Sensing machines mapping the Arctic, hormone-altering vapour, sweating bacteria, songs from the swamps…. This year’s Open Fields Conference was packed with mind-blowing discoveries
Category Archive: bioart
In this episode, Maja talks about her research into human/dog/wolf co-evolution; the possibility to create a hybrid of the human and the dog species; her experiments with biologically manipulating her own body so that she could breast feed a puppy; taboos around the female body and more
In this episode, the conversation goes from “Wouldn’t it be fun to have extra sexual organs?” to “Why wouldn’t a loving and cute robot be better at ruling over the lives of citizens than human high-ranking officials?”
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The book outlines new approaches to understand scientific practice in general and art-science in particular, showcasing how art can provide a unique perspective on the meaning and potential of collaboration
PL’AI is a process lasting several months in which plants grown from seed and an AI-robot whose perceptual world is limited to them, interact with each other
15 years of investigation by the Center for PostNatural History. Featuring essays and photography by founder Rich Pell, and a catalog of PostNatural organisms
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How do artists, designers and activists use performance, biohacking, robotics, synthetic biology, photography or gaming to probe and challenge the capitalistic abuses of plants, soils and the communities that take care of them?
Queer theory, co-dependency, desire, hierarchies, possessiveness, vulnerability or feminism… Everything you wanted to know about the close connection between mother and son
In her ongoing show in Milan, Anicka Yi highlights how our associations with smell, along with sight, breed prejudices and anxieties
The Antilibrary looks closely at artists’ books in order to identify atypical trends and future attitudes. Its material of choice tends to be very speculative, decidedly science-inspired, slightly bizarre and never without a touch of humour
“The witch may be a technophile — she is, however, squinting skeptically at capitalism in everything that she does, and twisting technologies towards beautifully weird outcomes”
Announcing online classes that will explore non-human life. Microscopic and massive. Extinct, endangered, wild, familiar, lab-grown or “tech-augmented”
Theresa Schubert multiplied cells from a biopsy of her thigh muscles in a serum produced by utilising her own blood, to artificially grow a piece of in-vitro meat. Which she proceeded to eat during a live performance
Artists offer new insights about genetic engineering by bringing it out of the lab and into public places to challenge viewers’ understandings about the human condition, the material of our bodies and the consequences of biotechnology
What worlds are revealed when we listen to alpacas, make photographs with yeast or use biosignals to generate autonomous virtual organisms?
The exhibition draws on a historically informed anthropocentric worldview toward a systemic conception of humanity as part of the evolutionary process
Free to download, the proceedings of the conference contain essays and visual documentation that explore the nature of the forbidden and the aesthetics of liminality in art that engages with technology and science…
Lynn Hershman Leeson‘s work exposes why we need to have a better understanding of the potentials of gene editing and how they are being exploited by companies motivated mostly by profit
One Tree ID, by Agnes Meyer-Brandis, transforms the ID of a specific tree into a perfume that can then be applied to the human body
An interview with Margherita Pevere who used DNA storage technique to preserve a woman’s intimate experience from her youth into foreign life
I talked with artist and designer Xandra van der Eijk about space mining without the need to leave the Earth and about controlling or being controlled by microorganisms
Gracie’s experimental breeding programme aims to gradually recreate, in an enclosed habitat, the atmospheric conditions found on Titan and make sure that the common fly would slowly acclimate to it
An exhibition at the Parco Arte Vivente, Turin’s experimental centre for Living Arts, aims to offer new perspectives and lines of inquiry about the Anthropocene
With this installation, critical and speculative scenario designer Tina Gorjanc is asking whether producing ‘fake’ copies of an extinct animal is an attempt to understand the past, or just an excuse to constantly create the desire for rarity
Animals that fake their appearance to blend in their surrounding and attract their prey, people who fake a […]
Alone or with the help of local communities, these artists have cleaned up polluted areas, planted wheat field, provided pollinators with colourful and appetizing flowery landscapes, built hanging and floating gardens, initiated edible and medicinal urban farms, developed schemes for sharing excess food and bred more resilient chicken breeds
The filtering capacity of flowers is a neglected area of research. However, the 3D structures of flowers make them valuable allies when it comes to regulating air quality by removing pollutants from the atmosphere. Dust Blooms juxtaposes the beauty and function of urban flora using a synthesis of artistic and scientific methods to create awareness about the every-day importance of ecosystem services in cities
Do artists using biotechnological materials and scientific processes have the same obligations, rights and responsibilities as scientists? Or should they enjoy more liberties and particular prerogatives?
Can art help us understand the ethical complexities of emerging (bio)technologies? Are artists able to uncover our hidden desires and demystify the promises emerging technologies represent? Are living artworks allowed and is art allowed to alter life?
EE #2 moves Beyond Nature, investigating experimental and emerging ways of understanding as well as making art/nature. This issue visits not just hybrid, but also parasitical ways of doing art in times of danger and apocalyptic visions. In the current ecological and socio-political crisis, the function of the artist emerges as more critical than ever
The Socle du Monde biennale in Herning is currently showing Koen Vanmechelen’s Planetary Community Chicken, a cross between his now iconic Cosmopolitan roosters and commercial hens
Hybrid ecologies unfold through complex interactions between actors and elements: human, non-human, biological, mineral, robotic, artificial, etc. There has always been some forms of interaction between humans and their immediate biological environment (through agriculture, bee keeping, fermentation techniques, etc.) but contemporary science is speeding up the synergies and frictions
Greiner’s works involve buying 40 litres of maggots and bringing them to the exhibition space until they turn into flies, composing music based on the luminous skin of a squid, convincing the Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin to consider a fly as a living artwork, photographing portraits of algae, carefully orchestrating explosions around Berlin
The focus of the Nordic art&science network program HYBRID MATTERs are the hybrid ecologies that emerge when our environment interacts with technology, when two spheres so far regarded as independent start to affect each other and form new entities with new qualities
Albedo suits are designed to increase the solar energy reflectivity (albedo value) in the forests; this way cooling the climate and mitigating the climate change. The work plays with the notion of geoengineering and forest management as a geoengineering project
“The Condition” might look like standard (media) art installation but don’t let its playful appearance fool you. The deeper you dig, the more you realize how many thought-provoking ideas and issues the work raises: new forms of ‘natural selection’ where it’s the prettiest -not the fittest- that survives, novel ecology in which salmons and tulips are grown à la carte, and intersection between the design of biological organisms and capitalistic values
This year, many of the work are exploring data. I got a bit tired of big data a couple of years ago but being at the festival reminded me that, once in the hands of artists, the most austere data can adopt a provocative, critical and sometimes also totally absurd tinge
Session 5. The Extended Body: Biomedicine, Micromatter & the Transhuman was the most eclectic and unpredictable one. It investigated issues as diverse as the use of forensic methodologies in art, the presence of human cells outside of the body and the possible role of bacteria in creativity
This session was one of the most fascinating sessions for me. Full of weirdness and wisdom. It started with a 19th century sculptor who made a life-like statue of himself complete with his own hair and teeth, proceeded with a set of artists who work with tattoo and the latest technology and ended up with artworks, socks and other artifacts made of human hair.
Image courtesy of the artist While visiting an ex soldier training area in Maastricht turned into workshops for […]