Creating a Program of Support for Art and Science Collaborations

Abstract

Section Frontispiece. Random Dance, detail from AtaXia, June 2004, a dance production resulting from Random Dance's choreographer and director Wayne McGregor's research Fellowship with a team of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. (Photo: Ravi Deepres)

The Arts Council England/Arts and Humanities Research Board Arts and Science Research Fellowships program was very much designed as a response to a particular set of circumstances that emerged at the levels of both policy and practice in Europe in the early 21st century. The report "Imagination and Understanding," published by the Council of Science and Technology (CST) in the United Kingdom [1], declared that the divisions in education and research between the arts, humanities and science were anachronistic and detrimental to the future of Britain's economy. At a European level, the "Lisbon Agenda" (or "Lisbon Strategy"), an action plan that aimed to make the European Union "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge economy in the world by 2010," had been launched in 2000 and also stressed the importance of investment in research and development and in exploring the potential of new technologies as drivers of growth. The CST report also recommended that the U.K.'s then recently established Arts and Humanities Research Board should become a full research council, the AHRC, which was launched in April 2005.

Arts Council England approached what was still the AHRB in 2001 to suggest the possibility of a joint program. It became clear that the conjunction of interests of both organizations- in using public funding to support research and development in the interests of "new knowledge" and innovation-would be an ideal ground for the introduction of a new scheme for connecting art and science and would itself privilege openness and knowledge sharing across disciplines.

For the Arts Council, a primary aim of the scheme was to try to place the artist "in the driver's seat" relative to previous support programs for art-and-science collaborations. These had arguably been under-resourced, particularly in the level of funding available to artists for research and development purposes.

The ambition was to create optimum conditions for the realization of innovative outcomes. The steps taken toward this end included supporting the individual artist's time and space within a scientific research context and more clearly framing the role of the university in such research. The program was able to utilize research frameworks developed by the AHRB, for example, outlining the collaborative research proposal at the outset alongside a clearly defined research context, research questions and methodology. An additional mapping exercise was introduced into the application process in order to also survey the diversity of institutional and project-specific approaches to copyright and ownership.

Process of Assessment

In the summer of 2003, 16 projects were selected from 85 applications for the first round of this new program. The process of shortlisting involved the assessment of each proposal by at least three peer reviewers, drawn from across arts and science disciplines. The judging panel included a historian of science as well as a media arts specialist and a science/music expert. The chair was Marilyn Strathern, a social anthropologist, whose studies in interdisciplinarity, especially the articulation of relationships between creativity and issues of ownership, had been particularly impressive at the Arts Council-organized Collaboration & Ownership in the Digital Economy (CODE) conference [2] in 2001, one of the formative events leading to the establishment of the program.

The successful projects were wide ranging in relation to both arts and science disciplines. A total of £535,558 was allocated, with an average of £32,000 made available for each project for a period of up to 18 months [3].

BACKGROUND

A critical driver of the program's establishment was the observation that artists exploring new-media technologies and other technological and scientifically related processes during the 1990s had been limited in their results and in the quality of their expression by the lack of appropriate support structures. Arts funding programs were often premised on the production of "end activities" such as...