Contextscomprehension strategies, and academic classification systems. Consequently, these
research projects did not only produce fluent forms of interconnectivity and methodology
accompanied by different forms of knowledge production; they also led to novel artistic
strategies and intensities of perception.
in his project See and Seen (2006), matts leiderstam, for example, investigated the
art historical conventions for the ideal landscape developed as techniques of perception
in eighteenth- century painting (e.g. artistic seeing instruments like the Claude lorrain
mirror). a research trajectory consisting of the investigation of historical reports and
contexts and a production of various artistic strategies led to the issue and implications
of current spectatorship and how to address that subject in artistic work.
my method for see and seen was to research the different historical accounts
and the contexts of the representation of landscape. i was not so much
interested in the accumulation of knowledge but in how i could put it to work
in general to reproduce the landscapes through various artistic techniques and
strategies. i adopted different roles when i approached the landscapes through
mimicry – the copyist, the tourist and the art historian – used in both projects
as routines for seeing.
(leiderstam 2007: 28)do natural sciences allow an artistic intervention and re verification of visual
representation? That question was the starting point for irene Kopelman’s research
project Space in- between Spaces. Kopelman investigated how various natural
science collections used to base their display system on nineteenth- century forms
of categorization and logics of identity, a classifying logos excluding differences and
singularities.
during the 19th century, a scientific project needed to force things into
categories in order to visualize the rules they followed and which organized
the world in a logical system. This was a fundamental process to schematize
how we look at things and simplify it to the extreme, thus overlooking any
singularities. my research project concentrates on reopening some of these
categories, and to look upon differences and singularities. The project uses
elements from the history of science as resources and attempts to generate,
from both art practice and artistic thought, a type of knowledge extrinsic to
the field of philosophy or history of science, but still touching upon issues they
all share.
(Kopelman 2007: 40)in the form of a concentrated series of artistic interventions and deconstructions
of device systems, Kopelman develops alternative forms of archiving and display for a
number of natural science collections.