In summer 2021 scientists and artists come together for a unique exchange between the disciplines. The project “Entstehung einer künstlerischen Tatsache” (“Genesis of an Artistic Fact”) enables scientists to gain new perspectives on their work and artists to expand their artistic practice through scientific methods.

Thereby, the artists create a piece of art that can serve as a starting point for a social discourse on optical detection methods in research. In the end, a joint exhibition by all five participating artists (collectives) will show the results of the transdisciplinary dialogue. The science city Jena will be developed as a meeting point for the arts & science community. An artistic research process that is transparent for the public and the communities provides the basis for future encounters between science and art.

The heart of the project is the residency program, in which they invite five artists to enter into a dialogue with scientists and with one another and to create artistic works.

Andrea Garcia Vasquez is interested in the similarities and differences between humans and plants - in relation to their defense reactions, evolution, adaptation and behavior. Andrea will work with Microverse member Pooja Snehrashmi Mehta at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology.

Tamara Knapp 
in the world of microbiology there are structures, growth patterns and architectures that cannot be found in our everyday macro-world. As part of our residency, the graphic designer and artist Tamara Knapp would like to deal with these special structures. Together with the bioinformatician Jan-Philipp Praetorious from the Hans Knöll Institute, she will carry out experiments and deal with the working methods of automated microscopy, as artificial intelligence such as neural networks are also increasingly used in tools and programs for graphic design.

Masami Saito
 looks inward: She is interested in bacteria and fungi that colonize the human intestine. Masami Saito will work closely with the researchers from FungiNet at the Hans Knöll Institute in particular.

Claus Schöning Lam Yong has been concerned with the human side of scientific methods and their backgrounds for several years in his artistic work. In our residency he will work with Sandor Nietzsche and Martin Westermann from the electron microscope center of the Jena University Hospital.

Luca Spano 
 His collaboration with the laboratories in Jena will focus on exploring the limits of the visible. The starting point of his artistic research is the collection of optical instruments of the German Optical Museum (D.O.M.). Luca will pay particular attention to the mechanical aesthetics of the tools and the historical steps that heralded the paradigm shift in scientific vision. This is followed by an exchange with the electron microscope center (EMZ) of the University of Jena and the Nanobiophotonics department at the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technologies (IPHT).

The joint exhitbition will take place from October 2^nd until November 13^th, 2021 at TRAFO in Jena.

You can find the detailed artistic concepts on the project website.

Text: Künstlerische Tatsachen