Curator and Researcher Lucy Sollitt on Entanglements and Hybridity in Art-Science Collaborations20 min read

Philosopher, writer, and curator Lucy Sollitt delves into how encounters between artistic and scientific methodologies can help us explore the hybrid relationships between humans, nature, and technology. Moving between quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and alternative economic structures, this wide-reaching conversation explores art as a form of research, and the importance of building robust art ecosystems that support such thinking. 

Hannah Scott: Tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you’re thinking about now.

Lucy Sollitt: So, I originally trained in continental philosophy,  I have an MPhil in this. My thesis took a Bejaminian inspired object-based approach to illustrating paradigm shift across western history. Inspired by Deleuzean notions of the fold and assemblages, I explored the notion of the garden through time and possibilities for paradigm shift towards more sustainable relationships with/in nature. I explored ontopoetic experience as a methodology for restoring a direct relationship with/in nature and found this in Insideout: jardí del cambalache (2001) at the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona. This garden of exchange was created by Colombian artist Federico Guzmán, and I collaborated with Frederico as part of my thesis. 

I’ve always been attracted to visual art as a form of felt knowledge. I think through art, as it were. Though it’s not without its problems, art is an open space in the world, and there aren’t many open spaces in which to think and experiment.. 

I’ve worked across art and ecology in the past, and have always been attracted to interdisciplinary practices and art that takes place outside of the white cube. This led me to explore emerging technologies and how artists are critiquing and creating with them. I’ve worked in that field in a lot of different capacities — in a funding capacity at Arts Council England, in policy development for the UK government, and I’ve also worked with artists as a mentor, curated exhibitions (e.g. States of Play: Roleplay Reality, at FACT, Liverpool) and events, and undertake analysis on this area (e.g. Intersections, Future Art Ecosystems 2: ArtxMetaverse) and in consultancy capacities as well. 

In the last few years, I’ve also been looking at the economics of the art world and the art market (e.g. Future of the Art Market report), because I’ve been trying to figure out what models exist for operating within? It’s an open question that I’m trying to figure out both in terms of my own practice, but also more broadly as we face societal challenges. Over the last few years I’ve looked a lot at the potential role decentralized technologies can play in this. In some ways I remain skeptical of blockchain but I am also open to exploring the possibilities for reimagining institutional models and fostering collectivity (e.g. through series I’ve curated such as Tokenomics: A New Economy of Art). I’m currently advising Serpentine Galleries and RadicalxChange on their Partial Common Ownership model for art and have begun exploring whether web3 technologies have a role to play ecological restoration and enacting more-than-human rights. 

I’m looping back into ecological thinking I explored in my Mphil and on when working on the RSA’s Art and Ecology programme. There’s an idea that is beginning to shape my thinking which I recently wrote an essay about called “The Synthetic Sacred,” which was published as a NERO edition in January of this year. Now I see my research as focusing on 3 intersecting areas: emerging technologies; experimental ecologies; and ecological consciousness.

I think artists have become really interested in recent years in countering categorization. Developments in science, and discoveries like the fact that our microbiome is full of other organisms that we are completely dependent on — those kinds of findings are creating more and more hybridity, and challenging and expanding what we think of as intelligence.

HS: I think something that really struck me when reading your writing is that where we tend to see pretty strict binaries between the technological realms, the human realms and the natural world, your writing catalogs the bleeding over and the messy lines between what constitutes the human as separate from nature and technology. Can you talk a little bit more about what hybridity means to you?

LS: This blurring of human, non-human, more-than-human, or however you put it, has been something that in recent years artists have been looking at more and more, and it’s really interesting to think about what’s feeding into that. It runs counter to the Enlightenment idea of humans somehow being separate from nature and above nature in a hierarchy (this way of thinking goes back to ancient Greece and Christianity). I think artists have become really interested in recent years in countering such categorization. Developments in science, and discoveries like the fact that our microbiome is full of other organisms that we are completely dependent on — those kinds of findings are creating more and more hybridity, and challenging and expanding what we think of as intelligence. Advanced technologies – from neural interface networks, to artificial intelligence and soft robotics complicate this further. 

