Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens

Abstract

Since the year 2000, artists have increasingly employed tools, methods, and aesthetics associated with scientific practice to produce forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science. Anthropologists, intrigued by the work of art in the age of its technoscientific affiliation, have taken notice. This article discusses bio art, eco art, and surveillance art that have gathered, or might yet reward, anthropological attention, particularly as it might operate as an allied form of cultural critique. We focus on art that takes oceans as its concern, tuning to anthropological interests in translocal connection, climate change, and the politics of the extraterritorial. We end with a call for decolonizing art–science and for an anti-colonial aesthetics of oceanic worlds.

Creatively connecting science, society and the sea: a mini-review of academic literature focusing on art-science collaborations and the ocean

“…I also excluded articles which although had elements of art, ocean, scientists or public engagement, were not collaborations directly between a scientist(s) and artist(s) (column titled Related Articles in Table 1). I thus excluded articles from projects which use creative methods but did not mention any artscience collaboration directly (see Gebbels et al, 2012;Neilson et al, 2016), reflections on historical ocean art (Berta, 2021), ocean art reviews which focus on general ocean art rather than specifically on art-science collaborations (Radstone, 2017;Helmreich and Jones, 2018;Matias et al, 2023), articles which analyse art projects but the researchers who wrote the article were not involved with the project ( Van der Vaart et al, 2018), individual reflections by ocean artists which do not mention any scientifc collaboration (Nobel, 2015) and those projects that have yet to happen (see Parsons et al, 2021). In addition to these papers, others were read either from reviewing the bibliographies of those papers discovered through the web of science review, prior knowledge of research papers and books, as well as also what was recommended by colleagues and others in the field.…”

New forms: Anthropocene Festivals and experimental environmental governance

“…waste) and modes of interaction (e.g. gleaning) to generate new understandings of materiality and ecological community (Cheetham, 2018;Helmreich and Jones, 2018;Lippard, 2014). The art event Creative Time (2011), which Yates McKee (2016 describes as "a massive jamboree of presentations and performances by artists and activists in the style of a TED conference," shares with the Anthropocene Festival an emphasis on laterally connective, interdisciplinary models of sociality (compare with Turner, 2006Turner, , 2013.…”

The Anthropology of Art, After the End of Art: Contesting the Art-Culture System

“…The Multispecies Salon is an early curatorial project displaying and theorizing interspecies encounters ethnographically (Kirksey 2014). In a recent review article, Helmreich & Jones (2018) have characterized these intersections of art, science, and culture in both art practice and ethnography as para-anthropologies that tend to art's efficacies in various ways that benefit from the special status of art as Other to political activism, highlighting the decolonizing potential of art-science collaborations (see also Liboiron 2017, N. Myers 2018. We also emphasize that the flourishing of these particular encounters between science and art contributes to conversations about the materiality of art itself and its distributed social relations across networks as a particular form of interdisciplinary arts activism (e.g., Bakke & Peterson 2018).…”