open systems

By Elizabeth Buschmann

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.