Drawing Across/ Between Boundaries

International Conference on Drawing Across Borders

If we step into a STEM workplace today, we find all types of drawings circulating among scientists, technology researchers, engineers, or mathematicians. Computer screens connected to databases, where information is processed into vivid graphic visualisations, coexist with everyday drawing activities: observational sketches, graphs traced with markers in whiteboards, hand-drawn diagrams on found papers, or instructional illustrations. Some of these drawings are representations used as surrogates that stand for already acquired knowledge, while others are models designed to generate insights and produce new knowledge. Regardless of their names, the nature of their media and surfaces, they all stand for formal and informal ways to extend our minds in situations involving visual-spatial reasoning, feedback, or memory retention. In the last two decades, this diversity was mirrored by the growing interest in drawing activities as topics of STEM practices and pedagogy, such as drawing-to-learn or learning-by-drawing.

Hybrid knowing spaces were also opened by art-science collaborative projects, where the objects, methods and epistemology of science meet artistic research. At this intersection, drawing acts as a situated form of inquiry to address and experiment with concepts and processes such as metabolism, movement, perception, pain, human mobility, emotion, matter, entropy, or time, among a diversity of phenomena across divergent areas.

Triggered by the debates surrounding the epistemological impact of drawing activities in science, a shift of focus has also occurred. In the hybrid knowing spaces opened by art-science collaborations, drawing activities are not restricted to visualising, modelling, or understanding. They are a form of agency whose goal is to connect, act and care, a way of staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway would put it. By addressing drawing as an agency, we consider the links between who is drawing and what is being drawn as part of both the artistic and scientific research process; we focus on how objects and subjects are constituted in their mutual interactions through drawing in order to transform ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and acting in the world.

The three prepositions of the title – ACROSS X ALONG X BETWEEN – are attractors to explore drawing's different movements within university areas. They hint at possible research directions in terms of which the dualisms between embodied and discursive knowledge, image and writing or art and science in the university can be challenged.

DAY 1:

PANEL #2 DRAWING ALONG

A framework for action and reflection:

Using play to facilitate/ understand the relationships between art practice and life science.
Joanne Berry-Frith

Loughborough University