Environmentally Engaged Art/Science Collaboration and Aesthetic Appreciation of the Environment

From the 1970s we can observe new art practices that combine creative artistic strategies, scientific research and interest in environmental issues. Starting with the Harrisons or Hans Haacke, artists begin to experiment with scientific data to help protecting environment, focusing on problems of soil degradation (Rahmani), water pollution (Simpson), deforestation (Steinmann), ecosystem instability (Hull) and many others that influence appearance of natural, semi-natural or artificial environments. In these restoration or environmentally engaged art projects, galleries are left behind and works are situated in the environment, so the art/science collaboration directly changes aesthetic qualities of chosen area. The role of science here is to rectify the artistic creativity to achieve environmental improvement of the site, an emphasis is given not to show the beauty of art in the environment, but to return back the lost aesthetic value of damaged natural environment. In the paper, I want to focus on new extends and problems that these art practices interpose in environmental aesthetics, especially in its cognitive branch. My aim is to show that, on one hand, both new art practices and cognitive approaches in environmental aesthetics try – though in different ways – to accent natural beauty with a help of scientific knowledge, but, on the other hand, this type of art disproves cognitivist assumptions that sharpen the distinction between aesthetic appreciation of art and nature (f.e. Carlson's natural environmental model or Parsons's scientific cognitivism). I want to argue that new art/science projects with its focus on conceptual forms of art, improvement of damaged environment, cooperation with scientists and favoring nature over artwork – minimizes differences between artistic and scientific, artificial and natural. This presupposes the revision of separation of the environment's aesthetic valuation from other types of aesthetic experience. In this point of view, new artistic practices with their social, cultural and ecological overlap correspond better with other approaches in environmental aesthetics, for example with Berleant's broader concept of aesthetic appreciation of environment that blurs dualism between nature and human, or subject and object.