Art and Science Research Teams? Some Arguments in Favour of a Culture of Dissent

Abstract

While working on a project concerned with theoretic models describing interrelations between higher cognitive and perceptual processes, I was kindly welcomed as a research fellow at laboratories of neurobiology — as an ‘art historian in lab’ one might say. While I was officially treated as a ‘visiting scholar’, it was quite clear that I was seen rather as a more or less exotic ‘guest’ than as a ‘collaborator’ in a strict sense. A different perspective onto a shared field of interest, for example disparate ideas about what ‘art’ might be and which kind of questions were interesting to ask when dealing with works of art, were some of the issues that lead to a difference in research objectives and hypotheses. And even though I had entered a fruitful cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas on certain problems, I discovered that I was simultaneously acting as a kind of ethnologist (trying out the limits of participant observation) (Geertz 1987). My attention was drawn to certain aspects of laboratory practice that did not appear to be of central concern to my hosts.