In the Synthetic Sacred, I’m asking what becomes of life when nature is increasingly synthetic. I’ve been looking at this in the context of biotechnology and bio-digital convergence. Anicka Yi is one of the artists whose work has really helped inspire my thinking here.The developments in biotech open up many urgent philosophical and practical questions. What is it to manufacture tissue without a body, without context, without an ecology that it sits within? What is the ontological status of such hybridity? Is 3D printed tissue, or a drone-controlled dragonfly able to perform its sacred role in the universe? And who or what controls life, natural and synthetic, when nature is bionic?

There’s the resurgence and increasing recognition of ancient and indigenous cosmologies and worldviews, which always understood hybridity and accounted for it from a place of deep interconnectedness between all life. How can these cosmologies help us navigate hybridity? I’m interested in how indigenous concepts, for example the Haudenosaunee concept of ‘Good Mind’ can inform developments in biotech so that emerging innovations are generative rather than extractive for life. This last question is something I’ve been discussing with Dr. Keith Williams, co-author of “Indigenous Perspectives on the Biodigital Convergence” in recent months as part of developing a programme delving deeper into the Synthetic Sacred. 

HS: I know you’ve done a lot of philosophical work around quantum physics, and I would love to hear more about your experience in combining these two types of very different methods of research, one being physics and one being art. What did it look like to mediate between the two?

LS: The work I did on quantum with the Goethe Institute revolved around an initiative, Studio Quantum. As part of that, they asked me to map out the key questions, opportunities and implications emerging around the “third quantum revolution”, and propose how the Goethe Institut can devise a cultural programme in response. There was the initial atomic physics phase of quantum research, which obviously led to the atomic bomb. The second revolution entailed major advances in lasers, GPS and the transistors used in mobile phones and laptops. And now we’re entering the third quantum revolution, in which the scale of quantum systems is likely to increase dramatically enabled by quantum computing. 

I asked artist Libby Heaney, who I’ve known for a number of years previously, to kind of get my head around how quantum computing works. I spoke to various different experts in the field and started to try and piece together some of the really complex questions that are emerging in this space. Because the technologies are still really weaponized, whether in a literal militaristic way or within geopolitics of competition and security, there is this geopolitical race to be the one that’s got the most powerful technology. So some of my research was trying to understand that, but also understand the positive things, because quantum technology can be really useful with things like creating vastly more efficient batteries and solar panels, helping reduce the need for using fertilizer in agriculture and so on. With any technology, there’s the potential for really good things to happen with it, and the potential for really quite terrifying things to happen with it. I wrote up some of the findings here.

While I was doing the research, I was really influenced by Karen Barad’s thinking. The way that Barad talks about the idea of quantum thinking goes into the physics to break open its radical potential. This thinking allowed me to ask questions about the implications of quantum physics, and what those mean for our relationships with each other, for the hybridity we were just talking about. I guess it’s more epistemological, but this thinking is influencing quite a lot of artists. There still aren’t many artists working directly with quantum technologies, but the Studio Quantum residency initiative should help with this and came out of my work for the Goethe Institut. The reason that there aren’t many artists working in this field is not just the complexity of it, but because it’s so difficult to get access to the computers  — IBM’s Quantum Platform lets you work with a few qubits, but it’s still kind of limited. It was quite challenging to find artists who were working directly with the technology, but there are artists who are reflecting on the implications of quantum physics. Take for example Black Quantum Futurism, who think about the materiality of time and the collapse of the past, present, and future. 

With Studio Quantum, I curated a three-part talk series on quantum thinking in Beijing, San Francisco, and London. In the Beijing event, Quantum Nature Holism and the Space Between, we looked at the links between pioneering work in quantum fractals by Christiane Morais Smith and Taoist philosophy. Christiane works with quantum fractals and her research opens back up the possibility for consciousness to be quantum. I find that super interesting and exciting. Chinese curator and practicing Taoist, Fu Xiaodong, found a strong relationship between what Taosim and quantum physics tell us about the world. Artist Liu Yue helped us think through this in relation to his sculptures, and how they occupy a really tenuous relationship between order and disorder. It seems that the sensitivity and tenuousness that makes it easy for something to collapse is actually vital to giving things order. When quantum states things teeter between the brink of being and non-being, this creates space for potential. To me it seems that quantum is a form of natural intelligence that results in this exquisitely sensitive web of natural order to emerge, while allowing for flexibility and disorder at the same time. 

