my apologies for the late joining of this discussion.
Having just curated an exhibition around the thematics rather than the
epistemology of Synthetic Biology myself I find the previous posts
very pertinent. The SyNTH_EHTICS show looks great and the
documentation is very clear. My exhibition "LIFE 2.0: artifice to
synthesis" is being held over 3 months at The Royal Instuition of
Australia (RiAus) to go with 3 months programming of Synthetic Biology
policy meetings and symposiums for scientists and range of more
general public events. Like Jens, I put the show together quiet
quickly, and scheduled in highlights from the Biofiction Film Festival
later in the program.
http://riausondemand.org.au/life2
However the context I am curating in is quiet different. the RiAus
mission is "bringing science to people and people to science." More
broadly the aim is to inform and educate on the critical scientific
research being carried out today - so that society in general can
engage in knowledgeable dialogue and reach an opinion as to how our
future is created. RiAus has the only dedicated Art and Science
Gallery in Australia- and a unique remit to be a touchstone for
society; to bring prominent issues to the fore; to not only delight
and entertain, but to challenge and stimulate debate and to present
alternative perspectives on what matters to humanity.
This doesn't mean speaking to just the academic, scientific and art
world - and although they are included as a primary audience - it
means communicating with everyone. And its not illustrative "science
education" either - I dont think those dichotomies work any more -
the context itself is a synthesis of artistic of scientific intent.
Works I've include are as diverse as Deborah Kellys paper collage
animation of very sexy animal/insect hybids who do the dance of love
and then consume each other, documented and conceptual bio-art works
from Daisy Ginsberg, Rich Pell and others, the Life Support series
from Revital Cohen- who rightly insisted that she wouldn't be involved
in the exhibition if it had the term 'Synthetic Biology" in its title.
The part of the show that has captured people from board rooms to
crafting activists is the creation of a local chapter to crochet a
Hyperbolic Coral Reef. if any one was at Textures run by E-Text and
Textiles in Riga last year, you know what a lovely staring point that
is to speak of enfolding, species and environmental awareness -
creating active nodes by fusing art, science, mathematics, craft and
community. It seemed at first to RiAus an odd and soft inclusion in
show about hard science, but it embodies human striving, good will,
the wish for survival, recognition weve messed up, and the willingness
of the disparate and different to join together.
I'm not at all interested in singing the anthem of, or shaping the
canon of bioart itself, and I'm glad others are doing that, but rather
in creating a space where this "new" contemporary artform infiltrates
into the everyday. I do think often we can do ourselves as artists
and curators and writers a great disservice by neglecting the more
accessible aesthetic, material and poetic dimensions - the actual
space where this work can extend and embrace beyond its very smart
enclaves.
As said the same condition apply to the media arts - and I guess for
all the new forms yet to come. That pioneering imperative seems
rampant in technology fields.. a sense that once something becomes
settled, normalized its time to move to new territory, but I'm coming
to a place where I think maybe its time to look at what hasn't been
obvious - the subtleties rather than the spectacles. I went to
retrospective a while ago of one artists film and video work over 35
yeras. Video art has been a form I have always despised, yet I was
fascinated by the evolution and beauty of grain and compression and
migration. The content didn't matter, the materiality of the light did.
I seem to have veered off topic..
.. hope to catch up with many of you in Istanbul in September.
warm regards,
Melinda
Melinda Rackham
Contemporary Artforms Curator
Partner Curator Royal Institution of Australia
Adjunct Professor RMIT University
On 24/05/2011, at 2:05 AM, Daniel Lopez del Rincón wrote:
> Hi Jens and Yasminers,
>
> I have been reading Jens´explanations about the exhibition *Synth-
> ethics*:
> true food for thought. I joined the list months ago but I didn´t
> introduced
> myself. I´m Daniel López del Rincón, PhD student of Art History in
> University of Barcelona (Spain) in a research group of Art and New
> Tech
> (www. artyarqdigital.com).
