Contemporary environmental and social challenges, such as climate change, pollution, desertification, natural hazards and species extinction, demand urgent and multifaceted responses. Art, with its own methods and long trajectory of exploring the relationships between human beings and the natural world, constitutes a specific pathway of inquiry and knowledge production. It operates differently from and complementary to scientific research. Art has the ability to evoke emotion and facilitate deep connections, making it a powerful tool for cognitive learning and delivering messages that reignite a sense of beauty and responsibility. Science transforms our understanding of the world. Art transforms the ways in which we perceive, experience, and relate to it. This complementarity makes collaboration between scientists and artists especially fertile. It allows complex questions to be approached through experience, the senses, the body, and the imagination. Art also opens an experiential path toward diverse audiences of different ages, backgrounds, and cultures, with or without specialized knowledge that can enhance scientific communication without replacing it. The scientific and artistic communities share an interest and responsibility in exploring how we inhabit a planet whose systems are under increasing pressure, and in generating new forms of knowledge and dialogue around these transformations. Traditional educational and communication methods have long addressed these challenges. Art-science collaborations open up further pathways for research and dialogue, grounded in direct, embodied experience. But this collaboration is not simply about art communicating or making science accessible: when both disciplines meet on equal terms of exchange, new questions, methods, and languages can emerge that neither discipline would reach on its own. This session aims to explore these interdisciplinary conversations. By bringing STEM and the arts together as equal partners, we want to open a space to discuss how these disciplines can collaborate in the research, exploration, and communication of contemporary social, economic, political, and environmental challenges, and what new forms of knowledge can emerge from this encounter.
We encourage talks on all forms of artistic expression be it visual, audio, or performative. However, we do ask that talks be restricted to artistic expressions in which the end result was produced by a human and not artificial intelligence.