Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW) is a four-year SSHRC funded interdisciplinary art and science project, involving four phases between 2016 to 2020. It involves co-designing, curating, testing, and analyzing models of collaboration for art and science. Participants include Emily Carr University’s faculty, art students, visiting artists + physicists, post-doctoral researchers and graduate students working at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre and accelerator-based science located at the University of British Columbia.

In this venture we join together artists and physicists to share the quest to understand the nature of reality. Their diverse experiences, views, and interactions bring each discipline to see a new perspective on the creative process while also broadening the potential for communication between disciplines. Our aim is to transform the grammar of abstract knowledge by specifically addressing the barely discernible phenomena studied by physics through aesthetics, analogy, metaphor, and other inventive methods.

During the collaborative process, scientists frame a physics topic for artists who in turn make material-based, intuitive investigations and responses. These transformations are manifest in visual art forms that include sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, photography, installation, sound, text, interactive media, dance and other cultural forms. The aim is to open new pathways for the possibility of a much richer understanding of human experience than each can attain separately. The process and outcomes of this creative research project has relevance beyond art and physics as it presents an emergent model of practice for the apprehension of complex knowledge and diverse ways of knowing.

At the end of the production period from January to September 2017 the resulting works from 26 artists will be exhibited and performed. In the next Phase beginning in February 2018 we will redesign the experimental set up which will be followed by another production period with artists and scientists in 2018. During 2018/19 the two phases will be analyzed resulting in writing on the project in preparation for a publication. In 2019/20 the four year project will be reconceived as a final exhibition accompanied by the publication with essays, the scientists’ drawings, equations and stories as well as the documented artworks.

Research Creation Questions

1. In what ways can transformative methodologies of collaboration work to engage with the diverse languages employed by artists and physicists?
2. What are possible models for interdisciplinary learning in the studio and science lab that are creative and effective generators of new knowledge and its visualization?

Objectives of the Proposed Research

1. To explore how artists might work with scientists to develop a shared understanding of how knowledge can be translated across their disciplinary communities.
2. To organize and assess a process of interdisciplinary collaboration between art and science that enables “hybrid research” which can then be shared by artists and scientists.

Co-investigators 

Ingrid Koenig

associate professor, Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Ingrid Koenig has been Artist in Residence at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre from 2011 to 2021, co-organizing processes of collaboration between artists and physicists. Her pedagogical designs involve courses that intersect science, humanities and visual art. Her studio practice traverses the fields of physics, social history, feminist theory and narratives of science through visual art and relational projects. She is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Koenig earned her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.

Koenig has exhibited her drawings and paintings in public galleries across Canada, Europe and New Zealand. Publications include the book RAW DATA - Artistic Transformation co-written with Berlin artists/collaborators, and an article on her partnership with a physics lab in MIT’s journal Leonardo. In 2019 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to join the Arctic Circle art and science residency in the international territory of Svalbard. Based in Vancouver, she is an associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, situated on unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories.

ingridkoenig.ca