Seminar

This panel gathers practitioners working between contemporary art and natural science, who use and remake “the scientific experiment” in consideration of critical histories and theories of technoscience. Whether as a research protocol or pedagogical and demonstrative form, the experiment is always also a technique and site of Empire, whose uses, however, are sometimes democratized, queered, and decolonized in history and practice. The panel takes up both amateur and professional traditions of conducting scientific experiments and considers their potential for criticality within artistic work and aesthetic practice, both in different scales and contexts: whether it’s through the biological cultures of an experiment, or its metaphors and chromatic significance, its usefulness for hacking property and producing other kinships, or its capacities for molecular colonization and cultivation of alternative freedom practices. This session is convened with Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, and features artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost, and biologist Deboleena Roy. 

Participants
fields harrington, artist
Mary Maggic, artist
Claire Pentecost, artist
Deboleena Roy, Dean of Faculty and Professor, Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University
Convened with Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School.

This seminar is supported by the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy fund and is co-sponsored by Border As Method, a virtual, public-facing event series hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. It features artists, curators, activists, and scholars across the world focused on the making and unmaking of art under conditions of exile or forced migration, or from areas where travel is prohibited or difficult.

As for Protocols Seminar Series
Led by The New School and Vera List Center faculty and staff, each monthly seminar in this year-long series will examine a particular aspect of protocols, among them those relating to language and communication; protocols for equitable networks, computer interfaces, and algorithms; global health and development; data aggregation and narrative systems; culturally-specific community agreements; or protocols undergirding scientific research. Building on the conversations started in previous sessions, each seminar is centered by an art project and accompanied by readings.

The Spring 2021 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Boris Lurie Art Foundation
Dayton Foundation
Ford Foundation
Kettering Fund
Pryor Cashman LLP
Sigrid Rausing Fund
and
The New School