HS: There is another point you raised that really caught me, which was about the geopolitical implications of quantum in particular, and what it means for artists who work in this space. You set up two modes of working as an artist in emerging technologies or fields of knowledge; there’s the direct proximity to a new technology, and there’s the more removed philosophical consideration of something like quantum physics. A lot of artists in our Creative R&D Lab, for example, grapple with this prompt for the lab, which is to think about an emerging technology and create an experience with it that enables cultural exchange. But typically the tools that one might use are developed by corporations that people might not always feel align with the goals of the project. This is a perennial problem in art and science, or art and technology collaborations, and I’m wondering how you think that artists can sort of walk the line and do something impactful without affirming or accelerating a technology that they might not otherwise feel aligned with?

LS: It’s a question that media artists have been grappling with for a really long time. I think there can be a real power to working within a technology, within the code, within the media, and making an intervention from the inside and potentially disrupting it or revealing something that wasn’t obvious. If it’s done well, you’re not reinforcing the corporate agenda necessarily. Maybe one way of thinking about it is in terms of some recent conversations around generative AI. I was talking to Anna Ridler, who’s an artist who has been working with AI for quite a while. She was saying how the new tools, like prompt-based image generation, have made AI less interesting for her. The technology is hidden and inaccessible behind the interface, and requires huge numbers of GPUs to run. There is a politics there, then, to refuse that. On the one hand, these new tools make working with AI more accessible to a much wider range of artists and can really assist the production process — it’s opening up other avenues of creativity for artists. But on the other hand, the tools only give you access to the surface, they don’t give access to what’s  beneath. You’ve also got the fact that they’re built on appropriating other people’s creative work, a lot of implicit bias is hard wired in the datasets they are trained on, and then there is the huge energy consumption entailed with running these systems. It’s this fine balancing act, and it’s really about thinking honestly and carefully about what you’re doing.

HS:  Moving from networks of science and technology, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the infrastructures that support art and artists, and the labor and economic side of this practice. I think a lot of artists are walking this thin line between art and product, art and research, art and experience. At C/Change, we have an “R&D Lab” where artists are building prototypes. Especially with media arts, sometimes there is a fine line between product and art. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your thinking around arts economies.

LS: I find the product versus art thing so interesting. On the one hand, the idea of a product may be something that’s very reproducible potentially at a relatively low and accessible price point. If an artwork is made available as a product more people can experience it and it brushes up against the scarcity model for the art market which is nice. How often is that crossover successful? How can a mass product  satisfy the kind of considerations that artists will have about what makes a good artwork, for example, the way in which something is made, or the conditions it needs to be experienced within? What’s the contextual framing? What does it mean for an artwork to be sold on Amazon? I mean, people have tried that, but it’s generally not where you are going to go for quality contemporary art.

I’ve been really interested in practices like Bernadette Corporation, dis, K Hole, and metahaven, and others that have played with this very slippery line between art and retail or consumption, and try to push it a little bit at the edges. The economics of art are unequal and in today’s financialized market, access to capital can be a prerequisite for success. There’s a lot of polarization — the majority of value in the art market is located at the top: the big names, big brands, and big galleries. If you’re not at the top and you want to grow, if you want to make money, where do you go? Suzanne Treister had her tarot cards, and I remember talking to her about them a few years ago. Her tarot cards are part of the Hexen 2.0 project, which you see referenced a lot at the moment. These cards are about the infrastructure, power dynamics, and ideologies underpinning networked technologies. One of the things that I love about this is that these tarot cards were purchasable for around £15, people are playing with them around the world.  

I have been really interested when artists have formulated their work in these kinds of ways, in these kinds of mediums that can circulate a lot more freely, and circulate beyond the space of a gallery. Yes, you can have Suzy’s paintings in the gallery, but you could also be playing with the cards. I do think that things like NFTs can help with that, though there’s a long way to go for that to evolve in relation to quality of art. But there is some good work out there. I think it’s also been an enabler for exploring different models, different economic models for making, experiencing, and selling work. I think we’re only at the beginning of that stage. People talk about us moving beyond speculation in that field to utility and really thinking about the practical implications. What are the possibilities if you think about blockchain as a utility? I’m interested in how art can circulate, be funded and owned differently within alternative economies, and how decentralized technologies can be a part of that.

