As a part of the project, the EAF has commissioned texts from over 20 national and international writers, published here together with images from artists working in the field. Art in the Biotech Era is a comprehensive compilation of theories and practices surrounding issues of art and biotechnology.

Published by the Experimental Art Foundation
February, 2008ISBN 0-949836-52-4210mm x 210mm234 pp/36pp colour images

Contributors: Introduction by editor Melentie Pandilovski

Writers & Artists: Miguel Amado, Roy Ascott, André Brodyk, Stuart Bunt, Heath Bunting, Gary Cass, Boo Chapple, Melinda Cooper, Critical Art Ensemble, Gina Czarnecki, Kirsty Darlaston, Joe Davis, George Gessert, FOAM (Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney), Eduardo Kac, Diane Ludin, Marta de Menezes, Mez, Anna Munster, Michalis Pichler, Liljana Simjanovska, Niki Sperou, Mike Stubbs, Eugene Thacker, Zoran Todorovic, Polona Tratnik, Raewyn Turner, Recombinant I-Ching Collective, Tissue Art & Culture (Oron Catts, & Ionat Zurr), Tanja Visosevic, Morag Wightman, Adam Zaretsky.

For more information: http://www.eaf.asn.au/aitbe_about.html

We are living in a time in which the ‘made’ and the ‘born’ are fusing. Hypoallergenic cats are already on the market. Plants are used as sensors, information displays and chemical factories. Animals are being augmented and branded. Young girls are provided with hypernatural vaginas, modeled after the photoshopped vaginas seen in Playboy magazine. In response to donor organ shortages, researchers are working on a 3D organ printer. Real nature is not green. It is out of control. Games have become jobs. Second life is not sustainable. Digital world metaphors are boomerang into our physical environment. Everyday robots give massages and take care of the children. RFID chips open doors, they might be infected, but nonetheless are edible.

The extent to which new technologies are intervening in the constructive, material, aesthetic and social practice of everyday life can hardly be underestimated. Highways, airports and supermarkets are part of our natural environment. Our established image of nature needs to be updated.

Next Nature; the nature caused by human culture. Nowadays, children know more corporate logo’s and brands than bird or tree species. Our technological world has become so complex and uncontrollable it has become a nature of its own. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.

With: Manuel Castells, Kevin Kelly, Rob Schroder, Michiko Nitta, Tinkebell, Susana Soares, David Kremers, Rene Daalder / Folkert Gorter, Floris Kaayk, Julian Bleecker, Erik Davis, Peter Lunenfeld, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Judith de Leeuw, Luna Maurer / Roel Wouters, Arnoud van den Heuvel, Rolf Coppens, Christian Bramsiepe, Helena Muskens, Quirine Racke and more…

In the weeks towards the Biggest Visual Power Show 2008 we post a few video’s of earlier power show presentations. Philosopher Prof. Dr. Jos de Mul – author of countless articles and books like ‘Cyberspace Odyssey’, ‘Domestication of Fate’ and ‘Database Delirium’ – was a speaker at the Biggest Visual Power Show 2005 in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Inspired by the images of Basia Knobloch and music of Lauri Anderson, professor De Mul decided to sing his lecture.

MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). The participants invited to contribute to the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional /affective senses and dream states, embodiment and communication.

CAMILLE BAKER is a Ph.D. Candidate at SMARTlan, University of East London, conducting research on Networked Performance Media, funded by BBC R+D.

Making DICOM Dance: Marilene Oliver’s practice-based research looks at medical and laser imaging technologies that scan bodies and break them down to bytes. Oliver examines from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to convert flesh to pixel (digital photography), flesh to voxel (MRI, CT and PET) and flesh to xyz co-ordinates (3D laser scanning). Oliver will present a selection of artworks made using MRI data (where the subject of the scans is bespoke) and CT data (where the subject of the scans are either infamous or anonymous). The presentation will be both technical and theoretical, concentrating on the performative puppeteering activity that emerges when working with MRI and CT data.

MARILENE OLIVER is currently a research student in the Fine Art Print department at the Royal College of Art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy, Royal Institution, Science Museum (UK). Oliver was awarded the Royal Academy print prize in 2006 and the Printmaking Today prize in 2001.

The Art Exhibit Subcommittee of the 2008 GE3LS International Symposium welcomes submissions of original digital works of art that address the ethical, legal, and social themes related to the human genome, biology in the 21st century, or genetics in society. For the purposes of this contest digital art is defined as art that is created in a digital form. It can be drawn using a computer, created from a source such as a digital photograph, or be entirely computer generated. We will not accept digitized images of oil, acrylic or mixed media paintings.

