What are the obligations of science and art to each other?
Philosopher Bruno Latour reflects on the difficulty of bringing artists and scientists together in collaborative work. Such collaborations always fail, he notes, unless the artists and scientists can come together to address challenges that lie, in effect, outside their areas of specialization and expertise. When specific difficult challenges require the collaborating parties to seek answers outside their usual repertoire of skills and methods (“when artists and scientists don’t know what they are doing and where they are going”) such collaborations can yield groundbreaking results, by steering specialists from both domains toward a creative fusion that does not proceed from habitual or conventional approaches but which may generate new ways of thinking or seeing.