>
> By mid June I´ll go to Wien and I´ll go and experience the exhibition
> Synth-ethics. I found the reflexions by Jens very interesting.
> Waiting for
> the direct experience when going to the exhibition I would like to
> make some
> questions:
>
> - Regarding the relationship between works and the museums where
> these are
> displayed: Is there a difference in doing an exhibiton on bioart
> in an art
> centre/museum or in a natural science museum?
> I´m thinking, for example: does the discourse (or meaning) of the
> works
> presented change in a scientific museum because an "artwork" is used
> to
> explain "scientific contents"? are there differences between public
> going
> to sciences museums and public of artistic museums?
>
> - Regarding the materiality of living artworks and the
> (bio)technologies
> used to "modify" them: to which extent technology is fundamental to
> talk
> albout "bioartistic" artwork?
> I´m thinking in the topic on the limits of the concept of bioart,
> that arose
> in the discussion you had in 2006 here in Yasmin. I see the
> difference between works that engage with biotechnology in a
> metaphorical/iconographic sense and others using biotechnology as
> their very
> medium (Jens talked very clearly about this, distinguishing between
> "meaning
> effects" and "presence effects" in "An art of Growing interest...").
> But:
> what are the differences between a work of art like the performances
> of i.e.
> Joseph Beuys (*I love America and America loves me*) with the
> presence of a
> living being (coyote) and the performer itself, and the works
> exhibited in *
> Synth-ethics*? Is (bio)technology the very key to understand/
> singularise the
> works displayed? How is technology and materiality "semantic"? Is
> technology not only a medium but also a concept?
>
> I have the impression that this questions are not just a problem of
> Bioart
> but maybe common to all "Media Art", but I think the materiality of
> (living)
> Bioart makes it different in some way.
>
> I would be glad if Jens (and others) could bring light to these
> questions.
>
> All the best,
>
> Daniel
>
> 2011/5/19 Jens Hauser <jhauser@club-internet.fr>
>
>> Hi Yasminers, dear Laura,
>>
>> thanks for pushing the discussion about „art AND synthetic biology"
>> or „art
>> WITH synthetic biology", which popped up after my announcement of the
>> current SYNTH-ETHICS exhibition at the Vienna Natural History
>> Museum, a step
>> further.
>> It's of course always better to actually go and see the exhibition
>> rather
>> than discussing it as a dry run, but here we're are again trapped
>> by the gap
>> between presence and representation, which is a current and known
>> problem
>> especially when it comes to biotechnological art forms which
>> speculate on
>> their underlying, supposed or real live-ness effects.
>>
>> Some of your points have to do with the very definition of the
>> branding and
>> the tangible reality of an emerging (or blended) technological
>> discipline
>> and what would be then the most justifiable posture for artists to
>> engage
>> with it; others deal with the question of the appropriate mediality
>> and
>> materiality of the aesthetic objects that relate to, or use tools
>> of this
>> "new discipline" - if ever it appears to be ontologically and
>> epistemologically different from previous biotechnologies in a more
>> or less
>> profound way.
>>
>> To recall, the Vienna exhibition which runs until June 26 in the very
>> "temple" of natural history, is an exhibition that presents art works
>> related to the new field of Synthetic Biology and its historical and
>> epistemological roots, and which questions the very notion of what
>> „synthesizing" actually means within the long tradition of the
>> discipline of
>> biology, be it in the light of the now acclaimed field of
>> contemporary
>> Synthetic Biology, or be it in the light of those previous
>> practices and
>> research orientations that currently converge to make Synthetic
>> Biology up.
>>
>> http://www.biofaction.com/synth-ethic/
>>
>> I pointed out earlier that this questions what Synthetic Biology
>> actually
>> can be defined by is not just a question of historical roots but of
>> diverging contemporary cultural and techno-scientific understanding
>> of the
>> field, quoting as one exemple De Lorenzo and Danchin (2008) with
>> their more
>> holistic approach which includes engineering, computing, modeling,
>> molecular
>> biology, evolutionary genomics, traditional biotechnologies,
>> orthogonal/artificial, origins of life research, proto-cells, protein
>> modeling etc.
