Institutional Fieldworking

Institutional Fieldworking proposes the institution as an active site of fieldwork to perform and reveal compelling relationships between interdisciplinary research and the agency of publics. Conceived, developed, and produced collectively by a number of artist-researchers from the Cultural Negotiation of Science group (CNoS) based at Northumbria University, UK, the exposition takes as its springboard a festival of research events, workshops, and exhibitions, Institutional Fieldworking: CNoS@10, convened in the autumn of 2023 to mark the group’s tenth anniversary. The exposition allows the reader to navigate their own route through and between three ‘scales’ of approach, each of which develop multiple ‘nodes’ of enquiry. ‘Scales of Negotiation’ moves through methods to enact interdisciplinarity borne of deep-knowledge and trust including nodes such as Provoking and Holding; Collective Imagination and Knottyness; ‘Scales of Institution’ focuses on how these methods are performed within an institutional field and how public permeability might be approached through, for instance, Civic Agency; Kitchen-Table Thinking; or Knowledge Disruption. The nodes within ‘Scales of Time, Space and Velocity’ speak of dynamic range used to unsettle or disorient across technical and material bodies, from Astro-Ecologies to Intimacy, and from Lag Time to Oikos. CNoS reaches across publics and research communities to develop a performative approach to the production of knowledge that actively challenges the use of art as an instrumental or illustrative device to interpret science. We support the development of innovative, practice-based methods that re-vision the relationships between scientific and artistic research, leading to artistic outcomes that can support publics and generate socio-political impact.