Our session brings together historians of art and historians of STM to explore and situate a variety of ‘cases’ from the late nineteenth century to the present. We range across many knowledge practices -- as seen in botany or technical construction, laboratories or photography -- teasing out the networks of connections between different kinds of producers. We analyse the relationships between ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ productions, including issues of ‘professional’ identity and audiences. We also hope to ‘connect’ our cases, both historically and analytically, so as to provide frameworks for further such experiments.

Plants have long been paradigmatic for questions of aesthetics and accuracy in species depiction, as iconographical symbols, and more recently for notions of sexuality. Around 1900 they were the centre of decorative art, and several analysts have pointed to ‘applied art’ as one root of abstraction in avant garde painting. In our first session, David Lomas will discuss a Swedish pioneer of abstraction, Hilma af Klint, a trained illustrator for whom explorations of plant forms were especially important.

Artists are now commonly ‘embedded’ in Labs and Museums, as in other institutions. But to what benefit? -- for the interactive participants or for publics so ‘impacted’? Marion Endt-Jones examines the work of Mark Dion and Beatrice Da Costa and others, to elucidate their projects and their self-positionings between the scientists and the publics.

Science-art professionals now, like student of innovation, tend to look forward rather than back; but more than a century ago, especially in Germany and France, experimental aesthetics thrived as various kinds of psychology threatened to displace philosophy as the foundation of ‘cultural studies’. Robert Brain explores the significance of these diverse connections and contests, for psychology, for key art producers, and for their publics.

Of all modern visual technologies, photography is most closely associated with realism, but of course it has many other aspects, in labs as well as exhibitions. It could, for example, be an analytical tool, eg for studying ‘radiations’, where the understandings of ‘rays’ developed in tandem with understandings of photography. Chiara Ambrosio explores the work of the ex-chemist Alfred Stieglitz, as an inventor, as an analyst of photography as a technical field, and as an avant- garde photographer.

With Cornelius Borck we move to the constructivist world of engineering at the peak of the cold war, with its heightened awareness of the destructive potentials of (military) technology and industrialization. Facing this situation, a number of projects turned to arts for help, but with contrasting epistemologies and material practices. Gyorgy Kepes at MIT, for example, advertised a universal ”education of vision”, while ‘ Experiments in Art and Technology’ in the New York area, embraced experimental failures as the very aim of art and technology cross overs.

To set the scene and to sketch a frame for the papers and discussion, John Pickstone will use his analyses of working knowledges in the history of STM to suggest how art- work might be similarly analysed, over time. Perhaps if we took fuller account of the structured synchronic variety of practices across the sciences, the arts and ‘fine art’, we would have better ways of historicising across the wider complex of knowledge practices. That hope we will pursue both for our particular cases, and more generally. In that respect, the Symposium, like much recent art, may evidently be called ‘experimental’.