Project: ART4MED – Art meets open science and technology in health and medical research
Coordinator: Digital Art International (FR)
Partners: Laboratorium for Æstetik og Økologi (DK), Stichting Waag Society (NL), Suomen Biotaiteen Seura RY (FI), Zavod za kulturo, umetnost in izobraževanje Kersnikova (SI)

Project amount: 329.132 EUR
Grant Awarded: 197.479 EUR (60 %)
Project duration: 1. 11. 2020–31. 10. 2022

Ever since the digital revolution in life sciences and the vast new international open science movement, many citizen scientists, makers, artists and designers have been collaborating to develop affordable tools that could revolutionize the field of biology, diagnostic guidance, medicine practice and access to healthcare. Meanwhile, the development of variants for experimentation, iterative design and creation, has paved the way for new forms of art practices: experimenting with portable ultrasound imaging, webcam microscopy, surgery robotics, prostheses, microfluidics devices, monitoring of vital signs, etc. Artists—from performance art, new media art, speculative design, bioart and body art—are engaging with these new media.

Medical professionals, living labs and open science communities who have worked with artists to co-design and prototype new medical tools appreciate their creative mindsets as well as their unique approaches to raising issues of equity in access to healthcare and discussing ethical values. But these collaborations are fragile, and methodologies and artworks that might otherwise emerge often still have difficulty in finding appropriate production contexts.

Some questions emerge:
– How should art dealing with such complex issues be produced and presented today?
– How can we share good practices and methodologies for cross-disciplinary collaboration?
– How can we consolidate and broaden the networks of contemporary cultural operators dealing with health and medical research? How do we disseminate this content beyond immediate peer networks?
– How can art make the wider public more aware of the need to improve access to healthcare?

In order to address these questions, we propose to form a consortium: the ART4MED project: 5 partners from 5 EU countries will unite around their common interest to experiment and disseminate methodologies where “art meets open science and technology in health and medical research”.