Ifu's claim to interdisciplinarity will also embrace the debate about current artistic practice. The transgression of genres and media boundaries, constitutive for many art forms today interrelates - if in quite complex ways - to ongoing technical and economic processes of globalisation. Artistic strategies are established that transcend specific art forms, thus escaping one-dimensional approaches to visualization and postulating art's intervention in social and political ideas as well as in our spheres of life. In the beginning of the new millenium, digital technology and culture has created a new platform for the encounter between art and science.

Art and science both offer specific perceptions of world or realities, framing certain aspects in order to analyse them, and thus, in a certain sense, practice a form of artistic and scientific world construction. Way before the Human Genom Project scientists have left the field of discovery and entered the field of creation. Ifu's concept of interrelating art projects with the scientific approaches of the six project areas body, city, information, migration, water, work provides a very important link between the great deal of freedom they can allow themselves and their social grounding.

Ifu's attempt to encourage interaction and a certainly controversial dialogue between art and science proceeds from two basic assumptions:

• the reception of complex, provocative, surprising, etc artistic works bears a potential of gaining insights and thus a potential of shaping worlds.
• the art projects may open up a space of doubt, they may perform a spacing of knowledge, refer to the gaps in the historical and media construction of thorough knowledge.

Artistic interventions in general

Prominent women artists with different cultural and artistic backgrounds (film, video, performance, dance, fine arts, net.art) have contributed with their specific cultural and artistic experience to this space. They have shared their wealth of experience in workshops and reformulated and further developed it in a joint project with the students. Shu Lea Cheang and Ursula Biemann, for instance, offered a workshop dealing with new ways of establishing borders in the age of so called globalisation. Their approach has made use of internet and video technique.

Other artists have presented their work in a plenary lecture and discussion, such as Aglaia Konrad in the project area city.

Finally the artists Gülsün Karamustafa and Mila Zoufall were even present during the whole period of three months: they have included and monitored current processes within the project areas and the students' experiences in Germany coming from about 115 countries. The results are video sequences and a series of photos and texts or a workshop of "busy doing nothing" in actual facts.

Besides the German television station NDR has supported the production and public postproduction of the film essay "Trading Images", with contributions from Casey Chan, Lynn Hershmann Leeson, Suma Josson, Wanjiru Kinyanjui and Brigitte Krause.

Participating artists in project area water