Creative partnerships and cultural organisations: “enabling” and “situating” arts-science collaboration and collective learning

Abstract

Arts–science activities are proliferating globally, and they are demonstrating significant capacity to shift public thinking (and potentially action) in new ways that confront many of the pertinent challenges of our times, such as sustainability. Transdisciplinary arts–science practices offer enhanced possibilities to increase this agency. However, this can only be assured through the development of supportive institutional material and social infrastructures. In this chapter, we explore how best to enable and situate such projects, drawing upon the work and practices of transdisciplinary media artist Keith Armstrong. By comparing two Australian cultural organisations he has worked with (a university gallery and a public arts organisation), we analyse how institutional frameworks can better support such projects and programmes, mitigated by the site and location of the work. We then ask: What is the future of this mode of activated practice, and how might we best foster it?