In tackling the challenges of the twenty-first century, new forms of collaboration able to engage different perspectives are now seen as a necessity. These are partnerships that can network different resources, pool skills, challenge boundaries, and embrace risk. A sense of urgency can be felt amongst many communities wishing to reach outside the four walls of their institutions and establish, with all force, new ways of tackling the complex challenges they face. Where do we see new forms of engagement across disciplines and sectors?

Working with artist and trans-disciplinary researcher Arthur Clay, our first edited book – On Science, On Art, On Society (2015) – features a collection of twenty-five interviews with innovators testing the boundaries of conventional practice. Its authors ask, for example, whether neuroscience can uncover the laws of aesthetics; whether citizen science will open scientific research to a larger community of stakeholders; whether corporate responsibility and grass-roots innovation can bring about a fairer society based on the resource sharing; and whether new approaches to tourism can help build inclusive and sustainable local economies. Our second book – On Media, On Technology, On Life Process (due 2020) – explores how creative practitioners are engaging with live tissues, microorganisms, and living processes to create work that defies traditional concepts of media. Featuring work from artists in the UK, South Korea, and Japan, the book builds on a new theory of “vital media” by Robert Mitchell (Duke University). Essays in the book imagine the use of biotechnology to pursue extreme self-sufficiency; offer a future-historical account of a lab-grown meat industry; and ask how the transplantation of our skin microbiota shifts a multi-species body (Me) into a flourishing of independent selves (We).

Publications

Clay A., Rut, M., and Senior T. J. (Eds.) (2015). On Science, On Art, On Society: Interviews with Innovators. Gistrup, Denmark: River publishers. ISBN: 9788793379121, e-ISBN: 9788793379138