Organized jointly by MA Space and Communication HEAD-Genève, Arts at CERN, and Metahaven, the symposium ‘Re: view from nowhere’ is interested in the way in which physics, “the science in which we have achieved our greatest detachment from a specifically human perspective on the world,” might inform, inspire, or flow towards the practices of art, design, and filmmaking. CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, was founded in Geneva in 1954 in a spirit of internationalism and multilateralism. In the context of this event, it will serve as a framework to consider new cross-pollinations between science and art.
While science and art engage with a broad variety of questions, they can be considered related through a curiosity and perseverance shared by both scientists and artists. Both fields depend on what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls the “arts of noticing”: attentiveness to transformative encounters. Art and science both work from questions that are rarely experienced quite as urgently by others than those asking the question. Science probes into the texture of raw, un-narrated reality, while the obscurity and patchiness of creative processes don’t make for elegance or smoothness. Any discoveries and findings for both science and art are shorthand for everything that still remains unknown.
In spite of these analogies, there are also differences between science and art, the ways their practitioners think, sketch, create, and discover, and the way their processes and results are communicated and discussed.
In ‘Re: view from nowhere’, artists and researchers from a variety of backgrounds will not make any attempt to hide their differences in approach and vocabulary. Instead, they will engage in circulation, between science and art, of a more unfiltered form of insight. By facing the very limits of the possibility of dialogue, the event hopes to foster an unsmooth context for new exchanges.
Speakers:
Mónica Bello, Erich Berger, Michael Doser, Lukáš Likavčan, Metahaven, Blanca Pujals, Tamara Vázquez Schröder
