Drawing Processes of Life is the product of biologists, philosophers, and artists working together to formulate new ways of representing our new approach to life. It is a mutualistic symbiosis, where identities are transformed, information and nutritive substances shared, and where new organisms emerge.
Originating from an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project, it derives from Gemma Andersons’ work on the methodological and epistemological value of drawing as a technique in biological research and from her collaborative work on visualising living – biological – processes through artistic processes. It also draws on John Dupré’s recent work on biology as process, and the need to develop representations of biological systems that more adequately capture their processual nature. Hence the book has intertwined aims: to show how better to represent biological process through drawing and to demonstrate the scientific value of drawing as a method.
The book presents this work and locates it in a broader historical and contemporary perspective on the relations between art and science. The project outcomes are interwoven with the work of leading scholars in the field. Many of these contributions also stress the problems presented by the processual nature of biological phenomena, a central focus of Anderson and Dupré’s own work.
Contributors include Chiara Ambrosio, Heather Barnett, Alessio Corti, Katharina Lee Chichester, Johannes Jaeger, Wahida Khandker, Jonathan Phillips, Berta Verd, James Wakefield and Janina Wellmann. Foreword from Scott F. Gilbert, and Afterword from Sarah Gilbert and Scott F. Gilbert.
The perspectives presented here constitute a powerfully integrated and vital set of themes of interest to artists, scientists, philosophers, students and post-doctoral researchers.
The edited collection Drawing Processes of Life is the product of artists, biologists and philosophers working together to formulate new ways of representing a new approach to life. It shows how better to represent biological process through drawing and to demonstrate the scientific value of drawing as a method. 78 b/w and 36 colour illustrations. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.
Gemma Anderson is a research fellow at the University of Exeter in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology and the Living Systems Institute, and a lecturer in drawing at Falmouth University.
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John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Egenis centre for the study of life sciences, University of Exeter, UK.
