Past Programmes

Experimentality was the 2009-10 Annual Research Programme of the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was a year-long collaborative exploration of ideas and practices of experimentation in science and technology, the arts, commerce, politics, popular culture, everyday life, and the natural world. Through a series of interdisciplinary workshops, arts events and a conference bringing together leading practitioners, academics and members of the wider public, it used the notion of the experiment to explore vital questions about the relationship between knowledge and power, freedom and control in the modern world.

Programme Director, Bronislaw Szerszynski, says: "the idea of the experiment carries many of modernity’s greatest hopes - and greatest fears.  We need a concerted attempt to understand the nature of experimentation, in order to explore how we might use it to shape the future in more benign and inclusive ways".

The programme launched with its first workshop, The Experimental Condition, on 15 and 16 October.  For further details, visit the programme’s website http://www.lancs.ac.uk/experimentality