>>
>> Laura, let's take up your first point, asking whether a contemporary
>> understanding of a changing field should not automatically
>> supercede its
>> earlier definitions:
>>
>> Why is it we are putting synthetic biology on the agenda now – and
>> not
>>> earlier if the field has the history we allure to? Should we
>>> distinguish
>>> between modern Synthetic Biology in the same way as traditional
>>> biotechnology is separated from modern biotechnology? The sciences
>>> has a
>>> shifting nature and its current state is often better understood
>>> in its
>>> present than past.
>>>
>>
>> I agree with your remark that putting SB on the agenda as a mere
>> topic
>> would be for sure – even curatorially speaking– a quite questionable
>> practice, just providing an intended utilitarian service in the
>> name of
>> science communication or educational purposes. Indeed, I disagree
>> with what
>> you say that science would be "better understood in its present
>> than past";
>> I believe that above all it is historical epistemology which helps
>> getting
>> the absolutely necessary critical distance when discussing the
>> "newness" of
>> a new field and its applications, then subverted, co-developed or
>> just used
>> by artists. But I think that you are absolutely right saying that
>> distinguishing between traditional biotechnology and modern
>> biotechnology is
>> addressing the same problematic so-called biotechnological art faces:
>>
>> How different are, as an example, the practices of tissue culture
>> concretely used by the Tissue Culture and Art project since 1996 to
>> those
>> already known in the first half of the 20th century? Looking
>> closely, one
>> may say that they differ only gradually – but have become
>> available, and of
>> interest, to artists only in the late 20th century. The case of
>> TC&A is even
>> more interesting when thinking that their use of tissue engineering
>> has
>> often been a way to actually criticize the hype around genomics
>> (taking the
>> latter as a topic) – using tissue engineering, materially speaking,
>> to
>> subvert discourses surrounding the topic of the Human Genome
>> Project ("Pig
>> Wings") – but both, indeed, include "traditional and modern
>> biotechnologies." Also, something has changed in biotechnologies
>> and tissue
>> engineering: When you read manuals from the beginning of the
>> century – I'm
>> just dissecting Erdmann's "Praktikum der Gewebepflege oder
>> Explantation
>> besonders der Gewebezüchtung" from 1922 – you recognize that half
>> of the
>> book does not deal with the actual practice of tissue culture, but
>> with how
>> and where to get the growth medium from and how to extract it from
>> living
>> organisms. I'm taking this as an example because many of TC&A's works
>> actually deal with the irony of the proclaimed contemporary
>> "victimlessness"
>> of contemporary biotechnology which hides its victims away, unlike
>> traditional biotechnology manuals. By pointing to this shift, TC&A
>> actually
>> criticizes modern techno-sciences by the use of, and the reference to
>> traditional ones – but without the very materiality itself
>> undergoing a
>> paradigm shift. It points to the contemporary "media blindness" of
>> contemporary sciences, ready to hide the means that produce
>> knowledge away
>> in the banality of their "materials & methods" section, while in the
>> contemporary artist's work, the (growth) medium – understood in its
>> sense of
>> milieu – is, finally, the very message. Another example from TC&A,
>> and which
>> may justify the very presence of a TC piece such as the "Worry
>> Dolls" in the
>> SYNTH-ETHICS exhibition, is that the used McCoy cells (human/mice)
>> can be
>> actually seen as a product of biological synthesis, even in the
>> realm or
>> tissue culture.
