A Deleuzian Interrogation on the Interference of Art and Science

Interdisciplinary research has become more mainstream in the academia as of late. Gilles Deleuze’s theories, especially his critical insight into the relationship between science and art may open new avenues for this kind of research. Deleuze’s ideas are significant, not only because he provides a framework for thinking about nomadic science, but he also clarifies possible criteria for assessing the nature of interdisciplinary experiments. Art “organizes” this chaos in a frame to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory/affective/intensive, but science “organizes” the same chaos into a system of coordinates and forms of measure that produce the appearance of “Nature.” Art and science, in this model, can intersect and intertwine, but Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari never suggest there can be a perfect synthesis between the two. Instead, we can associate the two kinds of creative activities in terms of neighboring planes: planes of composition for art and planes of reference for science. The goal of this paper is to argue that Deleuze and Guattari characterize the interaction between these two planes as one of interference rather than synthesis and shed new light on arts-based research in terms of the three interferences.