The Center for Images in Science and Art _ UL (CISA_UL) was born inside the research project Image in Science and Art of the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. This project developed a diverse and enlarged range of activities, such as conferences, seminars and workshops, and ended with "Crossings" - which included four conferences (at the Calouste Gulbenkian Fundation, on the 17th of November 2010, 15th of December 2010, 19th of January 2011 and 2nd of February 2011), an international colloquium (at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, during the 17th, 18th and 19th of February 2011) and the exhibition "corpoIMAGEM" (at the Pavilion of Knowledge - Ciência Viva, from the 12th of February to the 27th of March 2011).

On the basis of an interdisciplinary team coming mostly from Philosophy, Sciences and Fine Arts, the research project Image in Science and Art takes image as its central object, aiming at questioning its very philosophical, scientific, and artistic nature. This was done by a comparative methodology, always trying to intertwine Art and Science.

Some privileged case studies were considered in order to get a deeper understanding of the status and functions of image in Art and Science. That is the case of the Portuguese scientific illustration, of the unexplored collection of anatomical drawings of the Museum of
  Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon, and of the collection of nude drawings from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon.

CISA_UL answers the need of selecting, putting together, contrasting and comparing a set of scientific and artistic images. It proposes a preliminary database designed in order to experiment the hybrid status of the selected images as knowledge entities with aesthetic value versus artistic objects cognitively oriented. The aim is to search for their inner affinities, to investigate their differences, to grasp their furtive proximities, to analyze their divergences, to scrutinize their secret resemblances, in a word, to experiment their crossings. We hope that this kind of methodology, even if rather incomplete and fragmentary, may have significant heuristic results.

CISA_UL is a project associated to the 100 years Celebration of the University of Lisbon.


Disclaimer: CISA_UL is a non-profit project and does its best to properly credit all images and to respect copyrights. If you are the author or the copyright's holder of an image and for any reason you do not want it to be part of our repository, please contact us and we will imediately remove it from our website.