KUNST ALS BINDEGLIED ZWISCHEN WISSENSCHAFT UND ÖFFENTLICHKEIT?
In Parliament of Things Bruno Latour essentially makes a new assessment of the relationship between politics, society and science. His primary concern is overcoming the Platonic view of the world that characterises modernity in which science belongs to the objective world of facts, and politics and society to the world of human sensory perceptions. It is an exceptional achievement of Latour’s previous works in the sociology of science that they were able to demonstrate that the sciences and the facts they produce do not exist independently of their social contexts, but are always constructed in certain respects. According to Latour, science has always been part of politics and society. Broadly speaking, Latour is interested in establishing relations and connections between science and society (or the public sphere) that appropriately reflect this social constructedness of science. Furthermore, there is also a necessity for links that are able to initiate self-reflexive critical processes.
It is in this context that the paper explores the question of the extent to which art can have such a linking function. In particular, the issue is whether art is able to initiate self-reflexive, critical processes that are not merely of a mediating nature but which also question the self-image of science. For only this approach would be in Latour’s thinking. This matter is discussed on the basis of the work Quantum Now by Anton Zellinger, which was exhibited at Documenta (13) 2012.
Verschränkungen
Interwoven – An Exhibition of Thought is a performative installation at the intersection of photography and cell biology. As a special experimental arrangement, conceived in collaboration with virologist Florian Hastert, the work explores the potential for networking between art and the natural sciences with a view to bringing the human perspective in contact with heterogeneous zones of dissimilarity.
In his artistic engagement with the laboratory as a place of knowledge production, Paul Pape sheds light on the dispositif of the production of scientific facts as refined images of nature. The apparatuses and machines of the experimental systems, all of which characterise scientific knowledge as mediated, occupy an essential position. From a microscopic perspective, the world of things become perceptible in their inherent dynamics when they gain auditory independence as an infection of sound.
Through an analogue photography apparatus specially conceived by Paul Pape, the space itself also becomes a data space whose traces become artefacts in the process of recording and direct artistic transformation.
