Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology: How art can make arguments in science and technology studies

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This chapter focuses on contemporary artists engaged with the life sciences. To see these artists as outside the STS community, as some might, is a form of boundary-making, and much can and probably will be written about the issue as art combines with STS to form the distinct discipline of ASTS. One easy way to spot the difference between the two disciplines is to consider the materials that go into making STS arguments. They consist of more than just the immutable mobiles of sociology like recorders and laptops. They also embrace the stuff that our informants, scientists, engineers, industrialists, designers, and users have aligned and combusted to create new knowledge. Materials, or as Calvert and Schyfter identify them in Chapter 2, “tangible artifacts,” are building blocks of science as well as technologies that contribute to the production of arguments. The majority of STS scholarship, however focused on materials, appears only on the written page. By bringing into the conversation contemporary artists who work closely with scientific materials, we can renew the STS focus on materiality and extend its scholarship to artwork that already engages many themes treated in STS.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRoutledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies
Number of pages11
PublisherRoutledge
Publication date2021
Pages228-238
ISBN (Print)9781138347304
ISBN (Electronic)9780429792847, 9780429437069
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone individual chapters, the contributors.

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