In 2024, the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg – Forum for Contemporary Art / Casino Display — welcomed its first artist-in-residence to engage with members of the scientific community. If this type of collaboration, where artists and scientists work together to tackle complex societal issues, is a first for the university, it has become more common in recent years. This can be seen in the growing number of funding instruments, programs, and public/private partnerships within academia.

Collaborations, interactions, and exchanges between artists and scientists yield numerous benefits, such as diversifying viewpoints, challenging established protocols, increasing the accessibility of scientific knowledge for lay audiences, fostering innovation, to name just a few. Yet, they also raise important questions. In light of ongoing spending cuts in the arts and humanities, how can institutions ensure that artists in residence are treated as equal partners in these collaborations? Conversely, how can scientists and/or engineers gain from interactions with artists without their findings and techniques being used for representations and visualizations alone? Furthermore, what is the status of the resulting works: when projects are co-created, under what conditions can they be considered art, science, or both at once?

These are some of the questions that the second TASTE talk aims to address through the lens of the notion of the body (lived, non-/human, posthuman, geometrical, etc.). In short presentations, invited speakers will explore how their interdisciplinary practices shape and mediate our understanding and perception of bodies, blurring the lines between art, science, and technology.