09/11/2021
S+T+ARTS: Area Science Park’s laboratories are one of the 21 science-tech-arts residences of the European programme
The initiative promotes collaboration between science, technology and art. The call dedicated to artists from all over the world is open.
Alta Tecnologia Creazione d'Impresa
Preserving Co-evolution, that is: “How can we preserve the evolution of species by improving the ability of communities to be resilient when challenged by diversity?”. This is the challenge that Area Science Park – as the co-host institution of MEET – Digital Culture Center in Milan, one of the 11 centres in the S+T+ARTS (Science + Technology + Arts) programme – has launched to artists all around the world.
S+T+ARTS is a European Commission initiative launched under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme that promotes hybrid collaboration between science, technology and art, based on the belief that such an alliance opens up valuable prospects for innovation, research and business.
The programme’s 2021 open call invites artists to reflect on a mission to Repair the present by addressing 21 local challenges in order to transform resources in a sustainable way and promote a renewed awareness of ICT and art. 11 S+T+ARTS Centres from 10 European countries have defined the challenges, which are open to individual artists and collectives from any art-related field. Each includes a fellowship of €40,000 and an artistic residency to be created at the host institutions, including Area Science Park, with which the winning artists are to collaborate to explore the present beyond current limits and re-imagine sustainable futures.
The national research body will open its genomics and epigenomics laboratories and the Orfeo Data Center to the call’s winning artist, thus making research results, data and technologies available.
The artist will visit Area Science Park’s laboratories and converse with researchers, searching for inspiration by reflecting on metagenomics, an area of study that helps us understand the fundamental processes sustaining life on Earth. Metagenomics is a new science that has already paved the way to discovering important aspects of the functioning of biogeochemical cycles and of the human microbiome, which are crucial for health.
Microbial ecologies can be viewed as a “symphony of sequences” of DNA, and are studied with algorithms in some ways similar to those used for single genomes, but which branch off from them, due to the greater complexity of the problem. Understanding how external disturbances – for example those due to climate change – affect ecologies and how they induce transformations on their ability to create new molecules and establish new processes, is of fundamental importance for the future of humanity, which is currently on the verge of very serious environmental risks.
This type of knowledge will be crucial to renegotiate our future on this planet with Nature. The answer to this challenge, together with the other works completed at the programme’s 21 residences will be exhibited in autumn 2022 at MAXXI in Rome and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, as well as at the facilities of the S+T+ARTS Centres.
To find out more