In the early 2000s, an increasing number of art-science collaborations began to emerge in universities and research centers, so called artist in labs or artist in residence programmes, as well as informal collaborations. At Uppsala University, recent similar examples from all three disciplinary domains include: Professor in Analytical Chemistry, Jonas Bergquist’s collaboration with the artist Jeanette Schäring, Magnus Linton as writer in residence at the Faculty of Arts, Uppsala University Graduate School in Sustainability Studies’ (GRASS) artistic visiting fellow programme in collaboration with Baltic Art Center (BAC), and the Centre for Medical Humanities artist in residence programme to open this fall.

The use of artistic practices as methods in academia are further increasingly recognised by the research councils. The Swedish Research Council and Formas are but a few of those that have recently called for the creation of cross-cutting research groups including participants from the artistic field. These grants are, moreover, often aimed at addressing major societal challenges and contributing to solutions for a sustainable future. What does this growing call for artistic practices in academia as a way to address societal challenges mean?
It seems that traditional research methods are no longer enough to address the societal challenges of today and tomorrow. Instead, these collaborations suggest that artistic practices seem to contribute to asking questions in a different way, to expand the imagination – to broaden the horizons – in academia. Speculative practices are used to critically draw out different trajectories into the future. Such speculations can be science based, literary, art and curatorial and intervention based.

We are planning for making research applications on how the creative activities, such as art, curating and writing are situated in today’s research landscape, more precisely, to investigate artistic practices as methods in academia. Art-science collaborations can contribute to investigations of the future, but exactly how such processes work is less known.

Projektet pågår under 2023-2024.

(text ur ansökan)