The idea of making art with living systems is not new; you might even consider a garden or a goldfish pond to be biological art. What is new is the degree of control over biological systems and materials contemporary technology offers us. Topics on the organism weblog include technical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical issues related to making art with living systems. Artists, scientists, engineers, students, and anyone else with an interest in this area are invited to contribute.
Gordon is a very special robot. Controlled by a dish full of rats’ brain cells, he’s helping scientists to understand how our brains work. Antenna explores the science behind Gordon, what he might tell us about the brain, and what his creation could mean for the future of robotics…
Gordon is on display in the Antenna gallery from 16 October 2008 for at least six weeks.
UIC’s Gallery 400 is pleased to present Biological Agents, a group exhibition curated by Christa Donner and Andrew Yang.
The complexities of contemporary life fundamentally challenge the way we understand ourselves as biological entities within larger ecosystems. Biological Agents focuses on the work of Brandon Ballengée, Caitlin Berrigan, and Natalie Jeremijenko: three artists who engage the intimate participation of organisms and the public to investigate what it means to be human, to be animal, and to have personal and social agency. In addition, the show’s Knowledge Virus Research Station offers visitors a diverse collection of small-press zines, view-master reels and web projects disseminating information on biological topics from a variety of creative perspectives.
Featured Artists:
Brandon Ballengée’s MALAMP project explores the mysterious malformations and global decline of amphibians through ecology, aesthetics, and participatory practice. Collaborating with biologists and local citizens, his photographs and installations create a both a visual and material dialogue on the effects of environmental change on native ecologies.
Caitlin Berrigan uses her Viral Confections and Viral Shelter projects to create intimate, virally-structured space within the gallery where visitors are invited to consume edible chocolates shaped into the molecular structure of the hepatitis C virus. A carrier of the virus herself, Berrigan will share her handmade chocolates with visitors during the opening reception in exchange for personal dialogue, igniting public discussion and fostering awareness around this prevalent and under-recognized disease.
Natalie Jeremijenko’s site-specific installations and collaborative projects engage the interfaces of animal/human life in urban ecosystems. Her Environmental Health Clinic proposes animal-collaborative prescriptions that both provoke and provide closer examination of environmental quality in contemporary urban-nature. For Biological Agents she fosters interaction with tadpoles, migrating coyotes, and local pigeons as a means to assess and intervene in the health of our shared ecologies.
Related Events:
Wednesday, October 22, 6:00pm, Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Screening of Critical Art Ensemble’s Marching Plague and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Strange Culture, exploring Critical Art Ensemble member Steve Kurtz’s bio-art (and alleged “bioweapons”) case. Accompanied by discussion about the work and the case with CAE collaborator Claire Pentecost, Associate Professor, SAIC.
Panel Discussion, Date and Location TBA
Lori Andrews, Chicago-Kent College of Law, IIT; Hannah Higgins, UIC Associate Professor of Art History; and Andrew Yang, SAIC, exhibition co-curator and biologist. Moderated by Lennard Davis, UIC Project Biocultures and Professor of English, Disability Studies and Medical Education.
Gallery 400 events are FREE.
Biological Agents: Artistic Engagements in our Growing Bio-Culture
October 14 – November 22, 2008
Opening Reception: October 15, 2008, 5-8pm
Gallery 400
University of Illinois at Chicago
Art and Design Hall, First Floor
400 S. Peoria Street (at Van Buren Street)
Submersed Songs is a sound-installation that promotes an interference of four carp fish in a glass tank, over the sound output of mp3 players (iPod’s and others) of the visitors. The animals’ movements and the proximity among them work as a parameter for modifying and juxtaposing the audience’s music tracks in real time. With this idea, new sound landscapes are created, not only from the interaction among the fish, but also from unveiling the intimate music archives, which are “submersed” underneath the mp3 player devices.
The visitor can connect his audio device to the interface, and chose a song of his preference. It is also possible for the user to record the track in the system in order to let the song be modified during the next visitor’s interactions. The visitor will as well listen to the previous visitors’ songs, as the system juxtaposes the previous visitors’ tracks with the current visitor’s song. Accordingly, the piece will be always meshing up two different songs.
The two tracks are submitted to different modification processes, both building a real time continuity between the swimming of the carp fish and the levels of distortion, which can vary from an intense reverberation to a simulation of the hearing underwater.
A work by Vivian Caccuri.
John Chalmers sent in a link to this image from Roger Y. Tsien’s lab at UCSD. Tsien just won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on fluorescent proteins.
http://www.tsienlab.ucsd.edu/Images.htm
If houseplants could blog, what would they say? To find out, Kamakura-based IT company KAYAC Co., Ltd. has developed a sophisticated botanical interface system that lets plants post their thoughts online. A succulent Sweetheart Hoya (Hoya kerii) named “Midori-san” is now using the system to blog daily from its home at bowls Donburi Cafe in Kamakura.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/10/midori-san-the-blogging-houseplant (via makezine)
Arbores Laetae – or Joyful Trees – has transformed a former brownfield site as part of the Liverpool Biennial arts festival which officially opens on 20 September.
Designed by New York architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, festival bosses say the work gives people a chance to “view nature at its most unnatural”.
The slowly rotating trees, intended to be a playful reinvention of the public park, were largely welcomed by members of the public in their unveiling on Wednesday.
