16th November – 1st December 2023

Northumbria University Gallery North, Experimental Studio and City Campus spaces

Institutional Fieldworking: CNoS @10 was a three-week series of exhibitions and events celebrating the tenth anniversary of Northumbria University’s Cultural Negotiation of Science Research Group (CNoS).
CNoS was inaugurated at the 2013 British Science Festival when three founder members developed the exhibition and networking event, Extraordinary Renditions, for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. The event set out to explore the compelling questions thrown up when artists negotiate scientific practices; questions that require artists to perform ‘extraordinary renditions’ across the ethical and political spaces where personal vulnerability and risk-taking is impossible to avoid.

CNoS has grown over the last ten years to bring together artists, academics and research students who engage with expert cultures across a broad spectrum of science and technology, including bio-medical, fundamental and environmental sciences. The ‘negotiations’ consider the creative, critical and ethical dimensions of working in and with the scientific realm, as a distinct contemporary art practice.

The Institutional Fieldworking programme shared and tested our commitment to supporting innovative, practice-based methods to negotiate and re-vision the relationships between scientific and artistic research in ways that both unsettle and connect. The programme proposed our institution of Northumbria University as the ‘field’ in which we perform and make manifest examples of critical cross disciplinary research and practice via six ‘strands’ of activity that embody the authenticity of what it is to work together.