Event
ARTESCIENZA Forum: connections that generate knowledge
Tuesday, March 10, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
MEET Theater and MEET Lounge
On Tuesday, March 10, in the morning, MEET ARTESCIENZA Forum will be held, an international event organized by Fondazione Cariplo dedicated to the dialogue between art and science and designed as a moment of encounter, inspiration, and discussion between artists, researchers, cultural institutions, and entities engaged in scientific research. The event was created to mark the launch of the “ARTESCIENZA – Percorsi condivisi di ricerca” call for proposals promoted by Fondazione Cariplo and is aimed in particular at those interested in developing projects that bring these two fields together.
The Forum
The event is not conceived as a traditional institutional presentation, but as a space for cultural activation capable of concretely demonstrating how the encounter between artistic practices and scientific research can generate new forms of knowledge, experimentation, and public engagement. Through international examples and case studies, the event aims to offer potential participants in the call for proposals a glimpse of the cultural and scientific trajectories that can arise from collaborations between artists and scientists.
The ARTESCIENZA Forum program was designed in collaboration with MEET Digital Culture Center, the initiative’s curatorial partner. The aim is to show, through concrete experiences, how projects capable of having an impact on both a scientific and cultural level have been launched in various international contexts, helping to create new languages and new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge.
The morning will begin with a plenary session in the theater, during which speakers will present projects and collaborative initiatives between art and science developed within their institutions. Afterwards, participants will have the opportunity to continue the discussion during a networking lunch in the MEET Lounge, designed to facilitate encounters between artists, researchers, curators, cultural institutions, and scientific organizations. The event will conclude with a visit to the LIQUID CHIMERAS exhibition.
The speakers
Ralph Dum, Advisor: “The nexus of Science and the Arts”
For centuries, art and science shared a common language, driving civilization forward. Today, faced with the ‘black box’ of complex technologies like AI, we need this convergence more than ever. Through concrete case studies, we will explore how artists do not just elucidate scientific world views, but reflect on and challenge its impact on us. In particular they put hard question on the technologies that science makes possible: explaining their functioning – rendering the ‘black box’ transparent, testing their limits in unexpected ways, or exposing algorithmic bias and resource exuberance of current digital systems – thus ensuring our innovations remain profoundly human.
Gerfried Stocker, Co-CEO / Direttore Artistico – Ars Electronica: “Negotiating Humanity”
The debate around AI is not merely technological, but fundamentally cultural. Rather than choosing between utopian enthusiasm and dystopian alarmism, it identifies the productive potential of the “in-between space” that emerges in moments of technological disruption. Drawing on early digital media art, interactive art, and net.art, it shows how artistic practice has historically functioned as a laboratory for technological acculturation – anticipating structural shifts and exposing emerging power relations.
Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN “Art–Science: Trajectories Toward the New and the Unknown”
Starting from the Arts at CERN program and the broader art–science tradition, the talk examines a series of case studies to demonstrate the breadth and complexity of practices operating at the intersection of artistic and scientific research. It proposes a kaleidoscopic understanding of the encounter between artistic practice and scientific inquiry, foregrounding the interactions between theoretical and applied science, advanced technologies, and artistic exploration.
Through selected examples, the presentation highlights how prolonged immersion in scientific environments can profoundly inform artistic processes while also influencing scientific perspectives and modes of operation. Such collaborations open new paths for experimentation, foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and facilitate the emergence of new forms of knowledge capable of redefining both artistic practices and scientific paradigms.
Joan Llort, Ricercatore Ramon y Cajal – ICM-CSIC Barcellona: “Exploring the fringes of oceanographic research with art-science collaborations”
In last few decades, scientific research has accelerated towards a hyper-productive and highly-competitive environment. Researcher now face strong pressure to reach excellence, secure funding and publish papers. This acceleration translates in less time spend wondering about the mysteries of reality, less contact with other disciplines and too often an a-critical perspective towards the sociopolitical environment hosting research activities, funding and institutions. Yet, most of our pressing issues in society require approaches that blend together different disciplines and to generate a broad, in-depth knowledge about its multifaceted causes and potential solutions.
In this talk, oceanographer Joan Llort will explain the reasons that make him dedicate part of his time to deeply engage with artists and generate trans-disciplinary knowledge that explores the fringes of contemporary oceanographic research. This effort is situated in a widespread trends in both scientific and cultural institutions to generate spaces and infrastructures where artists, scientists and society can collaborate and co-produce new meanings to scientific concepts. Llort will briefly summarize the relevance of oceanographic research for society, he will showcase and explain detail the concepts and methods behind his works with Entangled Others and other artists, and speculate about the trends in art-science context in the near-future.
