ARA Podcast - Bones and Dinosaurs: Art/Science collaborations

Arts Research Africa Dialogues

In this ARA dialogue I speak to three Wits academics who have creatively engaged, in both their research and teaching, with the interface between Scientific and Artistic research. My guests are Dr Justine Wintjes and Joni Brenner who were both members of the History of Art department in the Wits School of Arts at the time of this collaborative project, and Prof Jonah Choinere, from the Wits Evolutionary Sciences Institute.
Although we explore the routes, professional and personal, that led the three to collaborate across the Arts-Sciences divide, the focus of our discussion is the art-science pilot project which they initiated with postgraduate students in History of Art and Paleontology in 2016 and 2018.
In this lively and wide-ranging discussion we cover the following issues:
The different ways in which Joni, Justine, and Jonah approached the collaboration, and the factors in their backgrounds that led them to collaborate;
How the teaching project developed out of the Life of Bone exhibition curated by Joni Brenner with Elizabeth Burroughs, and Karel Nel in 2011 at the Wits Origins Centre Gallery (and published by Wits University Press in 2011);
The similarities and differences between artistic and scientific practice;
The value of drawing as a mode of intense observation;
The design of the collaborative teaching project and the challenge of scope;
The different effects of the project on the arts and science students who participated.
The lessons learnt from the collaboration and the ways that the project could be taken forward into future projects.