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Abstract
Research in the sciences of new-media arts aims to develop original research questions and borrows many different interdisciplinary research methodologies that often involve collaboration with professionals from non-art fields to provide real investigations. Over the last four decades, new-media arts provided unlimited strategies to integrate the laypeople into real interactive conversations allowing them to express their opinions and reflect their concerns regarding boundless scientific, environmental, political and ethical issues. Within this context, this article illustrates the parallel and growing attention to perform effective joint public engagement projects between both new-media arts and biological science domains and how biological science could benefit from the new-media arts projects to allow the laypeople to actively participate in decision-making processes regarding critical biological issues that seek more open and democratic biological investigations. This article, therefore, monitors the developments of public engagement as a concept in biological sciences and its practical principles, which they have been enhanced under the influence of today’s new-media arts strategies of engagement. As an extension of the existed efforts, the article, finally, highlighted one of the most recent international conversation led by the author regarding an assumed new-media arts protocol to use stem cells in new-media arts labs and the role of such protocol to secure the highest standard level of public engagement, by which the laypeople could control and reshape the future of generative biology and personalised medicine.
- art and medicine
- community arts
- public art
- medical humanities
- science communication
Data availability statement
Data are available on reasonable request. All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as online supplementary information (New Media Arts Protocol to Use Stem Cells (NMAP-SC) Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/New_Media_Arts_Protocol_to_study_Stem_Cells_NMAP-SC_/6199325/3).
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Data availability statement
Data are available on reasonable request. All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as online supplementary information (New Media Arts Protocol to Use Stem Cells (NMAP-SC) Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/New_Media_Arts_Protocol_to_study_Stem_Cells_NMAP-SC_/6199325/3).
Footnotes
Contributors DAMA is a lecturer in sciences of New-Media Arts. He is an artist, educator, researcher and creator to set up systems of artworks, basically depending on the intersection between art, sciences and technology. DAMA graduated magna cum laude with PhD (Dr Phil) in sciences of new-media arts and technology, University of Bern, and University of Applied Sciences Bern, Switzerland. His accurate specialisation lies in the area of holography, interactive arts, generative arts, processes arts, neuro-aesthetics, autopoietic aesthetic systems and visual communication. Through his research and experimental projects, DAMA seeks fostering the interdisciplinary knowledge derived from the artistic practice-based research and explore its dual functions of being a means of integrating the public into complicated scientific inquiries and as an approach to enrich the visual and visible interface of the contemporary sciences.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Artists and the public were involved with biologists in the survey conducted to rate the assumed protocol designed to use stem cells in new-media art labs. All participants including the public provided advice on key aspects to enhance the design of the template-based protocol from several perspectives, including the outline of the new-media art projects intended to be carried out with biologists under the protocol and their potential outcomes. All public participants will be re-consulted for the public dissemination of any product arriving from the assumed protocol.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.