>>
>> In a similar sense, we can see Joe Davis's "Bacterial Radio",
>> consisting of
>> bacterially-grown platinum/germanium electrical circuits to
>> potentially
>> listen to AM stations (unfortunately the last one has been recently
>> dismantled in Vienna), as an ironic reverse of the main goal of
>> synthetic
>> biology by applying biological principals to electronic
>> engineering, instead
>> of vice versa. While synthetic biologists attempt to create "genetic
>> circuits" made out of standard biological parts, devices and systems,
>> frequently citing electronic engineering as their most favorite
>> metaphor,
>> critics argue that living organisms are too complex to be designed
>> and
>> constructed like electronic circuits. But even, to quote private
>> conversations with Joe Davis, for him the ideal "Bacterial Radio"
>> would be
>> functioning not with bacterially grown metal circuits in a Petri
>> dish, but
>> as a genetic circuit within a single bacterium… simply, even
>> contemporary SB
>> is not yet up for this.
>>
>> So, Laura, your following point is also important:
>>
>> How do we talk about synthetic biology as a practice? For instance,
>> in
>>> terms of standardised parts: Is merely using parts from Synthetic
>>> Biology
>>> sufficient (i.e. transformation) or does one have to engage in
>>> synthesising
>>> parts
>>>
>>
>> In fact you are asking the question whether SB art would need to
>> imply the
>> actual techno-scientific CREATION of, to make it 'standard' let's
>> say, an
>> artistic "biobrick", or whether the only USE of such a "biobrick"
>> would
>> actually make it qualifying for the "label" of "SB art." Does this
>> not ask
>> the question of the (rare) case of the artist as (scientific)
>> inventor (see
>> als Dieter Daniel's book " Artists as Inventors -Inventors as
>> Artists",
>> 2008)? My answer may seem quite conservative, coming myself from film
>> studies as my initial academic focus: of course I value most highly
>> all
>> formalist's and avantgardist's attempts to invent, transform,
>> transgress and
>> develop the very mediality of an art medium, but the great majority
>> of
>> artists in all disciplines is fine with just using these media for
>> aesthetic
>> and discursive practices, and I do not see a problem here.
>>
>> Taking the very example of Tuur van Balen's "Pigeon d'Or",
>> attempting at
>> making pigeons defecate soap, my understanding is that there is
>> both use and
>> development of two "biobricks" that work at the level of the
>> bacteria, not
>> yet at the level of the pigeon organism: one may lower the pH level
>> in
>> Bacillus subtilis, the other makes it express lipase. See the
>> "biobrick"
>> here, I trust indicating this correctly:
>> http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K200031
>>
>> Of how many artists do we indeed know who really develop poetico-
>> artistic
>> "biobricks" – and should this even be a criterium for art? What
>> comes to my
>> mind is this "teenage gen poem" by the Bangalore based art/science
>> team
>> Yashas Shetty and Mukund Thattai named "BBa_K22100", a sequence of
>> DNA that
>> produces the organic compound Geosmin, and which is responsible for
>> the
>> smell of wet earth when it
>> begins to rain, thus playing on the mystique surrounding the aroma
>> of the
>> Indian monsoon. How many do you know?
>>
>> A last point I wish to develop relates to your quote of my 2005
>> text "Bio
>> Art—Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster" (Ars Electronica catalogue
>> "Hybrid") in which I wrote that "bio-fictional manifestations such as
>> chimera-sculptures, DNA-portraits, chromosome- paintings or mutant-
>> depicting
>> digital photo-tricks are no more examples of Bio Art than Claude
>> Monet's
>> impressionistic paintings could be classified as ‚Water Lily Art' or
>> ‚Cathedral Art'". While here, the question was whether sculpture,
>> painting,
>> photoshop etc. could be or not appropriate media – in the
>> aforementioned
>> sense of "media adequacy" – to address biotechnology related issue
>> in their
>> very presence rather than in their symbolic representation, I
>> suspect that
>> your point is that works in SYNTH-ETHICS may not materially relate
>> to the
>> field of Synthetic Biology, but rather in a thematic or evocative
>> sense. I
>> do respect the kind of puristic endeavor lurking behind such
>> suggestion, but
>> tend to affirm that this comparison is not accurate. While there is
>> no doubt
>> that painting or sculpture in their classical mediality do represent
>> bio-topics, however, I would claim that all works included in SYNTH-
>> ETHICS
>> do actually include material techniques or disciplines which
>> constitute the
>> convergent parts of Synthetic Biology, both conceptually and
>> materially.
