A roundtable and popup exhibition organized by ArtSci Salon
Roundtable Participants:
Roberta Buiani – Chair
Erika Biddles
Jenifer Wightman
Stephanie Rothenberg
Adam Zaretsky
Kathy High
Dolores Steinman
The world always exceeds our conception of it (Shotwell, 2016)
Coinciding with this year’s SLSA “Out of Mind” conference in Toronto, ArtSci Salon proposed a panel/roundtable on “out-of-mindedness” as a way to re-think categories, and to disrupt the disciplinary and methodological status quo through which we normally see science and the humanities unfolding in academic contexts. We planned to do it through a pop-up exhibition featuring the works of local artists and members of SLSA. This became even more urgent, as all the arts panels had been located at OCADU, a satellite location different from the conference venue at the Hilton. We needed to go mobile to “infiltrate” the other participants!
Description
What to do when the sciences and the humanities loose their ability to fully grasp, and sometimes even speak of, phenomena that have inevitably become too complex, too diffuse to be simplified through a model or a formula, or to be seized and summarized by one discipline?
This initiative is not designed to propose a set of new categories, but to pose a series of open questions, highlighting the necessity to conduct collaborative research between artistic practices and scientific research. We interpret the idea of “out of mind” as a strategy. In fact, using the arts as our preferred mode of expression, we believe that we ought to step out of the traditional mind configurations and fixed wiring in order to seize new ways to come to term with the multiplicities characterizing current environmental transformations. These occurrences have proved to be connected with nature, culture, and society in too many intricate ways, to the extent that neither science, nor technological methods are able to fully comprehend them.
