NanoScopic Culture is an exhibition in a book format. It includes specially commissioned work by seven artists who have all spent time over the last two years at The National Institute for Medical Research in North London (NIMR). The term NanoScopic comes from the apparently opposing ideas of Nano, a suggestion of something which is believed to exist, but is outside of our empirical frame of reference and Scopic suggesting something which is visible. NanoScopic Culture proposes that the idea of trying to articulate abstract ideas or make the invisible visible can be applied to certain contemporary art practice as it much as to contemporary scientific research.

NanoScopic Culture is a curated art book, not a catalogue of past art and science projects or an illustrated compendium to the latest scientific achievements. The book offers a different perspective from which to view the interface between art and science. It moves away from focussing on illustrating contentious topics within the biosciences and creates a space for contemporary art to exist outside of an autonomous art context.

 

For this project I speculated on ten hypothetical social experiments using the conventions of the laboratory write up.

In doing this, I draw on the tension between the natural and social sciences (Roy Bhaskar, in his early philosophy of science, talked about how social science can never take place under laboratory conditions and is it's scientificity is therefore of a different order from the natural sciences).