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Re-Programmed Art at the Swiss Institute in Rome
The project Reprogrammed Art: an Open Manifesto will be presented by Davide Fornari at the conference Revisiting Practice. Arts, Sciences, and Experimentation (21-23 October 2015) on Friday 23 October. The conference is hosted by the Swiss Institute in Rome, via Ludovisi 48, and is convened by Philippe Sormani (ISR), Guelfo Carbone (ISR) and Priska Gisler (Hochschule der Künste Bern). The conference is public and held in English.
The speech Re-Enactment as Method: How to Overcome Programmed and Kinetic Art Obsolescence will report on the workshop held at SUPSI in September 2014 and the productions of new artworks.
Of late, the relationship between the arts and sciences has become a topic of scholarly discussion and, at times, political and moral concern, leading to a renewed “debate on research in the arts” (Borgdorff 2006). This debate has recently been sparked by reforms in European higher education, transforming former art schools into universities of applied sciences or universities of the arts. Consequently, the debate has tended to rehearse terminological and institutional issues, regarding the character and legitimacy of “research” on, for, and/or in the “arts” (Borgdorff 2006:6; Freyling 1993). Rare, however, remain detailed investigations of artistic practices in situ and in vivo, investigations that devote a similar ethnographic attention to “research in the making” as this had famously been the case for the laboratory sciences (cf. Knorr Cetina 1995). It is against this background, then, that the present conference invites its participants to engage in revisiting practices at the manifold intersections of the arts and sciences, with a particular focus on experimentation across these domains (cf. Rheinberger 2012). The focus on experimentation shall allow us to discuss an argument made by art and science historians, the argument according to which “what much of (a conventional) focus on Ê»artʼ and Ê»scienceʼ as discrete products ignores are the commonalities in the practices that produce them” (Jones & Galison 1998:2). More broadly, the conference addresses the current relationship(s) between institutional discourses and practical inquiries in the arts and sciences, a topic that seems all the more pertinent given the alleged “de-marcations” (Entgrenzungen) of both domains (e.g., Jasanoff 2004; Rebentisch 2013; Reckwitz 2012).
