Cosy Science

For centuries, scientists have sought help from artistic practice as an aid to visualization and discovery. Yet, the collaboration between artists and scientists still nowadays seems to involve the assumption of a sharp separation of these two fields: art belongs to the realm of creative inspiration, while science is about data, evidence and testability. In this talk, I want to challenge this division, and in particular I want to question the idea that the role of art in art-science collaborations consists exclusively of “illustrating” scientific concepts. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples, I argue that artists often participate in the growth of scientific knowledge by disturbing and questioning concepts that scientists take for granted, and that scientists have a great deal to learn from the history of their interactions with art.