Thomas Söderqvist The Institute of Advanced Studies at Lancaster University sponsorerer i 2005-2006 en serie tværfaglige workshops om forholdet mellem kunst, videnskab og politik. Den første workshop kommer at handle om:
“‘ideal’ objects, such as a sequence of amino acids or nucleic acids, aiming to investigate how they are treated in different contexts, upstream and downstream of their existence in databases such as GenBank. By asking figures actively involved in the manipulation of these objects to address questions about the nature of these objects, their construction and attributed potentials, as well as the practices whereby these potentials are realised, this workshop will seek to explore the different modes of production, manipulation, circulation, and re-configuration of these working materials, both as points of attachment for economic and intellectual values, and as substrates of other kinds of work, such as comparing, combining and concatenating”.
Workshopen kommer at foregå som en trepartssamtale mellem deltagerne og et panel bestående af en ledende brittisk forsker inden for gen- eller proteinsekvensforskning, kunstneren Jane Prophet, som er interesseret i kompleksitetsteori og artificielt liv, og undertegnede, som vil tale om “the Affymetrix Gene Chip, which, in his view, represents much of what goes on in recent biomedicine (fusion of information technology and genetics, molecular diagnostics, individualised medicine and the like) and yet it is a very difficult object for museum exhibitors because it is so small, abstract, and not very ‘tangible'” (citeret fra Paolo Palladino).
Seminaret foregår én dag i uge 49 eller 50 og arrangeres af Paolo Palladino, Department of history, Lancaster University. Annonce mer nærmere detaljer om dato mm. kan fås på http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/history/research/scienceartandpolitics.htm eller fra undertegnede.