It seems that the sensitivity and tenuousness that makes it easy for something to collapse is actually vital to giving things order. When quantum states things teeter between the brink of being and non-being, this creates space for potential. To me it seems that quantum is a form of natural intelligence that results in this exquisitely sensitive web of natural order to emerge, while allowing for flexibility and disorder at the same time.

HS: I think you highlighted another really crucial factor in determining that transformation, which is the context in which you experience something, whether it’s art or product. In a traditional exhibition space, there is so much work, thought, and time that goes into figuring out how to place something as seemingly simple as a screen. With a product, it doesn’t matter where it is, it’s atemporal, it’s agnostic to geography, et cetera. I think with something like NFTs, there is so much potential for expanding and enriching the context in which digital art exists, and how we experience it, encounter it, talk about it. 

LS: There’s a really great history with Net Art and things that do exist purely on the screen. That’s a good thing, but also, the area that I particularly enjoy is the bleed between the digital and the physical. All digital is ultimately physical anyway, right? How do those two realms, those two worlds start to blur more? I think there’s a long way to go with that as well, but it’s being explored increasingly in a worldbuilding context. This also goes back to some of things I’m thinking about in the Synthetic Sacred — critically considering what we are making and putting out into the world as part of an ecology. Thinking about the materials and processes that are involved in the creation of whatever it is that’s being made, whether it’s an experience or a physical object. 

HS: I imagine that such a reconsideration of art’s ecological footprint carries a real reckoning with what art is. Maybe our Romantic ideals for art would have us believe that art’s footprint is irrelevant, because it’s elevated to this higher plane. I’m not sure that we can afford to think that way anymore. I’m curious if you think that ecological consciousness necessitates this broader reconsideration of what art is and what its value is?

LS: Yes, I think there has to be a reconsideration of what we’re putting out there. For example, take an artwork that’s, say, made out of fungus. It’s going to degrade in a relatively short period of time. You can own it, but only temporarily — what does that mean for its economics? I do think there are interesting questions about ownership there: what is it that you’re buying? How do you relate to that object? Does it have to be that if you buy an artwork, it’s solid and not ephemeral? This has been something that’s been a challenge with born-digital art and with performance art. So in some ways, it’s nothing new. But we might need to think about ephemerality in broader terms. I was reading an article the other day that questioned whether art’s focus on research in recent years is enough in the context of climate change. It asked whether praxis is needed too. What would art be in that case, if it’s practical, if it’s taking action? Art that’s focused on finding solutions, for example, can easily slip into the space of design — does that matter? There are artists who have a strong praxis in their work already. But I thought that this was a really important point about our collective responsibility. Maybe we need to do some more outside-the-box thinking about what form an artwork takes, and also be inspired by the artists that have already been experimenting with this over decades. As we face biodiversity collapse, I wonder if art can play a role not just in a way that’s transforming consciousness, which I think it’s great at doing, but also is there an argument for more practical intervention and solutions?

HS: I’m fascinated by these transformations of art, and I think a lot about this increasing trend of art that takes direct action in the world and aims to actively change or produce something. I wonder what the function of institutions in that case are, and how our existing infrastructures would have to change to support such work.

LS: There’s a lot of reflecting institutions need to do in relation to networked culture, in relation to who they are relevant for and what roles they can play in this era of permacrisis. I think what we need generally in society is more spaces and contexts (technologically enabled or otherwise) that can shelter  free thinking, gathering and experimentation with new models of organization, of collectivity and of making that are resilient enough to adapt to what’s coming, especially with the political, societal and economic ramifications of the ecological crisis. If they can really decolonize themselves and think beyond just reform, then institutions can be part of this.

The final event in the Think Quantum series, Tuning into the Quantum: A Vibrational Exchange Between Karen Barad and Black Quantum Futurism, takes place at Gray Area in San Francisco on November 22, 2023.