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Art/Science - an art project with rats

Golden Underground

The artist Roland Maurmair is planning to gild a tooth of a Viennese rat in the course of an artistic-scientific research project, and then release the rat to freedom with a transmitter. A control group of 5 other rats without gold teeth will also be equipped with transmitters. The aim is to investigate if and how the social behavior of the rat changes in comparison with the control group. The knowledge gained in this way should, at best, contribute to putting the rat population, which is usually not present in our realm of perception and whose life takes place unobserved in the subsoil, into the limelight in order to provoke a more differentiated picture of the ill-reputed rat.

This transdisciplinary experiment is based on the question of whether a scientific field research with an artistic approach can yield insights into human social processes.