The three rotating trees can found at the heart of 17 hornbeam trees planted in a grid pattern at the corner of Great George Street and Parliament Street, but are not immediately obvious to passing pedestrians or traffic. In place of the familiar movement of shade according to the rotation of the earth around the sun, here shade migrates at an artificial speed, transforming the familiar patterns of the natural world into artificial creations.
Some people find their unfamiliar shading patterns tranquil and others, unsettling, which was the aim, according to designer, Rick Scofidio.
Mr Scofidio told BBC News: “I found that it’s both beautiful, wonderful and a little bit frightening.
“Trees in poems are beautiful objects, but they are also things that tap on your window at night and in many fairy stories are quite evil and dangerous.
Via balkon & garten,
Evaristti’s execution bed which goes on view this month in Copenhagen
Gene Hathorn, a convict on death row in Texas, has agreed to give his body to the Danish-based artist Marco Evaristti, should his final appeal against execution fail. Evaristti plans to turn Hathorn’s body into a work of art. “My aim is to first deep freeze Gene’s body and then make fish food out of it. Visitors to my exhibition will be able to feed goldfish with it,” Evaristti told The Art Newspaper.
In the last year Evaristti has visited Hathorn several times at his prison in Livingston, Texas. “I wanted to raise awareness of the fact that there are people killed legally in our Western civilisation,” said the artist. “A lawyer put me in contact with Hathorn and after a few meetings I suggested that I use his body and he [said he] wished that I would.” He does not think that his plan is cynical or unethical. “The real problem is legally killing people,” he said.
Evaristti says that US lawyers doubt whether Hathorn’s testament, which makes the artist the heir to his body, is valid. “But we are confident [that we can] solve this issue before Hathorn is executed,” Evaristti said. Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department for Criminal Justice (TDCJ), told The Art Newspaper that a death row prisoner “can select a person to handle the disposition of their remains”. She added that the TDCJ had no interest in who that person may be.
Evaristti is helping to finance Hathorn’s appeal by selling drawings made by the convict in prison. “I don’t think his appeal will work, so if he is executed, we will ship the body to Germany, deep freeze it there and turn it into fish food,” Evaristti told The Art Newspaper.
He said he was already in contact with a company that would be willing to assist him, but declined to identify it. The proposed exhibition will consist of a huge aquarium filled with hundreds of goldfish. Visitors would be able to feed the fish using food made from Hathorn’s body. A venue for the exhibition has yet to be decided.
The exhibition is part of Evaristti’s wider project against capital punishment. In August he presented a clothing collection called “The Last Fashion” to coincide with the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair. Fifteen models wore dresses designed by Evaristti. He says they are for death-row prisoners to wear on their execution day. They will be offered as mail-order items to prisoners on death row in the United States.
“The fashion show will be forgotten in a short time. People went there, looked at it and were amused. But I want [there to be] a lasting impact and therefore I’m using Hathorn’s body,” Evaristti said. He has also designed an execution bed to be shown at the Art Copenhagen art fair this month (19-21 September).
Evaristti came to international attention in 2000 when he placed goldfish in electric blenders filled with water. Visitors to the exhibition at Denmark’s Trapholt Art Museum could choose to press a button, turn on the blenders and kill the fish. In January 2007 he held a dinner party where the main course consisted of meatballs partly made with fat removed by liposuction from his own body. In June last year he was arrested while trying to paint the peak of Mont Blanc red as a protest against “environmental degradation”.
In April we reported plans by German artist Gregor Schneider to show a person dying as part of an exhibition. “My aim is to show the beauty of death,” Schneider told us. He said he would like to stage the exhibition at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld, Germany. The museum declined to comment.
Phoebe Washburn has a new installation on view at the Zach Feuer Gallery in New York until October 4.
From the Press release:
In Tickle the Shitstem, Washburn has developed a system/environment in which production and waste are equally important. The Shitstem generates its own products along with the inevitable byproducts or waste, and at times, there is little or no distinction between the two. The installation simply keeps churning, producing and hemorrhaging cyclically unless it is interrupted by a failure. Products of Tickle the Shitstem include beverages, pencils, colored urchins and t-shirts.
The Shitstem produces t-shirts, dyed sea urchins, pencils, and drinks, available for purchase.
Previously: Feeding plants with Gatorade.
Over time, parasitic micro-organisms such as cyanobacterias and the Cladosporium genus of fungi, have occupied and taken over the walls of the abandoned Alumix factory in Bolzano, Italy. The restoration of the ex-factory means that the building is loosing its value as habitat for the organisms.
Architects Stangeland and Kropf decided to engage with this transitional state. The Naked Garden is generated by the mediation of different modes: biological propagation, mathematical abstraction and technological execution. A robot, programmed with the rules by which the fungi grow, engraves and perforates the wall already inhabited by fungi, thereby allowing light, water and wind to enter and to facilitate the basic conditions of life.
On view until November 2 in Via Volta, 11, Bolzano, as part of Manifesta 7 – the European Biennial of Contemporary Art.
The Mossenger Project by Anna Garforth is an eco-grafitti made of moss. The artist uses a type of moss that sticks well to walls and glues it with yogurt and sugar.
The project is part of YCN LIVE, a two-week long public and participatory art initiative currently underway in London.
Mossberger will be on view until September 5th, on a brick wall near Clissold Park in London.
Via psfk.
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