Placing Art Practice into the Field of Bioimaging: Testing Play as a Methodological Tool to Explore and Reflect upon Art Practice

Abstract Bioimaging experiments are carried out in discrete labs, and artists are rarely granted access. The author finds that they are an underused resource for artist-researchers. In this article, she demonstrates how an artist-researcher can contribute to artscience initiatives in pharmacological research by working in an advanced imaging and microscopy lab and responding innovatively to current circumstances in bioimaging. She does this by thinking about scientific and artistic interdisciplinary practice in a playful way. Informed by established play theories and practices from the literature, she has reviewed, studied, and adapted. Here she discusses research conducted at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham, where she evaluated play as an insightful concept to provoke a reaction to scientific methods.