interdisciplinary

   Involving two or more artistic, scientific, or other academic disciplines. While exploring a concept, issue, or theme, interdisciplinary studies adopt methods and theories from different fields of study, often within an academic context. Artists have produced numerous interdisciplinary works since the early 20th century, and more so since the onset of postmodernism. Emblematic of this trend has been the breakdown of boundaries between such categories in art as painting and sculpture, between painting and theater, between drawing and cinema. Examples of interdisciplinary synthesis can be found among combine paintings, works by Fluxus artists, conceptual art, earth art, environment art, and performance art, among many others. New media is perhaps the latest such example. The visual arts have many traditional interdisciplinary connections with mathematics and the sciences, architecture, design, music, philosophy (empiricism, epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, phenomenology, semiotics, teleology, etc.), history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, psychology, technology, manufacturing, and many other fields. Concepts having interdisciplinary aspects include abstraction, analogy, cartography, chronology, civilization, culture, elegance, entropy, ergonomics, feminism, horology, kinesthetic, knowledge, measurement, metallurgy, metamorphosis, mind, model, mystery, ophthalmology, optics, order, pattern, periodicity, photography, simplicity, space-time, structure, transformation, typology, and unity. Also see advertising, art careers, art therapy, Bloom's Taxonomy, bone structure, dance, mass media, mixed media, multimedia, multiple intelligence theory, and multisensory.