BIOART
INITIATIVE AT RENSSELAER
The BioArt
Initiative is a collaborative research project between Rensselaer’s
Arts Department and the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary
Studies (CBIS). This project proposes to lay the foundation
establishing RPI as a premiere institution for the synthesis
of emerging biotechnological research and media art practice.
The potential for creating a mutually supportive and critically
engaged culture between art, engineering and science exists
at RPI to a degree that is possible in only a select few universities
worldwide. The initiative brings together RPI’s cutting-edge
biotechnology resources with its world-class electronic arts
community.
NEWS
Cautlin Berrigan at the Whitney Museum for American Art
Initial Public Offerings (I.P.O.): New Objects, New Audiences
Friday, January 25, 2008, 7 PM
Whitney Initial Public Offerings Presents an artist talk by Caitlin Berrigan in conversation with Boo Chapple, artist-in-residence at RMIT, Melbourne, Australia & Kathleen Forde, curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York
A new commissioned multiple artwork, Hepatophagy, will be given away to all who come, featuring sculpted La Tène Chocolate.
From chocolates made in the shape of the protein structure of the hepatitis C virus to silicone objects cast from the negative space of a mouth, artist Caitlin Berrigan probes bodily systems and pathologies to create works that address the simultaneous medicalization and eroticization of the human form. The results, she says, are "quietly disturbing works of subtle humor and irony that speak to our violent and conflicted relationship to the body." http://www.membrana.us
About Initial Public Offerings (I.P.O.): New Objects, New Audiences
Features artists who engage, challenge, or rethink modes of creation, circulation, and scale. Each artist in the series is commissioned to develop multiples that will be made available--free of charge--to the Whitney's public audiences.
Free with Museum admission, which is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6-9pm. You may register by going to http://whitney.org & clicking on the link to the talk on the front page. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Golden Nica for SymbioticA
SymbioticA Research Lab, University of
Western Australia, Perth, earns Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica
2007. The BioArt initiative is mentioned in the jury statement.
SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative
Research Laboratory, University of Western Australia, Perth
(represented by its co-founder and Artistic Director Oron Catts)
SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory, co-founded by Professor
Miranda Grounds, Professor Stuart Bunt as its scientific director,
and Oron Catts as its artistic director. The laboratory is dedicated
to the research, pedagogy and critique of life sciences in relation
to the arts. Since 2000, it has enabled artists to engage in
wet biology practices in a biological science department on
an ongoing basis and to pursue curiosity-based explorations
while complying with scientific regulations.
Uniquely housed within the School of Anatomy & Human Biology
at the University of Western Australia in Perth, SymbioticA
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.”
The jury recognizes SymbioticA’s exceptional achievement
as a collaborative structure which, since its creation, has
provided access to more than 40 resident artists who wish to
work with wet biology lab techniques. It became clear to the
jury that many of the submissions to the Hybrid category relied
on the type of resources which are nurtured and provided at
SymbioticA – to the extent that the Lab has since become
a model for other institution-embedded structures, including
Ectopia in Lisbon and the newly initiated BioArts Initiative
at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy. Artists
presently working with biological forms confront limitations
of access to technology, very much analogous to the experiences
of computer artists active in the late 1960s. The necessary
resources are financially still prohibitive, with access restrictive
and mainly obtained through institution-scale investments. Without
institutional support for the critical and imaginative practices,
the field is limited to singular and isolated attempts to employ
new techniques. SymbioticA represents an outstanding example
of how an artistic research community effectively identifies
new fields of engagement towards systemically meaningful art
forms.
Most crucial is SymbioticA’s efforts
to maintain the relationships between artists and scientists
in balance – a task that absorbs much creative energy
from the core artists running the structure, Oron Catts and
Ionat Zurr, from the Tissue Culture & Art project. Besides
welcoming other artists, dealing with the obligatory ethics
approvals and health and safety related issues, the core team
of artists also offer classes in “Biological Arts”
for undergraduate students, as well as the unique specialized
“Biological Arts Masters program”. Outside the academic
setting, it organizes workshops for artists including activities
such as DNA extraction and fingerprinting, genetic engineering
and basic tissue-engineering techniques, whose aim is to both
democratize knowledge about life sciences and to enable anyone
to set up home labs.
This award is intended to provide SymbioticA
both recognition and support for the Lab's existence, and help
in creating and producing new artworks. SymbioticA points to
new directions for the field of New Media art – to go
beyond "plug and play" strategies and to open the
horizon for new forms of art which demand time, equipment, skills
and philosophical awareness of the issues at stake. The jury
believes that these changing factors in terms of duration, transdisciplinary
fusion and the questioning of the centrality of data are crucial
in the category of Hybrid Art.
