Attendees:

Justine Cooper, artist
Jackie Brookner ,ecological artist
Sonya Laska, artist
Lisa Colley, arts funder / policy
Rebecca Cummings, artist / educator
Donnette Atiyah, artist / curator
Katherine Watson, producer
Marge Myers, Associate Director, Studio for Creative Inquiry
Nina Sobell, artist
David Rosen, managing director of Praxis, a business-development consulting firm
Damian Murphy, structural engineer
Meta Brunzema, architect / urban designer

QUESTION
If much of scientific research is funded by the motivation for profit, and the 'objects' of contemporary art continue to be defined and distributed primarily through the gallery/museum/collector networks, what then, if any, are the independent commercial possibilities for the 'products' of science/art collaborations?

REPORT
Karl Grimes stated the question and remarked that in art/science collaborations, sometimes more time is spend on funding the project than on the collaboration itself. There are very few funding sources that are specifically targeted at art-sci collaborations. R+D is particularly difficult to finance, and often a very expensive and time consuming part of the process.

A discussion of the definition of "value" of the products of art-sci collaborations followed. "Value" can be related to either a "public" or "private" conversation. "Value" arises as a conversation between the "appreciator" and the "artist".

Video and web art - quite radical 20 years ago, has now become subject to the art market economy. Works, much like gallery art, are sold in limited editions to collectors.

But do the products of art-sci collaborations have to have an "object" or defined "product"? Many artists are frustrated by working within the "commercial" art community. Perhaps it might be more fruitful to work within science institutions or centers. Often the university environment allows for more experimental collaborations than the "commercial" art scene.

In the U.S. there is virtually no public funding for art-sci collaborations. The last funding program aimed specifically at collaborations existed in the late eighties. It might be more productive to not stress the collaborative nature of the work in funding applications. Foundations in the U.S. seem to prefer supporting work by an individual author.

In the U.K. art-sci collaborations are quite fashionable now - in particular those that engage with high-tech, new media or "cool" sciences like microbiology. It is easier to fund such high-tech projects.

A discussion about intellectual property and the "value" of art-sci collaborations followed. Problems arise when intellectual property contracts are incomplete or non-existent. It is important to contractually define the parameters of intellectual property. Often the artist is interested in publicly exhibiting the work - which sometimes conflicts with proprietary commercial information produced by the research-based technology companies that the artist is collaborating with.

On a smaller scale, much of the most interesting work is produced on shoe-string budgets, in small university departments or labs - and only then finds its way into the gallery scene.

Damian Murphy, a structural engineer, suggested that artists often creatively find money in building construction budgets, or other tangentially related funds. Intellectual property is related to culture; in the U.S., much value is placed on individual "authorship" of the work - in the U.K. this is much less of an issue. For an engineer, the value of intellectual property is not an issue because the principles of engineering are universally known - and applied on a case-by-case basis.

The consensus was that it is good to work within a scientific setting - which offers more opportunities for funded research. However, scientific collaborators find it easier to get science-related funding if their artist collaborator is already funded by a prestigious art fund - such as NYSCA ( New York State Council for the Arts).

Reported by Meta Brunzema

Karl Grimes is an artist and lecturer on new media and imaging at Dublin City University. His work is exhibited and published in Europe and United States and is represented in numerous public and private collections. His lens based projects and art/science collaborations focus on issues of identification and classification in science and medicine, specifically in developmental biology, pathology, forensics and natural history display. He is currently completing, Future Nature, a collaboration with the Hubrecht Laboratory, Netherlands, on animal embryological and foetal collections. He is Chair of the M.Sc in Multimedia programs at Dublin City University, Ireland.