Art in the Age of Technoscience

Art, the Life Sciences, and the Humanities: In Search ofa Relationship Robert Ztuijnenberg Over the last decades there has been a distinctive effort in the arts to engage with science through participation in the actual practice of science. ' Exchange proj ects between artists and scientists, such as artist-in-lab projects, have become common and a large number oforganizations have emerged that stimulate and initiate collaboration between artists andscientists. ' Research funding organiza tions in thehumanities, such asthe British Arts and Humanities Research Coun cil (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), have also initiated all sorts of research programs that explore and support inter actions between art and science. ' Asa result, artists have grown more involved with scientific concerns and practices, and their increased interactions with scientists have also become a subject of study within the humanities. Why do artists openly seek to gain access to the domain of the sciences? And why do scholars in the humanities value collaboration between artists and scientists so much that theyare willing to spend research time and money on it? This interest in science, I argue in this preface for Ingeborg Reichle's bookArt in theAge of Tecbnoscience,' underscores that the arts and the humanities are searching to establish a new relationship with the natural sciences as well as with each other. Art and Science T he relationship between thearts and thesciences hasbeen subject to permanent change over the past two centuries.