The Co-production of Art: Collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers in Sweden, 1967-2009

Abstract

During the 1960s, when artists started to gain access to computers at universities and research departments in the industry, a new kind of collaboration between artists and engineers emerged. Today, during the first decade of the 21 st century, similar collaborations are brought to the fore, among other things due to an increased number of exchange projects between artists and scientists, so called artist in lab or artist in residence projects. Science and Technology Studies has been suggested as one part of a ‘methodological framework’ to be able to understand these collaborations. A basic assumption in the STS approach is that scientific and technological activities should be described as the result of relations between different actors rather than the result of singular individuals, disciplines or groups. By adopting such a perspective, scientific knowledge, as well as the use of it, can be regarded as a more or less conscious co­operation between different actors who as well as produce, use, knowledge. In this paper I argue that a STS concept particularly apt to study collaborations between artists, scientists and engineers is “co­production”, introduced by Sheila Jasanoff. By conducting interviews with Swedish artists, scientists and engineers who collaborated from 1967 through 2009, this paper aims at describing and analysing the collaboration 16 from the artists’ as well as the scientists’ and engineers’ point of view. An overall question concerns the kind of knowledge produced during the collaboration: What happens to the artistic as well as the scientific practice as the knowledge migrates between them?