The Practices of Art and Science

This dissertation explores the question of how art and science work as categories to circumscribe bodies of knowledge. People engage in rhetorical positioning through the creation of texts, style choices, making and unmaking the meanings of objects. Objects can be made to fit into the knowledge networks of art, science or combinations of both. For different practitioners and audiences, what counts as art or science and their association varies in interesting ways.

The categories of art and science serve many purposes. They indicate the kind of attention people, objects and ideas want to elicit from readers, viewers and thinkers. They serve to demarcate resources, to delineate interests and to separate social groups. This dissertation contains three core case studies: the story of the Blaschka’s nineteenth-century glass scientific models, the story of the 1990s tactical media movement, and the story of bioart as practiced in a biological wet lab in Australia.

By unpacking the ways actors have used these categories, the author complicates the division between the realms of art and science, examines their relative power in different contexts, and shows that science studies tools can be applied to artistic practice with fruitful results that offer new ways of thinking about people and objects that have often fallen outside the scope of science studies research. The author’s analysis details the forms of knowledge produced by art and science in these contexts.

SymbioticA Lab at the University of Western Australia, 2009.

(© Hannah Star Rogers)

Supplementary Material

Biomechanics Noordung.

Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič, Biomechanics Noordung, 1999, the first complete theatre production in zero-gravity conditions. The performance took place in the Russian cosmonaut training aircraft in the skies above Moscow.

Noordung::1995–2005–2045.

Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič, Miha Turšič, Noordung::1995–2005–2045. In 2005, the first reprise of a 50-year theater performance was staged inside the model of the International Space Station in the hydro-laboratory at Star City, Moscow.