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Creative Partnerships and Cultural Organisations: “Enabling” and “Situating” Arts–Science Collaboration and Collective Learning

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Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice and Education

Abstract

Arts–science activities are proliferating globally, and they are demonstrating significant capacity to shift public thinking (and potentially action) in new ways that confront many of the pertinent challenges of our times, such as sustainability. Transdisciplinary arts–science practices offer enhanced possibilities to increase this agency. However, this can only be assured through the development of supportive institutional material and social infrastructures. In this chapter, we explore how best to enable and situate such projects, drawing upon the work and practices of transdisciplinary media artist Keith Armstrong. By comparing two Australian cultural organisations he has worked with (a university gallery and a public arts organisation), we analyse how institutional frameworks can better support such projects and programmes, mitigated by the site and location of the work. We then ask: What is the future of this mode of activated practice, and how might we best foster it?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Support for transdisciplinary education has increased within tertiary institutions, albeit slowly e.g. SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, University of Washington DXARTS program, Masters programs at Central St Martin’s School of Art in London, Cardiff University’s School of Art and Design and Rhode Island School of Design (See: www.expspace.risd.edu). The 2017 International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) panel: Training Methods for Transdisciplinary Collaboration: Best Practices and Didactics for Team Work is a recent example of discursive activity (See: www.isea2017.isea-international.org).

  2. 2.

    The shift from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity introduces multiple layers of complexity and the need to include multiple stakeholders in the process of research design and problem solving (for example industry and multiple publics).

  3. 3.

    High-level support includes the Australian Network for Art + Technology Synapse program and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the USA. Likewise, Arts and Humanities Research Council England Art and Science Research Fellowships encouraged experimentation and progress in collaborative partnerships and recently Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK), (which oversees the seven separate UK research funding councils), has committed to significant cross-council funding for a broader and more systematic investigation of knowledge structures than was possible under the earlier generation of art-science schemes.

  4. 4.

    The SEAD 11 action clusters and key processes are (1) Translating: Problem-driven connections among academic, commercial and civil societies (2) Convening: Overcoming transdisciplinary thresholds (3) Enabling: Sustaining balanced SEAD relationships (4) Including: Spurring innovation through diversity (5) Embedding: Public engagement and negotiation (6) Situating: An emerging ecology of creative places (7) Sense-making: Multimodal knowledge and ways of knowing (8) Documenting: Recording and transmitting (9) Learning: Tapping into the passion and creativity of lifelong curiosity (10) Collaborating: Methodologies working across disciplines and institutions (11) Thriving: SEAD ingredients as essential contributors to healthy communities.

  5. 5.

    This is particularly true of teams working across disciplines in transdisciplinary ways, and with disciplines that do not traditionally mix (for example engineering, humanities and design).

  6. 6.

    Another significant arts-science collaboration at Bundanon Trust has been the three-year ARC funded project, ‘Portrait of the Shoalhaven River’ involving scientists, artists and humanities scholars with the aim to ‘increase understanding of both the region’s natural environment […] and its cultural history’ (See: www.bundanon.com.au/research-and-projects/shoalhaven-portraits/).

  7. 7.

    The Black nectar collaboration was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, QUT Creative Industries and the Bundanon Residency Program.

  8. 8.

    Timothy Morton’s book The ecological thought questions the very nature of ecologies, ascribing them as entangling “meshes”, free of any one central position that might privilege any form of being or understanding over another, interlinking everything with infinite complexity such that things can only be perceived in relationship to other things—as deeply entangled, interwoven, delicate, dense, multimodal, multi-dimensional—and therefore ultimately complex and beyond concept or thinking.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Tania Leimbach

  2. School of Creative Practice, Queensland University Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Keith Armstrong

Authors
  1. Tania Leimbach
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  2. Keith Armstrong
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Correspondence to Tania Leimbach .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

    Dena Fam

  2. School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Linda Neuhauser

  3. Centre for Education Research and Scholarship, School of Health and Education, Middlesex University, London, UK

    Paul Gibbs

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Leimbach, T., Armstrong, K. (2018). Creative Partnerships and Cultural Organisations: “Enabling” and “Situating” Arts–Science Collaboration and Collective Learning. In: Fam, D., Neuhauser, L., Gibbs, P. (eds) Transdisciplinary Theory, Practice and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93743-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93743-4_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93742-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93743-4

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