Art and Science: Processes, Systems and Histories of Entangled Knowledge

This seminar aims to examine the relationships between art and science – historically, methodologically and conceptually – with a particular focus on the processual, experimental and systemic connections that have characterized both fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries

Already at the dawn of modernist art, we see how artists such as the Futurists and Constructivists orient themselves towards science, especially physics, as a new frame of reference for their thinking about form, movement and energy. Where religion had previously been the dominant frame of reference for art's work with cognition, science and philosophy gradually took over this role in the 19th and 20th centuries. Aesthetic reflection thus shifted from transcendence to immanence – from revelation to experiment.

In contemporary art, this development is seen in new forms. A striking example is Pierre Huyghe's work After ALife Ahead (2017), which unfolds as a living, time-based biotechnical system. The exhibition incorporates HeLa cancer cells, algae, bacteria, bees and even peacocks with two DNA systems, and moves in a field where biological evolution, systems theory, thermodynamics, symbiosis and entropy form both motif and method. Here, the work itself becomes an ecological cycle – a self-organizing process in an environment where technology, biology and geology meet.

Such works suggest that there may be a common history of ideas and knowledge in art and science – a shared movement from stable form to dynamic system, from object to relation. In this context, questions of time and space take on special significance: just as physics has transformed our understanding of the structure of time and space, art has similarly experimented with perception, complexity and simultaneity. It is well known that Niels Bohr was interested in Cubism, and that art's own processual forms – e.g. land art, performance and interactive media – often function as aesthetic parallels to biological and technical systems with autopoiesis, self-regulation and emergence. In continuation of this, we can include cybernetic thinking about circuits and feedback, which has been of crucial importance in both music and visual art, and which can be traced from the system art of the 1960s to contemporary experiments with energy and materiality.

In contemporary art, this interest in process, function, composition and participation is strongly present. Many artists seek to incorporate insights from contemporary cross-disciplinary knowledge and knowledge practices such as Earth System Science, ecological thinking and environmentalism into the very design of the work. The question becomes how the exchange between art, science, philosophy and critical thinking is translated into artistic media, structures and practices: how are scientific concepts such as system, process, energy or complexity translated into aesthetic form and practice?

Art and Science: Processes, Systems and Histories of Entangled Knowledge aims not only to gather examples of concrete exchanges between art and science – historical or current – but also to discuss whether there is a more comprehensive history of knowledge or ideas in which art and science are entangled and share a common interest in the living, the processual and the relational. The seminar also invites reflection on methodology at the intersection of science and art, particularly on the status of concepts such as experiment and research as they are applied in both fields. It asks to what extent shared epistemological principles can be identified across these disciplines, bearing in mind what philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, often reminds us: Scientists, artists, and philosophers may meet, but not under the authority of one who would explain the others.

Register online by 13 September, 2026.

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