Daring to disentangle: towards a framework for art-science-technology collaborations

ABSTRACT This conceptual paper focuses on understanding the interactions between art, science, and technology as forms of wide interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary collaboration. There is scarce knowledge about how the wide interdisciplinary interaction between artists, scientists, and technologists can be conceptualized through a shared framework for collaboration. The ecology of collaboration involves a complex set of social structures varying between autonomous individually organized teams and institutional programmes. By using a social ecological approach, integrating social, organizational, and cultural factors, art, science, and technology (AST) collaborations can be characterized by a sequence of antecedent, process, and outcome conditions. These elements are organized to form a conceptual framework for art-science collaborations, elaborating on AST in its relationship to knowledge, aesthetics, interdependence, and experimentalism as antecedent conditions, while outlining the process elements and possible outcomes of the collaborations. The framework can be a vehicle for evaluation and reflection for practitioners, researchers, educators, and policymakers.