본문 바로가기
  • Home

Nanoart: Artistic Research and Ethics in Laboratory of Science

Cheon Heahyun 1

1단국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The projects of artistic research, dealing with organisms through converging technologies such as nanotechnology and biotechnology in the ‘science laboratory,’ are intervened by ‘ethics committee’ related to the health and safety issues, environmental, and ethical problems. At this time, though art may object to the deliberation of the ethics committee or deliberately reveal the hypocrisy and contradiction of science, the main basis for the ethics committee to evaluate and determine the value of such artistic trials is not by the experimental or aesthetic aspects of art, but by the practical and utilitarian analysis of art projects. Therefore, there are inevitable tensions between art and ethics committees. This paper suggests an ‘interdisciplinary criticism’ proposed by Stefan Herbrechter as a methodology for this problem, which is not a trans-boundaries or a dialectical transcendence of disciplines, but a creation of ‘third space’ between the disciplines. In addition, the concept of ‘second order observation’ in Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory is introduced as a way to sustain the third space. Art criticizing science does not see its own blind spot. In order to see art that can not see its own blind spot, it should lead to a criticism of art criticizing science, that is, second order observation. In this way, art can reflect on the blind spot of art, and the same goes for science and ethics. It will be the ethical practice of art in the scientific laboratory to discover the conflicts and differences in ethics through the interdisciplinary criticism including such a series of second order observations, that is, a criticism of oneself criticizing the other.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.