Together, a Beautiful and Sustainable Future Begins Today

Abstract

A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus design movement is being reclaimed and reframed as an experimental lab of our collective future on a shared planet. The New European Bauhaus (NEB) initiative calls on all of us to imagine and build together a beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive world. Now an official partner of NEB, Leonardo/ISAST celebrates this creative, interdisciplinary initiative as a global movement to connect the European Green Deal and planetary climate adaptation to living spaces and lived experiences beyond geopolitical borders and disciplinary boundaries. The NEB both reflects and reinforces Leonardo’s commitment to foster positive transformation at the nexus of art, science, and technology in pursuit of a more vibrant, just, and regenerative world. As articulated by the European Union, the NEB recognizes three inseparable values: Sustainability: from climate goals, to circularity, zero pollution, and biodiversity; in harmony with nature, the environment, the planetBeauty: aesthetic quality of experience and style, inspired by art and culture, enriching beyond functionalityInclusion: from valuing diversity, to securing accessibility and affordability; encouraging a dialogue across cultures, disciplines, genders, and agesThese values correspond to Leonardo/ISAST’s priorities for a world that is more vibrant (beautiful), just (inclusive), and regenerative (sustainable). Leonardo’s vision is to activate creativity that pushes the boundaries of today and unleashes the possibilities of tomorrow. This vision guides our leadership and participation in festivals, fellowships, residencies, scholarship, and the pages of this issue of Leonardo.With this triad of vibrant-beautiful, just-inclusive, and regenerative-sustainable values in mind, a small group met amidst the Covid 19 pandemic (June 2021) to identify key contributions that SciArt practitioners could make to the NEB. Believing that the strong participation of artists and scientists, along with colleagues from design and engineering, is vital for NEB to realize its vision, the group recognized valuable competencies and practices generated by art and science collaborations, including: Years of Experience: working at the interstices of knowledge, in-between cultures, trans-lingually, transdisciplinarily, outside the habitual, and especially engaging with citizens to build communities; integrating artists and creatives in scientific institutions, enterprises, and integrating the artistic into the non-artistic worlds/structures; translating, developing new languages, of exploring interstices, of defining new territories, of bridging estranged disciplines and creating improbable connectionsContent Expertise: bridging over knowledge gaps (creating culture!) through intriguing works that can exemplify scientific principles, simple phenomena, or a startling recombination of science and art. While kindling curiosity, these works create novel forms of engagement and education as a potent tool against populism, harbingers of a totally different yet more vital pedagogy of the future; developing innovative solutions and products, ranging from an impressive variety of bioart experiments to a host of surprising illustrations of intertwined scientific/artistic/societal realitiesExemplars & Examples: work carried out at the interface of ways of knowing/emotion/research/engagement/accessibility. At the crossroads of art, culture, social inclusion, science and technology, these works push the boundaries and explore new territory, always combining and recombining various disciplines/methodologies/practices. The novel ways of engaging with reality and with the public are the result of (an as yet uncharted) methodology capable of devising new means of engagement on the basis of the project itself. These projects directly tackle societal issues (e.g. Sustainable Development Goals), drawing on the engagement and knowledge of crowds. In these circumstances, the combination of science and art can become the midwife for public engagement.Reimagining and co-creating a vibrant, just, regenerative world, or in the words of New Bauhaus, a “beautiful, inclusive, sustainable future,” begins with art and science, with all of us together, here and now.