There are no fees or any charges to enter the contest. The Subcommittee will award a:
1st prize of $1,000 (Cdn.),
2nd prize of $500.00 (Cdn.)
3rd prize of $250.00 (Cdn.)

The Genome Canada Select Prize will go to a Canadian entrant selected by the judging panel. This prize will be a $500.00 gift certificate to a camera store of the prize winner?s choice nearest to their residence. The Select Prize winner will also have their entry used in promotion for the 2009 GE3LS International Symposium. All prizes must be accepted as awarded.

Submissions will be initially judged online by the general public. The final winners will be chosen from the top 12 based on voting numbers, by a judging committee which will consider the merit of the art and its thematic merit. The Genome Canada Select Prize will be at the sole discretion of the judging panel.

Biology plays an increasingly pervasive role in international society and our lives—a role that artists are responding to with a diverse array of practices. Some have started to collaborate with research labs to engage with organic materials; others buy DIY biology sets reminiscent of the early computer kits of the late ´70s. All are getting their hands into the material of life itself to reflect upon some of the most complex issues society has to deal with: the integration of biotechnology in quotidian life, and the ethical, cultural, and even political consequences of scientific discovery.

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, in collaboration with the Arts Catalyst and SymbioticA, is organising an intensive 5 day workshop for artists and others interested people. It will be led by SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts and his scientific collaborator Greg Cozens from the University of Western Australia.

This is a hands-on workshop where the tools of modern biology are demonstrated through artistic engagement, which in turn gives voice to the broader philosophical and ethical exploration into the extent of human intervention with other living things. It involves exploration of biological technologies and issues stemming from their use, and serves as a theoretical and practical introduction to the creation of biological art and is aimed at educating artists from India in issues of biotechnology and the life sciences.

The workshop will cover hands-on engagement with these technologies in order to be able to carry out and critique manipulation of living systems from an informed practical perspective. The practical components include DNA extraction and fingerprinting, genetic engineering, plant and animal tissue culture and basic tissue engineering techniques.

The workshop will present work of contemporary artists dealing with biotechnology. Scientists will be involved discussing ethical issues raised by artists’ work in this area and leading visit to NCBS laboratories. At the end of the week, the ideas explored in the workshop will be opened out with a public discussion event at a venue to be announced in Bangalore.

Attendance and Conditions: Attendance at the workshop will be by selection through open submission or by invitation. The selection will be made by Srishti, SymbioticA, the artist in residence at NCBS, and the Arts Catalyst’s curator, currently in residence at Srishti. Artists are expected to be available and present for the entire week-long workshop, as this is an intensive process of learning and social interaction. Artists should be based in India, or nearby countries in South Asia.

There is no cost to selected participants to attend the workshop, but travel and other expenses will not be covered. Limited accommodation is available at NCBS for artists travelling from outside Bangalore. Subsidised meals will be available for participants at NCBS. The organisers believe that the effects of the workshop will be felt in the long-term, as the artists, having learned the technology, will start working on their own biotech projects, or at least feel their work is informed by the experience.

SymbioticA is part of The School of Anatomy and Human Biology, Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and critique of life sciences. SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, in that it enables artists to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. SymbioticA sets out to provide a situation where interdisciplinary research and other knowledge and concept generating activities can take place. It provides an opportunity for researchers to pursue curiosity-based explorations free of the demands and constraints associated with the current culture of scientific research while still complying with regulations. SymbioticA also offers a new means of artistic inquiry, one in which artists actively use the tools and technologies of science, not just to comment about them, but also to explore their possibilities.

This workshop has made possible thorough the generous support of part of The School of Anatomy and Human Biology, and Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences, University of Western Australia, NCBS and the Sir Rattan Tata Trust.

This hugely significant event will illustrate many of the aesthetic, philosophical, scientific and medical issues raised in the exhibition sk-interfaces, and will feature specialists of international renown from a wide range of fields and disciplines. The artists’ projects that feature in the exhibition will be discussed in the context of wider debates on and around skin and its role as an interface, as well as biotechnology as an artistic medium and subject.

sk-interfaces Exhibition :: February 1 - March 30 :: Gallery 1 & 2, Media Lounge and Public Spaces, FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool.

