ASKXXI emerged as a collaborative, bilingual pilot program designed to dissolve disciplinary silos and national borders by cultivating an ecology of practices—a living network of mutual learning among Chilean and US-based artists, scientists, and technologists committed to addressing climate, biodiversity, and sustainability challenges through immersive, place-based research and creation across terrestrial and marine environments, digital and analog formats, and poetic and empirical methods, a project activated through a US Embassy public diplomacy grant and grounded in a consortium of institutions including CIBAS-UCSC and Friday Harbor Labs; rather than transmitting static content, ASKXXI privileged knowledge as a cartographic process, where fellows mapped biocultural interdependencies via 40+ site-specific workshops spanning gene splicing, data visualisation, virtual reality, and textile sculpture, culminating in Retícula, a cross-media exhibition and Chile’s first Art + Science Biennial, whose outputs not only reflected but enacted speculative, integrative thinking and new epistemic values—in one emblematic case, marine scientist-artist Fernanda Oyarzún co-led coastal residencies where participants simultaneously conducted ecological sampling and created environmental installations from organic detritus, fostering aesthetic inquiry interwoven with empirical insight; this lateral, transhemispheric structure allowed each participant to be both teacher and learner, eroding hierarchies and allowing subjectivities to coalesce around shared ecological urgencies, even as logistical, institutional, and affective challenges underscored the fragility of such ambitious frameworks—nonetheless, the pilot seeded an enduring relational infrastructure now stretching from Pacific Rim laboratories to Andean biocultural corridors, integrating partners like SECOS, Schmidt Ocean, Fundación Renihue, and the Festival Reino Fungi, forming a distributed and resilient scaffold for future collaborative futures in art-science diplomacy and ecosystemic thought.
Tremblay, G.G., Brice, J., Oyarzún, F.X., Pohl, N. & Gallardo, B. (2022). ASKXXI: Ecologies of Interdisciplinary Research and Practice in Art + Science and Technology. a2ru Ground Works. https://doi.org/10.48807/2022.0.0068
