Inter / Non / Anti: An Exploration of Interdisciplinary Arts Labs

What are the possibilities when, as a recent scientific article posed, there are “Artists on the Research Team: An Interdisciplinary Approach” (Stacey Springs, Jay Baruch, 2021)? When an artist adapts and furthers the research of other fields, acting as an experimenting agent, what happens? What are the possibilities and ethical implications of such experimentations? How does the nature of what constitutes “an artwork,” “an exhibition,” “an audience,” or a “critical review” evolve, and for whose and what purpose(s)?

“Inter / Non / Anti” thus considers artists and projects emerging internationally from a growing number of interdisciplinary university art labs. Of particular consideration are works in which the artist functions as a practitioner or collaborative entity of/within the particular experimental discipline she navigates, such as an artist conducting biology experiments, social science questionnaires, therapeutic modalities, neuroscience investigations, or the like in the process or final result of creation. What does it mean to create a “successful” interdisciplinary/non-disciplinary/anti-disciplinary action? How do artists, via the creative process, function as a practitioner within or outside of a discipline, and what are the potential conceptual/philosophical/logistical, and political implications of such projects? Among others, a foundational text to this investigation is the book Borges and Memory, which explores the concepts of cognition present in the writer’s work, noting that many artistic practitioners, less constrained by the strict scientific research methodologies inherent to non-art disciplines, have proposed experimental and radical concepts decades and sometimes centuries earlier than their scientific predecessors.