A groundbreaking exhibition on the uncertain limits between art and science, sk-interfaces explores, materially and metaphorically, the concept of skin as a technological interface. This multi-disciplinary exhibition launches FACT’s Human Futures programme. Designer hymens by medical artist Julia Reodica, a coat made of blended skin cultures by legendary French artist ORLAN, Jun Takita’s model brain infused with glowing moss, and biotechnological ‘leather’ growing in the galleries by the Tissue Culture & Art Project - are some of the projects that reflect the curatorial concept of Jens Hauser in an approach involving science, politics, philosophy and architecture.

From the press release:

Designer hymens, a composite coat made of blended skin cultures by legendary French artist ORLAN, a brain infused with glowing moss and non-animal ‘leather’ growing in the galleries, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) presents a ground-breaking UK exhibition exploring the idea of skin as a place where art, science, philosophy and social culture meet.

Curated by Jens Hauser, sk-interfaces launches FACT’s Human Futures programme in Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture and as an interdisciplinary exhibition will feature works from 15 international artists, including 2007’s Golden Nica winners at Ars Electronica.

“What used to be understood as a surface that represents the limit of the self and between the inside and the outside can today be seen as an unstable border. sk-interfaces is ideally placed within the cultural programme of Liverpool 08: Artists are exploring trans-species relationships, xenotransplantation, satellite bodies, endogene design, telepresence, permeable architecture and the ever pushed limits of art itself,” says curator Jens Hauser.

Formerly known for her surgery-performances in which she refigured her face and created new images referring to non-Western cultures, ORLAN presents her new work Harlequin Coat, a patchwork life-size mantle, which contains fusing in vitro skin cells from various cultures and species. This prototype of a biotechnological coat is made to symbolise cultural cross breeding.

The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Victimless Leather investigates the possibility of producing ‘leather’ without killing an animal. Three miniature stitch-less garments are tissue-cultured live in the gallery. Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr are behind the award-winning lab project SymbioticA (Golden Nica in Hybrid Art 2007 Prix Ars Electronica), the Australian–based research facility dedicated to artistic enquiry.

French duo Art Orienté objet has created biopsied, cultured, hybridized and tattooed skin made from their own epidermis and pig derma to create living biotechnological self-portraits. Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin’s work is intended to be grafted onto collectors themselves so they can physically wear and absorb an artists’ piece.

American artist Julia Reodica’s hymNext Designer Hymen Series confronts the values of purity and gender roles using the artist’s own vaginal tissue and animal muscle cells to create designer hymens. The sculptures pose as products to be marketed and are intended as objects of novelty for ‘re-virginisation’ thus addressing the issue of how different cultures value female virginity and the associated pressures.

Zbigniew Oksiuta from Poland will come to Liverpool to create a new version of his project Breeding Spaces in which a large 3D sphere of gelatin is grown in situ. The artist proposes the possibilities of designing biological spatial structures that can serve as a new kind of habitat and presents a new form of spatial coexistence between man and nature.

sk-interfaces will also feature further commissioned and existing projects from international artists such as Eduardo Kac, Jun Takita, Wim Delvoye, Olivier Goulet, Zane Berzina and Neal White among others.

Mike Stubbs, Director and CEO of FACT says, “FACT opens its 08 programme committed to pushing at the boundaries of how and what creative technologies and art can be. Touching on some of the biggest issues of our day FACT invites debate and conversation around life sciences and our changing relationships with our bodies and technology”.

Confirmed works:

Art Orienté objet (France) Cultures de peaux d’artistes, Roadkill Coat
Zbigniew Oksiuta (Poland) Breeding Spaces
Yann Marussich (Switzerland) Bleu Remix
Julia Reodica (USA) hymNext Designer Hymen Series
Jun Takita (Japan) Light only Light
Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) (Australia) Victimless Leather
ORLAN (France) Manteau d’Arlequin
Neal White (UK) Truth Serum
Wim Delvoye (Belgium) Sybille
Olivier Goulet (France) Skin Bags
Zane Berzina (Latvia) Touch Me Wall
Critical Art Ensemble (US)
Eduardo Kac (Brazil) Telepresence Garment

In 2008, FACT devotes its programme to one overall concept: Human Futures. The year is divided into three sections – My Body, My Mind and My World, each one hosting a major exhibition, conference and research focus. sk-interfaces launches this programme, exploring the biological environment and our relationship to the body.

Denise King visits us from San Francisco’s Exploratorium to discuss the aesthetic cultivation of bacteria. She will be presenting an introduction to identifying bacteria in the field, focusing on environments that are accessible from the Los Angeles area. Along the way she will discuss Winogradsky columns - simple containers that are filled with mud, pond water and plant material that allow the culturing of microbial communities in the laboratory, or in your own living room.

