The Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies appeared in December 2021. Art and science work is experiencing a dramatic rise coincident with burgeoning Science and Technology Studies (STS) interest in this area. Science and technology have played the role of a muse for the arts, inspiring imaginative reconfigurations of scientific themes and exploring their cultural resonance. Conversely, the arts are often deployed in the service of science communication, illustration, and popularization. STS scholars have sought to resist the instrumentalization of the arts by the sciences, emphasizing studies of theories and practices across disciplines and the distinctive and complementary contributions of each. The manifestation of this commonality of creative and epistemic practices is the emergence of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS).
This handbook defines the modes, practices, crucial literature, and research interests of this emerging field. It explores the questions, methodologies, and theoretical implications of scholarship and practice that arise at the intersection of art and STS. Further, ASTS demonstrates how the arts are intervening in STS. Drawing on methods and concepts derived from STS and allied fields including visual studies, performance studies, design studies, science communication, and aesthetics and the knowledge of practicing artists and curators, ASTS is predicated on the capacity to see both art and science as constructions of human knowledge-making. Accordingly, it posits a new analytical vernacular, enabling new ways of seeing, understanding, and thinking critically about the world.
Backchannels editor Shiv Issar interviewed the ASTS Handbook editors with an eye to their goals and experiences with this large-scale editing project.
Figure 1: The Routledge Art, Science, and Technology Studies Handbook cover features the work of Ali Schachtschneider, Vivorium, 2015. Photography by Z. Wei.
Shiv Issar: In the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology studies, you explored an intersection that’s only being superficially attended to by other texts within STS. Could you tell us more about the conceptualization and genesis of this project?
Hannah Star Rogers: We came together around several 4S meetings. After organizing a series of panel streams, we started to think about making a handbook and we saw a clear model in Sismondo’s STS handbook. We wanted people who were not only in STS communities to have an immediate way of approaching these ideas, but also people who were curators, artists, or scientists. I would say that the most surprising aspect for us at the very beginning was that we came across other scholars working in this area in STS who were not quite doing what we were doing, but were interested in visuality and science. They were talking about science images, and we were talking about art. We were made aware of the fact that there were more scholars like us working with these ideas and building on those older sources. We knew we all had monographs in the works which could seem like one-offs if they were alone, but they really weren’t alone. We just needed to locate other people like us as it would have helped us create a reception for these areas, while simultaneously letting us think about the diversity of the ways in which art and STS might be approached. We wanted a community.
Dehlia Hannah: All three of my co-editors who were at Cornell when I was at Columbia. I was coming from philosophy, and it was so striking to me that they were working together, given the differences in their backgrounds. We all met when we were doing our PhDs at a time when I felt really alone in my research topic. I was trying to bring the philosophy of science and aesthetics together. I was looking at all this literature and then suddenly, I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, maybe all the material that’s missing from me and philosophy is available in STS.” It turned out that we were all having the same experience of scouring the literature to support our commitments and the kinds of things we wanted to do. Each of us had assembled a bibliography that was approximating what we had in mind, which turned out to be a shared interest (of STS), but actually not the same shared bibliography. There was a constellation of issues present here that carried the potential to be coalesced. And we realized that we had, cumulatively, the makings of a truly fascinating interdisciplinary field. And as Hannah says, it was all there, we just had to put it together.
Megan Halpern: One of the things that this is making me think of is how different all of our backgrounds are and how we arrived at this project with different bibliographies. I began as a theater professional. I started a theater company that was rooted in performances about science, and that led me to pursue my PhD in science communication, where I focused on art, science and relevant collaborations. Between the two, I had a whole different set of literatures that I was interacting with, but also had a different perspective that I brought into the conversation. Dehlia was working on the art installation side and Kathryn was working with images in nanotechnology and arts in informal science education. Despite these differences and these wildly varying backgrounds, there are approaches here that hold this field together; common ways… of thinking about, and approaching the world.
Figure 2: Fast Forward Futures (2017). Installation at Harvard Forest. 4 × 8 × 26 feet; wood, acrylic paint, and assorted hardware. Collaborators: David Buckley Borden, Jack Byers, Aaron M. Ellison, Salvador Jiménez-Flores, and Salua Rivero. Photograph: David Buckley Borden. Context: Situated adjacent to and pointing toward a gap created by a dead and fallen eastern hemlock and now succeeding to a new forest of black birch, Fast Forward Futures is an abstraction of the “fast forward” icon of a media player. It is created from five interlocking delta symbols representing change and painted in a global-warming-inspired heat gradient.
Shiv Issar: Your editorial team worked with a very diverse range of contributors for the handbook, including many artists who didn’t possess a traditional academic background. What were your biggest takeaways from this experience and what advice would you like to give to early career scholars who hope to produce collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship at this scale?
Megan Halpern: I felt that having naïve optimism about what we could do and how comprehensive we could be was really helpful for me. I think that if someone had said that it’s going to take up ten years of your life and a huge part of your tenure case, it might not have worked out for me. We were depending on 75 contributors for text and artwork. Any reasonable advisor would have counseled against it. But it worked out for me. It was something that needed to be done. I thought to myself: this book needs to exist. It would have been so helpful to me as a graduate student and it really still is helpful, for teaching and for thinking about future projects. And so, it wasn’t really about weighing upon whether or not it was the right move for my career. I simply felt that it needed to exist.
Kathryn DeRidder-Vignone: We really had great mentors. Trevor Pinch wrote one of our forwards, while Caroline Jones wrote the other. Hannah and I took an “Images and STS” independent study that dwelled upon art with Mike Lynch. Bruce Lewenstein was on both my and Megan’s dissertation committee, and he also was Hannah’s outside reader. We had a lot of help and encouragement, even when we were naïve and arrogant. Hannah and I once approached Trevor and suggested that someday, we wanted to write a Golem book on art. Imagine how it sounded coming from graduate students!
Hannah Star Rogers: I know, and we have experienced great kindness, right? Trevor so gently told us that wasn’t going to work, and then proceeded to help us get oriented to what we could do to start to build a field, which was something he knew a lot about. You know, he sat on panels, helped us gather audiences into those panels, and didn’t even blink at our plans. He really was very kind. My own advisor, Judith Reppy, never suggested to me that this idea was not going to work and tried to guide me toward what could be done step by step. Certainly, our friendships and the collegiality of the co-editors really made this project possible. We were dedicated to balancing our individual priorities with what we each needed from the process.
Dehlia Hannah: After all, several kids were born during the production of this book! This work might have, at some level, come out of desperation because we needed it ourselves and on another level, there were moments of total hubris about the scope and what we thought might be possible. There is so much more to include now, just so much more that is out there, and that we now know about.
Hannah Star Rogers: Exactly, we knew from the beginning that while we were identifying some works, we would also be leaving some out, and now we really just have a sample of the field of ASTS in this text. Finishing this book gave us a chance to think about what got left out, how to continue building the community, the field, and what we’d want to do in the future.
Hannah Star Rogers is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches the intersection of art and science.
Megan K. Halpern is an Assistant Professor in Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University and a Scholar in Residence at MSU’s Center for Interdisciplinarity.
Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone is Faculty Senate Chair at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics, where she teaches future engineers, from across the state, about the complexities of science, technology, and engineering in action.
Dehlia Hannah is Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art and Natural Sciences at the Department of Chemistry and Biosciences at Aalborg University and a Research Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Art and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen.