For those interested in the intersection of art, science and social science intersections, Lucy Kimbell’s movie about her Rat Fair (see her post on December 23rd) is online

Seven Minutes in the Service of Rats from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This film documents the Rat Fair event organised by artist Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2005 attended by 40 rats and 450 people. Activities for rats and people included a rat beauty parlour, memory and agility tests, and roborat racing. The highlight was the world premier of the “Is Your Rat an Artist?” drawing competition for humans, rats and software, inspired by the Morris water maze used in animal experiments. The Rat Fair was the result of months of conversation with and observation of people and rats working together in the fancy rat and scientific communities.

Please see below. An interesting event on the collaboration between social scientists and artists in which, Lucy Kimbell, one of our blog members is involved. If you happen to be in London, make sure you attend and please post your thoughts afterwards.

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Tactical Play
A one-day colloquium for social scientists and artists about playful enquiry as a tactic for research
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
1 July 2009, 09.30am–5pm
Room GO1, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London

Speakers include: Anne Douglas (Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen); Lynn Froggett (University of Central Lancashire); Pat Kane ( author of The Play Ethic); Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford); Justin McKeown (artist, Spartaction.com) and Christian Nold (artist, Softhook.com). Convened by Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight.

Informed by discourses of cross-pollination between art and social science, this colloquium will discuss the role of “play” as a tactic for social change within reflexive and performative social science methods and socially engaged art processes.

Positioning playful enquiry as both a method and meeting place between the disciplines, the event will seek to address the following questions through the presentation of case studies and open discussion:

- In what way do the essential characteristics of one discipline offer possibilities for “play” within the other?

- How is research through performance, fiction, collaboration and conversation employed by each discipline and what are the individual motivations for this?

- At what point does playful enquiry meet “hard edged” research, and what are the academic implications?

- In what way is “play” a politicised method, and how can members of each profession use it to antagonise the frameworks in which they operate?

To book a place go to: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/tacticalplay

Cost (includes vegetarian lunch): £35 standard, £15 students.

Numbers are strictly limited, please register early.

Many topics have been raised by this post by Aileen (posted on March 13 ). One issue has been the status of the art work (especially when it emerges from the collaboration of an artist and a scientist, social scientist, etc). Lucy Kimbell’s post on the difference between art and design  is very relevant to this discussion:”One of the things that comes up in discussions of design is if, and how, it’s different from art. At last week’s European Academy of Design in Aberdeen, there was talk of critical design, a term associated with Dunne and Raby (see my earlier post about the conference) as well as other practitioners. One of the claims Fiona Raby made in her keynote at EAD was that in contemporary art, now you can do pretty much anything, nothing is shocking or draws attention, whereas it can be a radical gesture to present an artefact in the context of design, inviting audiences to imagine something in use through proposition and speculation. Here’s a contribution to that discussion. It’s a work called Aurabox (2005). It looks a bit like something you might buy at IKEA. But what is not (yet) at IKEA is the two embedded LED lights indicating the status of the object’s aura, either on or off. It’s inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea inThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”. Here’s a short film showing the Aurabox in the group show Product and Vision in Berlin in 2005.    

 Lucy Kimbell on her Design Leadership blog (January 18) wrote the following post:

“Building Space with Words is a project by social scientist Anne-Laure Fayard (assistant professor of Management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, NYU-Poly) and artist Aileen Wilson, associate professor of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute. Along with several others, I have been invited to join their blog conversation where they/we discuss matters such as disciplines, practices, materiality, art v science, social science v science and so on. Indeed the subjects being discussed, and the range of backgrounds of the contributors are such that I was worried that I couldn’t keep up with all the posts and all the threads. But then I realised it is rather like being at a party of people, some of whom know each other, or know of each other, or faintly recognise each other, with two hosts who keep offering drinks or things to eat, and introduce you to each other. But where are the gatecrashers?”

I think it’s an excellent description. Aileen and I are glad to be perceived as good hosts but we have to say that you are all great guests in this potluck dinner party.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Let’s keep drinking and eating.

And indeed where are the gatecrashers?

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Lucy was mentioning in her post on rat art / art rat (December 23) that she took “a practice from psychology labs, where such activities are routine, and combined it with an acknowledgement of the human participation to make an art event”.

Aileen commented on this point: “Your description of what took place in the gallery really highlighted the practices and procedures of the laboratory. It raised the question for me too of the ‘performative’ aspect of behaviour in different social spaces.”

This makes me wonder what defines a practice as “scientific” or “artistic”: from the comment above, maybe not the activities, the procedures, but the social context - a laboratory and experimenters who are “performing” an experiment or artists who are “performing” an artistic event. The example here is art and science, but it could be art and social science, art and design, or science and design.

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In my first contribution to this blog I though I’d write about one of my art projects (in other modes, I may write about design or social science), directly following on from earlier posts about humans and non-humans in art, and Natalie’s current work. One Night With Rats in the Service of Art is a performance lecture I first did in 2005, which tells and shows of my encounter with rats and some of their humans, mostly in the context of ‘fancy rat’ shows. As a result of hanging around, cluelessly, at these rat shows for a few years, I decided to make a similar event, which would offer something to that community, but also to arts audiences. My Rat Fair event held at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2005, attracting about 40 rats and about 450 people. In this space/event, I invited a number of different people to take part: a vet and rat lover offering a beauty parlour for rats; design students with some fashion and accessories for animals; a social psychologist offering a t-maze as used in labs to test intelligence; and - a world first - the “Is Your Rat an Artist?” drawing device. The pictures shows drawings created by the human and non-human combination of rats, software and humans. The photo shows how the set up was arranged. There was a pen with comfy sawdust on the floor in which a rat could move freely. Above this was positioned a video camera which tracked a rat’s movement. This was hooked up to some software which turned that motion into a drawing. What was important is that this took a practice from psychology labs, where such activities are routine, and combined it with an acknowledgement of the human participation to make an art event. Despite being in an art venue in London, rather than a village hall where many rat shows are held, and not having the typical judging events at those events, the Rat Fair succeeded in attracting quite a number of rats and their humans from the fancy rat community, as well as other kinds of audience. If I could work out how to use wordpress better, I’d add more images but may have to do this later.