Sample columns filled with lovely multihued stuff with be available for show and tell purposes, and willing participants will be able to make their own bacterial terrarium on site. We suggest wearing casual clothes or disposable hazmat suit if you plan on participating, as it may get slightly messy. For those who plan on just observing, standard formal wear should be fine.

The body is part and parcel of the sociological enterprise. The Homo sapiens’s cultural history demonstrates that the contribution the body makes to the brain is not limited to supporting vital operations, but includes regulating the space and time which organizes the contents of a normal mind. This fundamental property enables our ‘mental ship’ to produce the sequences of movements and events which organize the topographical mapping of bodily experience.

The somato-sensory mass of the brain (Damasio, 2004:314) builds up the connections which the body’s confines compound with the environment by means of neural activity maps coordinated in time. Lacking this mechanism, we would not be able to locate our interactions with the environment or even less, utilize, in the present, the store of knowledge acquired by our bodies by touching an object, looking at a view or moving in space along a path that our bodies describe by moving. We have ancient and genetically pre-arranged circuits which regulate the body’s functions, controlling the endocrine, immunity and internal organ systems and activating impulses and instincts. Taking root is the basis of our way of acquiring knowledge. This insistence on the mind being rooted in the body as a critical factor, brings to mind the need to pay attention to the real development of our brains in the connections in which it is ‘tied’ to the technological.

All the technical resources of human inventive capacity, from the chipped flints of the Neolithic Age to the Renaissance, emerge out! of the relations between bodies, technologies and emotional life. The invention and proliferation of microelectronic technologies and the rapid pace of their constant development and application – mostly in the developed world – introduced today a new phase not only in the role of technologies in human’s life but also brought about serious consequences for almost all aspects of the individual’s life and social relations. We refer to those technologies that are now fully integrated into, and an unremarkable part of, everyday life. It also deeply effects the human body. The physical world and electronic virtual world are not separate, as much current discussions might lead one to believe; in fact they are intricately intertwined.

The present call for papers faces up to the links between social constructions of the human body and the growth of completely, immersive realities (known as Virtual Reality or VR) constructed trough computer software. Human bodies form a basis for social relationships. Although a VE (virtual environment) minimizes ambulatory experience, users interacting with virtual technologies nonetheless constitute material phenomena engaged in practices. For example, users wearing Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) confirm a sense that technologies such as VR are able to obtain a grip on human bodies. We have now a new economy of presence within which we continually choose among the possibilities of synchronous and asynchronous communication, presence and virtual presence. Therefore we need to consider the roles of virtual places as well as physical ones, of electronic connections as well as asynchronous encounters and transactions in addition to synchronous ones.

The Program of the WG03 The Body in the Social Sciences at the first Barcelona Forum of Sociology is aimed to analyzing the complex interaction between the material and immaterial aspects of electronic technologies shaping today the ‘digital mind’ by considering the body as the crucial factor making up the relations between humans, technologies and affective life. The sorts of questions that this call addresses here include: How do technologies and the body contribute to the social, while being themselves heterogeneous? What are the sorts of relations into which these social, technological and bodily entities enter? Can we draw boundaries and borders around or through a nexus of relations in order to identify particular heterogeneous bodies, and what might such an identification offer us analytically?

The sessions organized by the Working Group 03 The Body in the Social Sciences will provide opportunities to elaborate an innovative methodological framework tracing the ways in which the bodies and technologies interweave in the interfaces between off and on line. Particularly welcome are papers aimed to analyze the ‘state of the art’ in body-computer interaction and papers on the processing of memory by multiple-tasking performances.

The following areas of discussion have been identified, but further suggestions are welcome:

1. THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR MIND-BODY INTERACTION
2. BODY MAPPING AS AN INTERACTIVE CREATION OF SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE;
3. THE BODY AS CRUCIAL FACTOR IN MEMORY PROCESSING;
4. ‘DOMESTICATING’ TECHNOLOGIES: IDENTITIES, EMBODIMENT AND DIGITAL MEMORIES;
5. DISTRIBUTED MAPPING ON CYBERSPACE;
6. ICTs INTERFACES AS BOUNDARY OF SOCIAL PRESENCE;
7. THE CYBORG CITIZEN;
8. ‘HOW MULTITASKING AFFECTS HUMAN LEARNING’;
9. USER IMPACT OF ‘AFFECTIVE’ COMPUTER’.

Proposals (1 page max.) should be sent to BIANCA MARIA PIRANI, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION,VIA SALARIA 113, 00198 ROMA (ITALY) :: biancamaria.piran at alice.it