Transdisciplinary Art Science Project

ArtScience is a Research - Education MSc project designed to provide students with a broader experience relating their technical education to the short and long term impact of new technologies on the living and non-living planet, society and human kind itself.

ArtScience is Transdisciplinary in nature and it aims to generate new knowledge trough combined approaches between the Sciences and the Arts, providing an opportunity to achieve a more complete and universal understanding of all that "is" or "will be".

It involves understanding the human experience of nature through the synthesis of artistic and scientific modes of exploration and expression. ArtScience is experiential by nature blending subjective, sensory, emotional and personal understanding with objective, analytical, rational and collective knowledge where students learn how to develop and explore various artistic approaches coupled to scientific approaches to generate their own interpretations and questions on the complex relations between human activities and the planet.

This program is based on making art in small groups of 3-4 students from various faculties to provide them with a first hand opportunity to develop an ArtScience project which either translates the state of the world, community, ecosystem, etc. into an art piece or concept of an art piece. Through this process, students gain new insights on how to translate, critically assess or identify the various ways our technological society interact with humans and non-humans.

In order to illustrate typical projects without being exhaustive:

• Music of Heavens - Sonic artistic translation of processes taking place in the atmosphere:

• Climate change takes place at time and spatial scales far larger than the human scale. How to translate such complex processes taking place in the planet atmosphere into a sound/visual installation that communicates the state of the change and explores the future as a function of our now a days technological choices ?

• Futures in our present - A visual media translation of possible futures

• Futures in our Present explores how and where scientists and engineers project their own bias with unconscious scientific procedures and technological choices into products and technologies that will be used in large-scale, or, on the contrary, limited to a small privileged social or geographical group. For instance, what are the possible futures of humans and societies when access to genetic enhancement or brain implants are either limited to a few or imposed to the many ?

These are just a few examples.

Teachers are also open to students' ideas on topics and media.

For questions or more information, email to : e.mendes@tudelft.nl (Eduardo Mendes)