Inventive problems and speculative things: What can (an ontologised) aesthetics offer STS and PEST, (and vice versa)?
Join us in the STS Seminar Room (Universitätsstraße 7/Stiege II/6. Stock (NIG) 1010 Vienna) or online via zoom (Meeting ID: 632 5148 9007, Passcode: 789205).
Abstract
In this presentation I consider how an ontologised aesthetics might play a role in contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS) and especially Public Engagement with Science and Technology (PEST), and vice versa. Drawing on the work of Whitehead and others, an ontologised version of aesthetics is outlined and related to STS and PEST. At base, the ‘research event’ of STS and PEST is understood as a process whereby heterogeneous elements ‘aesthetically’ combine to produce a cogent actual occasion. Re-visiting three empirical examples – the artistic controversy surrounding the nanotechnology Vantablack (the ‘blackest black’), the enactment of the institutional ‘defeat’ of the London fatberg, and the use of lay metrology as a sociopolitical tool – the paper examines how technoscientific publics are ‘aesthetically rendered aesthetic’. It is suggested that an STS/PEST attuned to ‘speculative things’ in material culture (e.g. respectively, Stuart Semple’s ‘the world’s pinkest pink’, Mike Thompson and Arne Hendriks floating fatberg, and Matty Benedetto’s Vague Ruler) further opens up how aesthetics operates in the ‘research event’, not least by inventively problematising the parameters of both ‘aesthetics’ and ‘publics’.
Biography
Mike Michael is a sociologist of science and technology, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. His research interests have touched on the public understanding of science, everyday life and technoscience, biomedical innovation and culture. Recently he has worked on lay metrology, design and speculative methodology. Major publications include Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations (Sage, 2017) and The Research Event: Towards Prospective Methodologies in Sociology (Routledge, 2021).
