Interrupting Conventions: artLAB as an Innovative Research and Teaching Format

Regula Valérie Burri, HCU - HafenCity University Hamburg

New Orleans 2019: Imagining

By engaging critically with sociomaterial worlds and participating in practices of reflection on the making and co-production of technosciences and social orders, STS expresses its concern with the major challenges in the era of anthropocene and digitalization. Such concern is shared by other practices that are involved with and by the world, including art practices. STS and art may thus enrich each other. These approaches are combined in the research and teaching format artLAB. Drawing from STS concepts and involving art practices, artLAB aims at exploring sociomaterial realities – often in an urban context. artLAB studies how the artistic inquiry of our complex and hybrid sociomaterial realities adds to conventional ways of doing research in STS and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the worlds we live in. It also engages critically with teaching conventions, thus interrupting traditional modes of instruction, learning, and thinking. At 4S conference, I will present the format and selected works that have been developed in artLAB and were shown in public exhibitions.

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