Dalila Honorato, Ph.D, is a facilitator of safe spaces for hosting the interaction of ideas around liminal issues in the frame of Art&Sci. Her research focus is on embodiment, monstrosity, the uncanny and the acrobatic balance between phobia and paraphilia. She is Assistant Professor in Media Aesthetics and Semiotics at the Ionian University, Greece, guest faculty at Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, collaborator at the Center of Philosophy of Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal and member of the Steering Committee of the conference Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science.
What is Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence? What are the most important features?
Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in short TTT is a conference within the framework of Art & Science with a special focus on the nature of the forbidden, the aesthetics of liminality and the emergence of creative transformation. As a title, TTT was launched two years ago, co-ordinated in parallel with the program of the Audiovisual Arts Festival 2016, an event organized every year by the Faculty of Music and Audiovisual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. As a project, TTT involves a call for papers and artwork which intends to provide a safe space for the meeting of scientists, artists and theoreticians working in the field of art, science and technology. In resume TTT is a project which started as a need to incentive discussion within ethic rigor but free of misconceptions of what may be considered politically correct or the latest utilitarian trend in academic fashion.
What is the aim of this project? How does it relate internationally?
The project took shape during the fall of 2015, in a time when Greece and the European Union were going through a major political and economic collapse of ideas and practices, which had as a result the deterioration of research and art practice conditions in public academic institutions. Unfortunately this is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon. The fall of 2015 was also the time when the subject of genetic engineering, through the spread of CRISPR-Cas9 in mainstream news, became a major social topic accompanied by increasing demands to provide answers concerning the application of biotechnology and the efforts being made to improve public health. While reality keeps strangely blending science fiction with hypothetical dystopian plots, TTT aims to contribute to the development of new safe spaces for the free discussion of ideas and for the exchange of information between academics, artists and citizens in general. As a concept the conference addresses the community at large also by including in its steering committee members of the international art world, therefore I am glad that TTT, now in its third year, is going to be hosted in Mexico in 11-13 November 2018 and we hope that in the future it will be welcomed in other venues.
What type of relationship is being developed between art and science?
Is it even possible to have one without the other? Yes one could have the impression that the artist seems more permeable to the influence of science than the scientist to the influence of art. This is a very finite vision of both art and science. Art market and big science apart what remains is the essence of play: the continuum of the research where one answer opens the door to new hypothesis and the consensual interest in the development and sharing of new media. Between art and science, in a time of dramatic environmental changes, a new type of narrative, requiring a greater level of collaborative and assistive relationships, brings both fields closer. To engage in this wider eco-narrative one has to resist staying boxed-in and willfully connect in the interdisciplinary arena without apprehensions, able of queering different fields of knowledge and experiences, recognizing their agency. Conferences such as TTT offer this opportunity to establish alternative structures and relations.
Info: Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence
