter workshop, Ensci – les Ateliers, November 2018.