#1343: Research for Humans: Social Practice Art as Scholarly Communication

Research for Humans is an interactive multimodal installation using social practice art to address a global epistemic crisis. Trust in reality wavers as traditional institutions lose their footing, while technology accelerates the need for reinvention. What is truth, how do we know it, and how might we design ways forward? Inspired by centuries of automata, the work reflects our enduring fascination with what it means to be alive and the uneasy balance between human vitality and machine logic. Visitors approach a roving cart overseen by an animatronic peddler — part mystic, part minstrel — and converse by talking or typing. Responses drawn from published research are printed in real-time on cards: one to keep, one added to a growing repository. Social practice art transforms research into communal inquiry. Here, academic knowledge becomes something felt, embodied, and carried home — a provocation toward braver thinking and social action.