The first episode of the radio show about art & science i’m recording for Resonance FM is broadcast today Monday 21 May at 16.30 (London time.) There will be a repeat on Thursday at 22.30. You can catch it online if you don’t live in London.
This week i’m talking with the lovely and lively Anna Dumitriu, visual artist and respected founder and director of The Institute of Unnecessary Research
Category Archive: bioart
Ollie Palmer’s Ant Ballet is a three-year research project into control systems, paranoia and dancing insects, and has culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. The projected insects is part of the FutureEverybody Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse in Manchester
“New Art/Science Affinities” was written and designed in one week by four authors (Andrea Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans, and Pablo Garcia) and two designers (Thumb), using a rapid collaborative authoring process known as a “book sprint.” The topic of “New Art/Science Affinities” is contemporary artists working at the intersection of art, science, and technology, with explorations into maker culture, hacking, artist research, distributed creativity, and technological and speculative design
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Jurema Action Plant is a machine which interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa Pudica). Its aim is to empower plants by enabling them to use similar technologies as humans use. It is also explores new ways of communication and co-relation between humans, living organism and a machine. Plants don’t have nerves, wires or cables but much like humans, animals and machines, they have an electrical signal traveling inside their cells
Summer is back in London and dozens of bees have now settled in the middle of Spitalfields. Real bees passersby don’t try to wave away. They are dead and hang on fishing lines as if they were caught in mid-flight inside a giant glass case, surrounded on all sides by office blocks
To understand how mysterious jumping fish can survive in a puddle with trucks driving through it, Mateusz Herczka recreated a South American puddle in an unheated Belgian space. The huge cube of glass and metal contains a reconstruction of a puddle found in the middle of a road in Guyana, with a truck wheel rolling through it. His work is documented in an exhibition which recently opened in Antwerp
social
Thirty years ago, a peg-legged motorcycle mechanic walked into the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. They had not returned his calls. The police were summoned. Forty-five minutes later he walked out with an academic appointment. Since then Joe Davis has sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, encoded poetry into DNA, and designed a sculpture to save the world
A few weeks ago, i was in The Netherlands to see the result of the first competition. You might remember that i had interviewed the 3 winning artists/designers just as they were about to start developing their projects (The Miscroscopic Opera, 2.6g 329m/s, aka the ‘bulletproof skin’ and System Synthetics) so i was curious to see whether the final pieces lived up to their (and my!) expectations
In a bold self-experiment aimed at blurring the boundaries between species, Marion Laval-Jeantet was injected with horse blood plasma. Over the course of several months, the artist prepared her body by gradually introducing into her bloodstream horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum, and which, for example, can function as antibodies in immune response. The artist called the process “mithridatization”, after Mithridates VI of Pontus who cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of the same
The exhibition looks at the sub-aspect of fauna and flora in nature. Through the works of some twenty international artists we explore how humankind manipulates nature and how the concept of ‘nature’ constantly changes as a result of this
Last Saturday i finally dragged myself out of the armchair and visited the ‘Park of Living Art’ in Turin. Although the ‘interactive’ displays i saw in some of the rooms were appalling, I’ll be forever grateful to the place for bringing to Turin exciting artists: Michel Blazy, Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna and now Brandon Ballengee
A global overview of the ways in which contemporary artists are drawing on kinetics, biology, robotics and information technologies to explore new forms of creative expression
Vegetation and microorganisms live symbiotically inside the body of this robot. The robot draws water from a contaminated river, decomposes its elements, helps to create energy to feed its brain circuits and the surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to fulfill their own life cycle
Yes, i had already seen sk-interfaces. Exploding Borders in Art, Technology and Society at FACT in Liverpool but the Luxembourg version, i was told by friends, is bigger, bolder and even better than the first one. They were right. A couple of pieces have been added to the show. The performances are well documented and there is a corner to watch videos. The space itself is kinder to the artworks. There’s extra drama as the poor Victimless Leather garments had caught some disease and were slowly eaten by decay
The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society’s temporary research and education institute on Art and Life Sciences, will be focusing this month on body art
Waag Society and Adam Zaretsky’s series of workshops and lectures are back in Amsterdam and this time the focus will be biology and bacterial transformation
Let’s get this straight first: the Earth is hollow and other societies live in there. Andy brought us to the cave in order to be closer to them
The second edition of Biorama was a workshop and symposium (set inside a cave) that explored the biology of the underground through the notion of umwelt developed by biologist Jakob von Uexküll and its influence on the development of biosemiotics by Thomas Sebeok.
The artists brought together for this show reveal an imagery that has been inspired by the current mutations in our environment. They deal with diverse matters such as Chernobyl, global warming and the rise in oil rates. At times close to science-fiction, these artists imagine new stories which pay witness to the curiosity and fears derived from this changing reality
VASTAL is a temporary research and education institute that Adam Zaretsky has set up in Amsterdam following an invitation by the Waag Society. Zaretsky will give lectures and workshops on Art and Life Sciences. The School was born with the objective of showing what it means to work artistically and scientifically with living organisms and materials. It also aims to make this form of art-science accessible for a broader audience and invite them to discuss the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake.
Using some DIY laboratory equipment, Andy Gracie’s team developed a system of variable strength magnetic field generators and related apparatus which allowed them to observe living micro-organisms as they were exposed and responded to various magnetic fields
The Transgenic Pheasant Embryology Art and Science Laboratory taught by Adam Zaretsky at the University of Leiden was a hands-on perfomance art wet-lab aimed at stimulating a debate about the use of new biological methods for permanent alteration of genetic inheritance
Call for the presentation of projects where science, technology and art converge into prototypes and installations that use software, hardware and biology
A robot engraves a habitat for fungi while a team of architectural conservators trap dust and dirt in latex in order to preserve and display it like a precious shroud
In a project that addresses the problem of future human food production and the ongoing consequences of the breeding, manipulation and mistreatment of plant and animal species, corn seeds are submitted to a new, broad educational curriculum
A short video that documents Brandon Ballengee’s research into amphibian declines and deformities
The videos of the conference which took place at FACT in Liverpool on February 8 & 9 have been made available online
Caitlin Berrigan, Adam Zaretsky, Brandon Ballengee, Kathy High and I will be in New York for a panel on biotech art
Featuring Critical Art Ensemble’s video Immolation and The Office of Experiments investigation into truth serums
Meet the artist who is hunting for moss bears, communicating with electric fish and combining woodworks and electronic music to create novel instruments and performances
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