Over the last two decades there has been an increasing tendency for artists to seek partnerships with academics and vice versa. Exchange projects like artistin- residency programmes at universities have become common practice and there are many organizations that initiate and actively promote collaboration between artists and academics. To stimulate theoretical reflection on this development, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) launched in 2006 the CO-OPs programme. CO-OPs focused on the processes of knowledge production that take place when artists and academics work together on a common research question. On the one hand, it aimed at the formation of new theories within the humanities by initiating hybrid research projects and practices at the intersection of art and science. On the other, the programme encouraged the artists that were engaged in these projects to reflect upon their experience and the interrelationship between art and science. The starting point for the partnership between the artists and academics was to explore each other's concepts, frames of reference and research methods and to render them productive for everyone. The artists and academics developed a discursive and visual relationship: through dialogue, exchange and collaboration they explored a subject that interests both parties, but which would normally be investigated individually, within their own paradigm.

The CO-OPs generated new and unexpected perspectives on contemporary culture and society, notably on globalization, commercialization and mediatization. These developments have been investigated by numerous disciplines but rarely from the perspective of partnerships in which the arts and sciences operated on an equal footing but from totally different principles. The ultimate aim of the CO-OPs project was to gauge artistic and scholarly thinking and to make it mutually productive. The underlying concept was that art and science embody – each in their own way – the shared values of a common modern culture. Each certainly has its own distinct processes, theories and practices, but these are not an autonomous matter that exists in isolation from social, political and cultural developments. The research teams aimed to grasp each other's theoretical and visual input in order to contribute to the development of a thinking in which the artistic and reflective was united with the scientific and analytical.