Paratactical Curating: A Collaborative Innovation in Knowledge Production

• In Event: Interpretations of Liminalities in Art and Science

Abstract

How does collaboration manifest itself in innovation processes of transdisciplinary knowledge production in STS? Revisiting the concepts of “boundary object”, “obligatory passage points” and “interpretive flexibility”, this paper aims at exploring heterogeneous translations among science, technology and art as a knowledge integration infrastructure within paratactical curating. As a transdisciplinary research practice, paratactical curating emerges as experimental and performative mediation in the coordination and participation processes of experts and non-experts on a particular matter. It suggests a collaborative and participatory form of innovation in knowledge production. An ethnographical study of an exhibition, Waves (2015) reveals how the collaboration among scientists, artists, designers and engineers, who live in distinct social worlds, can create ways of organizing imaginings, thoughts and conceptions in a decentralized manner in spite of multiple situatedness. The exhibition in paratactical curating emerges where knowledge is not yet stabilized. It reconciles different meanings performed within the exhibition upon which various agencies are not necessarily attempting to reach agreement. The construction of hybrid arrangements within paratactical curating opens access in rethinking and renegotiating the stabilization of definitions in between different social worlds. Therefore in paratactical curating, the coexistence of unstructured translation processes, along with their performative of uncovering the knowledge gaps, can allow interpretive flexibility, abstraction, multi-tasking and modularity, which are shared for augmenting the autonomy of the members of different social worlds.

Author

• Ebru Yetiskin, IstanbuLab – Science, Technology and Society Platform in Turkey, Turkey