22 February 2017: Seminar on Art, Science & Agency

Andrew Pickering’s early work was in theoretical particle physics, but in the late 1970s he joined the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh and moved into science and technology studies—STS. He taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before returning to England in 2007 and joining the University of Exeter, where he is now emeritus professor of sociology and philosophy.

His books include Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science and, most recently, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. His work in STS explores a shift from thinking of science as a body of representations of nature to thinking of it as emerging in action, agency and performance in a lively material world.

This talk sketches out the overall form of the analysis and extends it to the arts—especially artworks that somehow thematise questions of agency, rather than obscuring them, as modern science does—and to experimentality as a zone of intersection of art, science and engineering.