Sense Unknown – Art & Science

As part of MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain's "Art & Science" season, in partnership with the Université de Montpellier and the CNRS, "Sense Unknown" brings together nearly a hundred works and scientific artefacts by some thirty artists from the Renaissance to the present day, offering a fluid, interdisciplinary journey across subjects, experiments, disciplines and eras, to test reality—or what we think we know of it.
The book draws on Montpellier's history, a city that has been a major centre for education and the dissemination of knowledge since the 12th century, thanks to its University of Medicine and Life Sciences. The Université de Montpellier's collections underscore the power of cross-disciplinary exchange between knowledge and artistic forms, as well as the importance of historical milestones (discoveries, concepts, and objects) that, too, can become obsolete.
Like the scientist, the artist observes, analyses, interprets, and experiments, often venturing into the unknown without any guarantee of success, embracing failure and cultivating doubt. In the research process, serendipity, chance discoveries, accidents, and the acceptance of unpredictability reveal new paths that defy our predictions. Thus, we transition from the known to the unknown.
Through interviews, essays, a recipe, and dual commentaries on each artist's works, "Sense Unknown" amplifies the voices of members of the scientific committee, the exhibition's curators, students of science and art, and artists—particularly Joey Holder, Roy Köhnke, and Morgan Courtois—as they discuss the works they created for the exhibition.
The book traces the exhibition route room by room, featuring numerous views of the exhibition and close-ups of the works. Like the exhibition, it delves into the sensitive and intuitive dimensions of the research process, as well as biohacking and practices that seek to escape institutional constraints or challenge the hegemony of Western scientism.