| dc.description.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
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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
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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? | |
