Here’s that review in of the Plastic Futures 2 exhibition in FrameMag:
http://www.framemag.com/news/857
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From the blog of Lebbeus Woods comes an entry entitled “Utopia Redux” which features a series of images by Cooper Union student Daniel Meriador. They depict a strange and silent technological architecture of humankind, juxtaposed, or floating whimsically, against degraded or hostile-seeming landscapes. Using photo-montage, the images are disarmingly simple, and almost iconographic. The typical elements of classic science fiction imagery are there, the vastness of the landscape and the tiny, solitary, contemplative human figure. Woods points out the ambiguity with regard to whether the images are a vision of utopia or dystopia. Meriador has beautifully encapsulated the notion that neither scenario is completely plausible. It’s pointless to view the future as black and white. Instead there is the complex dynamic, an enlightened form of sustainability, touched on in previous Plastic Futures posts, characterised by constant flux. Woods supposes that the new generation of student architects are both more idealistic and realistic about the future as well as more process driven than their novelty obsessed predecessors. For me it inspires a long suppressed urge to make ‘artistic’ architectural imagery for its own sake, from an internally driven, self contained impulse, as a focus for outward reflection or speculation. Read the Lebbeus Woods article here.
Last year I presented the iPatch™ (complete with ironic trademarking) as a satire on the way we look to technology to solve problems often caused by technology. In this case the vast amount of information we recieve via a growing number of technological media. At the same time the iPatch™ is a recognition that the pace of technological change and the increased reliance on large complex information systems is an inescapable reality. The latest issue of New Scientist has an article entitled “The dangers of a high-information diet”, wherein the alalogy of diet and over-indulgence is explored in terms of possible hazards, to individuals and society, of too much information. Philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that the ready availability of some types of information in itself may be harmful (such as a recipe for making a bomb) but admits that it is dangerous to try to limit the amount of information that is accessible. People crave information the same way that some people crave food. Perhaps we can think of it as information obesity. “After the break, The Biggest Loser: Brain Drain.”
There is often a moral dimension to the popular fear and resistance associated with technological, social and environmental change. This kind of fear (”future-shock” immediately comes to mind) involves the struggle to cope with new modes of living, as well as a sense of loss for the old. We can never go back to the way things used to be. These ideas are discussed in this article in The Economist (Christmas 2009)) dealing with the way the concept of “progress” has been seen throughout history. The article proposes a generally humanist approach to the (basically false) future utopia/dystopia dualism. Refering to the work of Susan Neiman who rejects “the false choice between Utopia and degeneracy. Moral progress, she writes, is neither guaranteed nor is it hopeless. Instead, it is up to us.”
A bit of whizz-bangery from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT. It’s a 3D printer for printing food, molecule by molecule.
The NewScientist just came out with a gallery of Microbial Art or view source at MicrobialArt.com  Pattern produced by the bacteria responding to stresses put upon them SEEDmag’s just featured Martin Chalfie’s workbench – an interesting read..
Excerpt: Martin Chalfie is perhaps best known for his Nobel Prize-winning work on GFP, a jellyfish molecule that glows bright green when exposed to blue light. By injecting it into bacteria more than a decade ago to create the first tool for visualizing biological processes in living cells, Chalfie transformed the life sciences. “I realized this was going to be an extremely important tool,” Chalfie says. “What I didn’t know at the time was how far-reaching the impact of this molecule was going to be.” Now the pioneering scientist is busy illuminating mysteries beyond the glow of a curious jellyfish gene. Seed recently visited him at his office at Columbia University to root around his lab equipment, hear about how his life has changed since receiving the Nobel, and find out why he pokes worms with his eyebrow hairs. We’ve spent the past five days working with pipettes, petri-dishes and the semi-living in a science lab at RMIT. It may have come as a surprise to many of us that a basic understanding of genetics already existed in our minds, whether facilitated by well-informed sci-fi fantasies, a strong math background, or by a basic education in computer science. I think this is interesting because whether or not we have formal training; the technology seems to unravel itself as our understanding increases. But as artists, what do we hope to see come of a DIY biological art education? If the role of the artist is to assist in the process of cultural digestion, thereby to reassess cultural attitudes, contemporary thought, and the impact of present/future technologies… then it is our responsibility to understand not only the methodologies of these particular materials, but the potential impacts and cultural context that they participate in. Not to mention, how we frame what we create. In the past century we have seen alongside oil paintings and ceramic sculpture; orchids, computers, earth works, VR, bunny rabbits, etc. The question isn’t can we work with the technologies available, it’s what are we making and how does it interact with our environment, in terms of communication and ecology. According to Jack Burnham in Systems Esthetics: “The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective there are no contrived confines such as the theater proscenium or picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system. Inasmuch as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a “complex of components in interaction,” comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behavior determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control.” With this in mind, what are the fundamentals of biological art? Are there rules to break in the biological arts? To begin asking these questions, one could look at the Software exhibition of 1970 curated by Burnham at the Jewish Museum. Artists / public knew little about how computer systems work, yet in this show artists were utilizing basic computational processes (software) for the output of art (hardware). Such interaction with the medium required a rudimentary understanding of early computer science, but ultimately provided extended metaphors that changed with the development of individuating and evolving sensibilities. Perhaps as the space between ideation process and artistic output becomes clearer in the biological arts, we will come to recognize emerging metaphors that contribute to a greater complexity of poetic systems amongst artists and designers alike. The final day of the SymbioticA Biotech-Art workshop began with a session about plant tissue culture and cloning with Dr. Tien Huynh from RMIT Applied Science. We were given tiny ‘daughter’ plants cloned from a Chinese orchid species and separated them in sterile conditions before planting them in individual sealed jars containing 6 different mixtures of growing media. The recipes consisted of varying quantities of charcoal, coconut milk, banana, sugar and other nutrients in an agar gel. These kinds of experiments are used to fine-tune the way plants are grown in the horticulture industry where propagation from cuttings (essentially a form of both cloning and tissue culture) has a long history. The discussion about plant tissue culture led to speculation about the possibility of combining plant and animal DNA. We know that in the 1990s there was widespread debate about so-called “frankenfoods”, one example being the frost-resistant tomato plant that was created using genes from a fish. In terms of future scenarios I was interested in the idea of growing plant and animal cells together to form a new type of tissue, one that could grow and photosynthesise. Imagine a living, growing solar-powered building skin, or what about a solar powered human! I was surprised to learn that something like this already occurs naturally. There exists a type of sea slug (several different species, one from Australia). The slug’s body contains a network of ducts which contain the green chloroplasts from the algae it eats. When the slug is born it eats the algae and takes the chloroplasts into its cells. From then on it is able to produce its own energy. The New Scientist website contains a video showing the sea slug at work.
The second task of the day was touted as possibly the most morally and ethically loaded for many participants and this was the “killing and cleaning” session. All the biological materials used during the week needed to be “killed” or safely disposed of and equipment sterilised in a highly controlled manner ensuring no escape or contamination. Being unable to attend this session myself I am told it was undertaken with a surprising lack of ceremony, items were dumped in the appropriate biohazard bag or container or placed in the autoclave and everyone made their way out to have lunch! It seems to me this was partly because none of the materials used in the workshop were actually considered dangerous, and not just because we were simply running short of time. This also suggested that some of the qualms voiced during the week with regard to the use and destruction of living things had given way to scientific detatchment and an understanding of certain realities of working in the lab. In the final afternoon session the group held a public symposium where participants were given the opportunity to present some of their own work and discuss their specific areas of interest as well as to reflect upon their experiences in the workshop and the issues it raised during the week. During the seminar there was a re-engagement and review of the arguments/discussions held during the week, about the role of the artist to assist in the process of “cultural digestion” of science and what the stuff, the meaning, the “Meat” of this art would be, aside from the material, the “meat” that it could be composed of. The topics of dissussion ranged from the future of global climate, to a report presenting a set of responses from participants to the question “What if..?” (i.e. the possible direction individual artists might take in their work as a result of ideas generated by the workshop, this included a series of small sketches depicting these “germs” of ideas.) to a sort of performance “happening” involving (not always enthusiastic) audience participation to physically recreate the gel electrophoresis experiment of earlier in the week. The idea behind this was to try and stimulate open participation in some of the questions raised in the workshop through physical manipulation of space and semiotic and social cues within the metaphor of “objective” scientific inquiry. I think it’s clear that many participants retain uncertainties about many of the issues raised. And rightly so, since the black/white, agree/disagree dichotomies — even if presented on a sliding scale — fail to appreciate the diversity and complexity of views. At the conclusion of the workshop there seemed to be the strong desire for members of the group to stay engaged with this subject matter, and with each other in the future pursuit of artistic and design endeavours. It’s clear that the areas of science, technology and ethics we have briefly explored are ripe with unresolved tensions and amazing possibilities. As this week ends, and many many wonderful sources/names etc were mentioned, I would like to propose that we create a running archive from our notes for items such as resources e.g. films, books, materials, researchers……… [this is a great idea. we'll be setting up a resources page that you can hopefully easily get to and add links, references, and upload pdfs.] – admins. |
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