Artistic work at the Zukunftskolleg
“Reflections on Papers Past” website by Hari Sridhar
Hari Sridhar
Hari Sridhar (independent researcher and Senior Fellow/Writer in Residence at the Zukunftskolleg, invited by Gisela Kopp) and his partner Joyshree Chanam (both Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria) have launched the website “Reflections on Papers Past” and presented it during a Jour fixe in July. The project was funded by the Zukunftskolleg.
Since June 2016, Hari Sridhar has conducted 154 interviews with authors of classic papers in ecology and evolution (including scientists from the University of Konstanz). Hari Sridhar was motivated to hold these interviews because he felt that scientific papers are inadequate records of scientific activity. In his opinion, “a paper presents a cleaned-up, simplified and reorganized version of the scientific process, leaving out any detail that might distract the reader from understanding its findings and arguments”. In addition, he thinks that, although a paper is “true” when published, its truth diminishes with time, as new knowledge emerges that questions or re-interprets its claims. Furthermore, a paper can take on entirely new, unintended and possibly erroneous meaning when it is cited by other papers. In his interviews, Hari Sridhar asked lead authors of the papers about the (i) Making/Writing of the paper; (ii) Current validity of the paper’s findings; (iii) Impact of the paper on subsequent research and the author’s own career. The interviews were posted on a blog and used as teaching material in ecology and evolutionary biology courses.
Joyshree Chanam, Hari Sridhar and Gisela Kopp
“‘Reflections on Papers Past’ is now the final and incredible result of all this work: a collection of backstories and recollections about famous scientific papers in ecology, evolution, behaviour and conservation based on interviews with their authors,” says Hari Sridhar.
In addition to showcasing the full interviews, the website uses material from the interviews in the form of three exhibits:
Hari visited the Zukunftskolleg in the summer semester and presented the website on 2 July at the Jour fixe. He reflected on their motivation for this project and insights over the years: he could see a contrast between doing science and writing science, since “scientific papers 1. often leave out the study’s motivation, 2. hide the tricks of the trade, and 3. downplay the social aspect of science”.
Hari Sridhar: “Writing scientific papers is, arguably, the most important task in a scientist’s working life. Papers are the universal currency by which all scientists are compared and evaluated, and, often, the only scientific legacies they will leave behind.”
Film “SIE” by Alexander Schellow
Alexander Schellow (Senior Fellow/Artist in Residence at the Zukunftskolleg from 2010 to 2012) celebrated the premiere of his film “SIE” in March 2024. The film project was supported by the Zukunftskolleg. Alexander Schellow visited the Zukunftskolleg several times between 2010 and 2012, having been invited by the former fellows David Ganz (Literature) and Zsuzsanna Török (History and Sociology).
Alexander Schellow
About the film “SIE”
Hand-drawn frame by frame from memory, SIE (SHE) invites the viewer to encounter a person who meets their gaze without seemingly being able to look back at them. In and in-between 70,000 drawings made over the past 20 years, Alexander Schellow reconstructs 105 minutes of the face of his grandmother. Born in 1913 in Königsberg, she died in a home for people with dementia in Berlin at the age of 102. The intertwined streams of remembering and forgetting form a space of immersive sound and image. They unfold an impossible cinematic archive – a place inhabited by disparate temporalities. Yet, together with the perpetually transforming cartography of black spots and acoustic traces, questions of response-ability, care, representation and embodied history are set into movement across the projection screen.
The intersections of Alexander Schellow’s work with the fellows’ research projects were diverse and wide-ranging, from the humanities to the natural sciences. For example, his film project “Tirana” questioned, among other things, the extent to which political-social systems could be translated into spatial representations and, in turn, how, for example, official maps coincide with the respective specific “perception maps” created in the selective observation from the position of the stranger (migrants from the northern regions, artists themselves) – topics that have far-reaching sociological and political implications.
Watch the film (with a soundtrack by Laszlo Umbreit) here: SIE (no language, 2023, 105’)