Ksenia Fedorova and Silvia Casini on Artnodes #35 —

«STS encourages viewing media art not (solely) in terms of individual artworks, but through the complex networks in which these practices are entangled, or “worlded”.

The most recent edition of Artnodes has focused on exploring one of the most promising fields at the intersection of interdisciplinary artistic production and technological media: the convergence of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the arts. Artmatters interviewed the guest editors, Ksenia Fedorova (Leiden University), author of Tactics of Interfacing, and Silvia Casini (University of Aberdeen), author of Giving Bodies Back to Data; both books published in the Leonardo series by MIT Press.

The selection of articles is highly diverse, offering a broad and engaging range of content. The theoretical tools presented by the editors in their introduction to Artnodes 35 already suggest an original approach to exploring this transdisciplinary intersection, as can be seen in the following excerpts:

«STS research has long adopted an empirical stance towards analysing media art practices in situ, striving to produce comprehensive ethno-graphic descriptions that render visible the experimental nature of such practices (the already cited literature in ASTS offers several examples of these descriptions). However, these descriptions often dismiss a more nuanced engagement with the ephemeral components of media art, specifically the gestures, actions, and dialogues that are challenging to observe, record, and analyse. Being transitory, these components, founded upon the interaction between various agents, often go unnoticed and are lost in most ex-post account reconstructions of such practices. Artist Thomas Feuerstein, who has long been passionately con-cerned about the technoscientific world we inhabit, creates art from dialogues, stories, and languages (both natural and artificial), compris-ing highly ephemeral and time-based components in a constant state of flux.)»

«STS has long been interested in how possible future worlds are con-structed and how expectations regarding certain science and technol-ogy developments are managed (consider, for example, nanotechnolo-gy-shaped futures), as well as how the imagination of the future shapes the present. The ability to envision futures and manage expectations is a crucial element in socio-technical creation. As Audétat (2002) has pointed out, cultural and media studies are essential for better under-standing the “regime of promising” in which we exist, a regime shaped by fictional narratives that speculate on and/or anticipate the future to come. The future is inextricably linked to the present, as imagination is bound to materiality – a reflection made by Pickering in his The Mangle of Practice (1995, 20), whereby he described the nuanced temporal relationships between imagination and materiality, or, to put it another way, between the expectations raised within experimental settings and the resistances posed by materialities.»

Artmatters is delighted to highlight the rich and diverse contributions featured in Artnodes 35. With articles by authors such as Carlos Henrique Falci, Marilia Lyra Bergamo, Coco Moya, Carlos Barberá Pastor, Jaime Munárriz Ortiz, Andrea Tešanović, Esperanza Cobo Arnal, Giulio Galimberti, Samuele Sartori, Tiffany Garzo Camón, Regula Valérie Burri, Ashley Lee Wong, Bart Grob, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, Hannah Star Rogers, Philippe Sormani, among others, this edition offers a vibrant cross-section of voices at the intersection of STS and the arts. We invite readers to explore the issue and engage with the wide ranging perspectives Artnodes 35 brings to contemporary artistic and academic discourse.

Pau Alsina and Andrés Burbano