Some ideas arrive fully formed. Others take years of conversation, a few false starts, and the slow accumulation of proof before they feel ready to share. Art-Sci Currents is the second kind.
The podcast you’re about to listen to has been in the making in one form or another for nearly three years. It started as a question we kept asking inside MOTION Talks, The Crearte Foundation’s early community gatherings at Building 21, McGill University: what happens when you stop treating art and science as separate career tracks and start treating them as complementary ways of understanding the world? And more practically, who are the people already living that out, and what can we learn from them?
This prelude episode is our attempt to answer those questions before we hand the microphone to the people who’ve been doing it longest.
What We Mean When We Say Art-Science
It’s worth pausing on the term itself, because when many first hear “art-science,” they picture an art installation inspired by a biology textbook, or a scientist who paints on weekends. That’s not quite what we’re talking about.
Art-science, as we understand it at The Crearte Foundation, is a way of working that draws on the methods, tools and sensibilities of both art and science at the same time. It’s not about adding a creative garnish to a research project, or borrowing scientific language to make an artwork sound more serious. It’s about the genuine porousness between the two. It’s a recognition that inquiry, imagination, rigour and expression are not actually in conflict, and never have been.
What gets in the way is structure. Educational systems, funding bodies and career paths have spent decades building very clear walls between disciplines. Those walls are efficient for producing specialists. They’re not great for producing people who can move fluidly across fields, which is increasingly what many of the world’s most interesting and urgent problems require.
How This Project Came Together
The Crearte Foundation began, honestly, from a fairly personal place. Nicia’s background is in dance neuroscience, specifically, how the brain coordinates and anticipates movement. The foundation grew out of trying to find and connect others who were working in similarly boundary-crossing ways. What started as a map of dancers and scientists in conversation became something much larger: a global directory spanning more than 29 countries, a growing community of practitioners across disciplines and a real conviction that the field needed better infrastructure and shared visibility.
Art-Sci Currents is one piece of that infrastructure. Season one was a local experiment with filmed conversations in Montreal, built on the energy of a community that was just beginning to find itself. What we learned from that season is that the appetite for these stories is not local at all. People from across North and South America, Europe and Asia were finding their way into the conversation, drawn by the same feeling of finally being in a room where the combination made sense.
Season two is our attempt to meet that appetite properly with longer, deeper conversations with guests who have decades of practice behind them. Season two’s podcast format gives their ideas the space they deserve.
Who You’ll Hear From
In the pre-interview process for this season, we got to sit with each guest before we ever pressed record. That experience confirmed something we suspected but hadn’t quite been able to articulate: the people who build careers at the intersection of art and science don’t just produce interesting work. They tend to see differently. The questions they ask, the connections they make, the patience they have for complexity. They reflect a fundamentally different relationship with knowledge itself.
Art-science does not simply communicate knowledge. It creates the conditions for reorientation: changing how we think, feel, perceive, relate, and ultimately live with what we know.
That’s what we’re chasing in this season. And the conversations ahead are some of the most honest, generous and thought-provoking we’ve had.
A Note on Who This Is For
If you’re firmly planted in one discipline and wondering whether any of this applies to you — it doe! You don’t need a hyphenated title or a dual degree to engage with what art-science offers. Curiosity is the real entry point. The permission to wonder across boundaries is something anyone can give themselves, even if the systems around them haven’t always made that easy.
We hope this season gives you a few more reasons to.
Press play, and welcome to the current!
Art-Sci Currents is a podcast series from The Crearte Foundation, exploring the lives and work of practitioners at the intersection of art and science. New episodes drop throughout the season. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
