The Science & Society Session
The Science & Society Session, featuring speakers that deal with the sciences from a sociological, philosophical or artistic perspective, is a new addition to BacNet. This is due to the fact that the modern sciences increasingly influence our lives and receive public attention, which makes it necessary for scientists to deal more extensively with the social impact as well as public representation of their work. The session sees itself as an experiment that seeks to inspire an entirely new debate, provide scientists with a fresh perspective on their work and its impact, and initiate novel interdisciplinary collaborations.

The focus of this year’s Science & Society Session is on “Science and the Arts.” The theme picks up on the recently observed trend of science and art moving towards each other in a variety of ways. While artists, both in their own contexts and increasingly also in cooperation with scientists, are engaging in research themselves (“artistic research”), scientists are paying more and more attention to the intuitive, creative, and aesthetic facets of their work. Three presentations will highlight the varied aspects of this trend:

Art Historian Horst Bredekamp
The past few years have seen a dramatic rise of a visual culture in the modern sciences. In addition to traditional quantitative measurements, raw data are increasingly complex image;, complex models and hypotheses can be communicated only visually; and artistically designed images serve to popularize science. In his lecture “Into the Depth: The Microscope’s Principle of Disjunction,” art historian Horst Bredekamp (Humboldt University of Berlin) will examine those visual aspects of science.

Artist Ursula Damm
Especially synthetic biology with its possibilities for design and construction is an attractive field for artists who create new models of living organisms, who cooperate with labs in order to work directly with cells or tissue or who shape the public “presence” of synthetic biology. These issues will be addressed by artist Ursula Damm (Bauhaus University of Weimar) in her talk on “Engineering the Future.”

“Electrophoresis Artist” Paul Vanouse
Many artists reflect on the growing influence of the sciences on our modern world and its possible social and ethical consequences. They experiment with materials and techniques derived from the natural sciences. This perspective is represented by the “electrophoresis artist” Paul Vanouse (University of Buffalo, NY) who will give a talk about “DNA as Material and Medium.”

Chair: Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge, Freie Universität Berlin
Deputy Chair: Prof. Dr. Victor Sourjik, University of Heidelberg