How art-science collaborations help us confront social crises
Hi all!
I’m working on a book chapter about how collisions between art and science can help us confront society’s most pressing issues. Are there ways you bring different fields together to address a question? I’d love to hear about it.
Read an excerpt of an early draft below:
Excerpt from Colliding Science and Art to Confront Social Problems
—Many mainstream narratives about facing society’s current challenges espouse top-down technofixes. Art science has the potential to help us go deeper than treating the symptoms. Deeper change requires getting at the root of issues, beyond changing individual behaviors to rethinking systems. As one art-science program director explained:
[U]ltimately it's a cultural response. It’s a systemic problem. I mean, we look at the climate emergency really as a symptom, not as a monolithic problem, but as a symptom of, uh, sort of the dysfunctional way that we work as a society and economy and to fix it, we really need to rethink about how we respond to each other and the world. (Interview 14)
Art science helps us reframe society’s pressing issues as an opportunity for reassessing who we are and our relationships with the world and with each other. As one director explained:
We have to rethink, especially in Western countries, we have to completely rethink who we are. And that's deep work, and it's beyond just a behavioral change, you know. It's not just, "Oh, I'm gonna recycle." It's like, I, I cannot live my life the way I was promised I could live it. (Interview 2)
Another director used the example of an art science project about solar energy to describe how a switch from fossil fuels to solar energy would require rethinking our relationship with time and leisure (Interview 14).
These changes can come from within rather than from above. Rather than being mandated, directors see art science as a way to aid with this cultural transformation. They view art science as one of the many tools necessary to contribute to this deeper transformation. As one director described:
By itself, theater is not gonna make the change, but we already know that nothing by itself is gonna create the change that we need to make at this point. But I think the arts are an important part in helping people think about themselves differently. (Interview 2)