One of the common artistic strategies that appears to dominate the current  batch of arts /science exhibitions is the practice of the artist finding or making an artefact of science; either in the laboratory, from a real or  online scientific  archive, or in the collection of a science museum, and then re-locating it to an art exhibition. Simply stated, moving the artefact to an art space or art museum excises it from its original context and locates it within the discourse of art not the discourse of science.

Using the parallels offered by debates  around ethnographic museum practices of collection and interpretation, the artist can be seen simply as a collector acquiring artefacts from ‘other’ sites or discourses with different languages, cultures and contexts. The artefact in this process is then interpreted by its location in a privileged  art space as being within the discourse of art removed of its original context. These colonial type practices  are  increasingly unacceptable but not extinguished  within the ethnographic museum arena .

In order to move past this block the underlying premise of this practice, being one of inclusion/exclusion with each context  seen as a separate or isolated, needs to be broken down