>>
>> Let's take, as a last case study, the development of the concept of
>> proto-cells, which are so central in Synthetic Biology nowadays
>> (again). For
>> sure, as an example for the current state of the "art", Steen
>> Rasmussen
>> (Rasmussen [ed.]: Protocells : bridging nonliving and living matter.
>> Cambridge, 2009), in his question what protocells actually are,
>> states in
>> general as an universal epistemological truth that „all life forms
>> are
>> composed of molecules that are not themselves alive." In a
>> contemporary
>> sense, he then elaborates that three operational functionalities
>> may be
>> required: "a METABOLISM that extracts usable energy and resources
>> from the
>> environment, GENES that chemically realize informational control of
>> living
>> functionalities, and a CONTAINER that keeps them all together."
>> Now, for
>> example, in the use of the term protocell by artist and architect
>> Rachel
>> Armstrong, who seeks to apply the properties of living systems to
>> large-scale constructions, her protocells in her installation "Living
>> Chemistry" are more the precursors of "living" cells formed by the
>> innate,
>> complex chemistry of molecules existing at the interface between
>> oil and
>> water. They definitively form a container and express a metabolism,
>> but they
>> are not ruled by genes that would permit REPLICATION rather than
>> DIVISION
>> only. But would it be for this reason that we would dismiss the
>> material
>> qualities of Armstrong's artistic protocells? Of course, she
>> derives her
>> practice from former research on protoplasmatic structures, as
>> already
>> carried out in basic research at the end of the 19th century. But
>> in the
>> context of today's synthetic biology, protocells are becoming of
>> central
>> interest for different reasons: While attempts to make cells
>> function with a
>> totally synthetic genome have been successful, it still remains a
>> challenge
>> to actually synthesize the cell itself as the basic unit of life
>> and have it
>> serve, then, as a "chassis" for genetic circuits. And who can be,
>> as a
>> speculative question, totally sure that such protocells, as
>> biological
>> machines following an engineering principle rather that needing to
>> be alive,
>> really need REPLICATION capacities and could not be fine with
>> DIVISION
>> capacities only?
>>
>> To finish with, I would like to quote a short passage from Stéphane
>> Leduc
>> (1853–1939), the French biologist who was actually the first to
>> coin the
>> term „synthetic biology" in 1910. In "The Mechanisms of Life" he
>> writes:
>> „The evolution of biology has been the same as that of the other
>> sciences;
>> it has been successively DESCRIPTIVE, ANALYTICAL, and SYNTHETIC.
>> Just as
>> synthetic chemistry began with the artificial formation of the
>> simplest
>> organic products, so biological synthesis must content itself at
>> first with
>> the fabrication of forms resembling those of the lowest organisms.
>> Like
>> other sciences, synthetic biology must proceed from the simpler to
>> the more
>> complex, beginning with the reproduction of the more elementary vital
>> phenomena."
>>
>> By this quote, and by the other elements cited, I hope having
>> delivered
>> some food for thought and some reasons why SYNTH-ETHICS is
>> presenting itself
>> through an epistemological approach rather than through the prism
>> of the
>> self-understanding of an emerging contemporary discipline and its
>> current
>> techniques only.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Jens
>>
>>
>>
>> PS 1: You may have a look at how the New Scientist has seen the show:
>>
>> http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/05/unnatural-art.html
>>
>> PS 2: SYNTH-ETHICS stages art works by Rachel Armstrong, Art
>> Orienté objet
>> (Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin), Adam Brown, Joe Davis, Andy
>> Gracie,
>> Roman Kirschner, James Tour & Stephanie Chanteau, Tuur Van Balen,
>> Paul
>> Vanouse, The Tissue Culture and Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat
>> Zurr).
>>
>>
>>
>>
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> --
>
> Daniel López del Rincón
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