Science, art and the metamorphic betwixt

For many years I have been absorbed by the transformative activities of an art workshop. In this paper, by tracking the physically conceptualising processes of an art project in reference to Latour’s research on science in action I argue that art-in-the-making and science-in-the-making have much in common, and that their shared correspondences distinguishes them both from the concept of their identity as products. Latour described laboratories as construction sites where social and material transformations realise facts from erstwhile amorphic material. He tracked the physically conceptualizing process of science, breaking it down into steps which he called articulations or translations. Rather than merely exposing each step’s morphic change, I suggest that he wants to give us a sense of the metamorphic betwixt. Like science, the creation of a perfect reflection of the world is no longer an aspiring feature of art. Contemporary art is gloriously and pathetically dissolute but what almost unites its divergent practices is also an urge to reveal and experience the metamorphic betwixt.