Part 1, of this issue, draws on the Art and Genetics Project (from the Otago based Art Science series). The Project for 2017 was self-selected, with the University of Otago hosting the Genetics Society of Australasia Annual Conference, together with the New Zealand Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

The aim of the annual Project is for scientists and artists to work together in  creative cooperation to move beyond the illustration of scientific research to embrace the often speculative imagery that come from the mind and hand of the artist in response to a close acquaintance with the actuality of scientific processes and ideas—or even commentary from the left field upon something that scientists take for granted, as part of their unconscious sense of normality and rationality.

As a system of visual representation, art has had a long history of recording human investigations into the world of nature and, even more broadly, into speculating, even fantasising, about what that world might look like—out there in unseen worlds or in there, in the body, beneath the surface of things.  In Part 2, we publish a long essay which contends that the way we think about both art and science is crucial to our sense of “being in the world”. The ideas of Michel Foucault and others are reworked, on the many “histories” of science, as well as the Arts.