Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to show, by means of ethnography, a production process of artistic and scientific knowledge. I examine the collaborative process of construction, through “workshops”, of one specific kind of objects: the “prototypes”. The prototypes are the physical shape taken by a mixture of different knowledges and personal paths between many different agents in the field.

Paper long abstract:

My proposal consists of an ethnography of an emerging artistic practice in today's urban societies, the practice developed around artistic and scientific production laboratories: the media-labs. These production centers exist the world over and are oriented toward artistic and scientific development, blending creativity, traditionally associated with art, with other domains from the sciences, creating a new form of socioeconomic production and technological competition. These labs are part of a complex network of individual and collective agents forming a fuzzy circuit, around which they move in a disorderly fashion, producing a series of heterogeneous links through which they experience and construct themselves as a community. They do this by using the new communications tools and physical coexistence in workshops and shared learning spaces. The kind of work developed is based on collaboration practices. The particularities of this way of working are due, above all, to the fact that the projects are planned to be carried out by a team, not just by the people who propose them. As anthropologist, I have been collaborating myself in three different workshops where my background, between other aspects, has had some impact on the developed of each prototype. I did my fieldwork with the same movements with which I collaborated on the project.

My research is then focus on emerging artistic practice, their production processes and social organization. The stress is in "workshop" as place to learn and work together, from interdisciplinarity, trying to re-think about new and old ways of producing knowledge.