Why do we need Science-Art?

Science-art collaborations offer a number of benefits to practitioners:

• By demanding they develop skills and understandings from both disciplines, science-art confers a diverse and flexible skill-set on its practitioners.

• The creative artwork of practitioners can be enriched by the conceptual rigour of the sciences.

• Science and research practice can be stimulated by the creative tools of the arts, and strengthened by being shared with different audiences and communities.

• Collaborations between artists and scientists can occasionally result in entirely new directions for research and exploration, as in the case of Experiential Futures and Systems Gaming.

Perhaps more importantly than the benefits to practitioners, though, are the benefits science-art practice can confer on society more generally. As the director of the Stockholm University Environmental Humanities Laboratory Marco Armiero articulates in the quote heading this chapter, the diverse set of climate and global change problems we are currently facing demand equally diverse responses.

‘The world in which we live is a hybrid world’, Armiero explains. ‘The increasing demand on human and social knowledge to meet global challenges calls for post-disciplinary training that sets knowledge to work in new ways. We need practitioners who combine skills, methods, and theories from the creative humanities – historical, aesthetic, visual, anthropological and artistic – with an understanding of environmental, energy, media and technological issues, informed by the sciences.’