Curating experimental entanglements

This chapter presents some theoretical argumentation for doing how researchers approached the curatorial experiment, rather than going into the details of how the experiment was done and how the transdisciplinary cocurator team worked together. It provides some theoretical arguments behind researchers’ “curatorial challenge”, explores the possibilities and effects of using transdisciplinary cocuration with artists and scientists to exhibit complex, unsettled science in its cultural-historical context. The chapter attempts to treat a public exhibition space as a kind of laboratory where researchers would bring together not only curators and academics, but also scientists, artists, and others; to create and analyze new relations of meaning. People are experimenting with changing their microbiomes long before clinical use and ethical frameworks are settled. The shift toward exhibiting science-in-process has taken place in tandem with increasing demands that museums play a greater social role, which arguably requires taking more of an explicit stance in relation to the inevitably political entanglements of science and society.