Media Arts Watch Lab - www.arts-numeriques.info - laboratoire de veille Arts Numériques - twitter @arts_numeriques - @processing_org - @DigitalArt_be - by @jacquesurbanska @_Transcultures
We all glow. All living cells of bacteria, plants as well as (human and non-human) animals emit biophotons, extremely weak light emissions which cannot be perceived by the naked eye and are used in cell-to-cell communication in living systems. Instruments like photomultipliers tubes (PMT), however, are such sensitive detectors of light that they can detect individual photons.
Back in 2015, Mike and Susana from Thought Collider teamed up with artist Dave Young and researchers at Leiden University to build a kinetic sound installation around a Photon-Multiplier Tube.
Although the transformation of the functional state of the living organism into sound was an important dimension of the work, the artists and designers were also interested in looking at the processes and authoritative gestures that legitimise the collection of personal information and how informed consent is attained and defined.
With two decades of artistic practice exploring an understanding of the natural world through the medium of computational technologies, boredomresearch have become intimately aware of the sensitivity and vulnerability of complex systems, including those which support human life on earth.
boredomresearch have been expanding their interest in bio-inspired systems in a project Robots in Distress which considers our strategies for coping in a world increasingly destabilised by human activity. In collaboration with the Artificial Life Lab (Karl Franzens University, Graz Austria), who are employing bio-inspired robots to provide solutions operating in human polluted environments, in 2016 boredomresearch started building robots made from the same plastic waste that pollutes many marine environments. Their work with biologists and engineers offers a different perspective which challenges a broader concern over a tendency towards increasingly complex solutions to answer the challenges of environmental crisis. This has led the artists to extend cutting edge research in artificial neural networks augmented by artificial hormone production to create autonomous agents with the potential for despondency. As emotional robotics becomes a reality does it also reveal a vulnerability? As we incorporate the robustness of swarm robotics into our technological armory should we also be mindful that the most archetypal swarm of all, the honey bee, is an organism in crisis. In this presentation boredomresearch foster a new vision for technological innovation, one that recognises the fragility of the environment that sustains it.
Guy Ben-Ary, born in Los Angeles, is a Perth based artist and researcher. He currently works at SymbioticA, an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and hands-on engagement with the life sciences, which is located within the University of Western Australia. Recognised internationally as a major artist and innovator working across science and media arts, Guy specialises in biotechnological artwork, which aims to enrich our understanding of what it means to be alive.
Guy’s work has been shown across the globe at prestigious venues and festivals from the Beijing National Art Museum to San Paulo Biennale to the Moscow Biennale. His work can also be seen in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2009, his work Silent Barrage was awarded an Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and also won first prize at VIDA, a significant international competition for Art and Artificial Life.
Guy specializes in microscopy, biological & digital imaging, tissue engineering. His Main research areas are cybernetics, robotics and the interface of biological material to robotics. Much of Ben-Ary’s work is inspired by science and nature. His artworks utilize motion and growth to investigate technological aspects of today’s culture and the re-use of biological materials and technologies.
Eduardo Kac is a pioneer of bio art. The School of the Art Institute professor has pushed boundaries—and buttons—throughout his career. He is best known for his series of "transgenic" works, art that blends natural and created elements in highly unexpected ways. These works include a green fluorescent rabbit, a synthetic gene built on a Morse code translation of a sentence from the Book of Genesis, and a genetically engineered petunia that contains Kac's DNA. Join curator Hamza Walker and Kac for a conversation on his radical art practice and the many questions it poses for our genomic time.
The annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series recognizes a significant gift from founding CHF board member and distinguished art dealer Richard Gray. Thanks to the generosity of Lorraine and Jay Jaffe, Eduardo Kac will also visit a Chicago-area classroom and lead an interactive experience with the students.
Video produced by Pentimenti Productions.
This program was recorded on November 9, 2013 as part of the 24th Chicago Humanities Festival, ANIMAL: http://chf.to/2013Animal
… and what comes after self-driving cars and the internet of things?
While the world still has its hands full dealing with the Digital Revolution and the cultural and social transformations and challenges that it’s brought about, a young generation of scientists and creative engineers has set a course for new frontiers and is already at work amalgamating the disembodied world of digital data with the physical world of our bodies. They’re interconnecting bits and atoms in elementary form, fabricating new high-tech materials from natural substances. They’re teaming up with artists and designers, employing the neurosciences and biotechnology, digital hardware & software, and bringing together old handicrafts traditions with 3-D printers and laser cutters.
With their unorthodox approaches and highly inspiring projects, they’re not only blazing trails for new developments; they’re also opening up completely new ways of looking at the role of science in our society and the interplay of technology and nature...
With Cellout.me, artist Jeroen van Loon is offering his complete DNA sequence for sale.
His DNA sequence contains 380 GB of data, which consists of the three billion ACTGs that make up his source code. The DNA sequence has been determined with a 30-fold coverage depth, making it ‘laboratory’ quality. The data is stored on a server in a server rack which shows the DNA sequence and the website www.cellout.me. The public can see both the current bid and the actual data simultaneously. The buyer of Cellout.me will own an extremely personal ‘self portrait’ and will become co-owner of the artist’s DNA.
By turning DNA data into a commodity, Cellout.me tries to show some of the future ethical, financial and artistic questions and consequences that arise with DNA sequencing technology, which is getting cheaper, easier and more accessible each day. Biology is converted into binary data – data that is stored in data centers. Data that can be copied, manipulated, shared, sold, bought and so on.
Ce sixième numéro de Vidéographies défriche le champ ultra-contemporain du champ Art(s) & Hacktivisme. Spécialiste du domaine, Jacques Urbanska nous guide à travers pas moins de 25 œuvres et performances mêlant arts, sciences et militantisme.
Par les détournements opérés par les hackers, des objets du quotidien au réseau informatique, le spectateur ou l'utilisateur est amené à repenser son rapport à la société d'aujourd'hui.
Audiopill: for enjoying music from the inside. Art and technology. Project audiopill.net. Part of exhibition Prolapse of Love, 14. - 24.1. 2016, Prague, prolapseoflove.com
On the occasion of his exhibition Prolapse of Love, artist Jan Poope will introduce a world-unique device Audiopill, designed for enjoying music from within your own body. You swallow the pill and it then starts to rumble at a preset BPM. Techno party you can’t avoid.The second part of "musical component" in this conceptual art by Jan Poope is based on an Italian medical device Sirio. Ultrasound scratching on human bodies is a brand new music genre. Extremely personal and uncopyable. No one can hear anything, not even the performer-musician, the only one who enjoys the music is the listener.Audiopill is a functional prototype yet and simultaneously with its official introduction/exhibition opening on January 14, 2016, a crowdfunding campaign will start on indiegogo.com. If successful, anyone in the world will be able to make their dreams about exciting musical self-destruction come true.
Born in 1982 in Shiraz, Golnaz Behrouznia orientedherself from a young age in visual arts.She began practicing sculpture while studying finearts in Tehran and, after that, continuedher work as a professional artist. In Iran, she participated in fifteen solo and groupexhibitions in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz and won several awards at festivals and biennials.In 2008 she decided to go to France to continue herartistic career. Fascinated bymultimedia, she studied Digital Media Design in inToulouse. She has presented her work inthe form of sculptures, video installations and paintings in different places like the “Muséedes Abattoirs", "La salle des Illustres" and "la Fabrique culturelle" in Toulouse, the "SalleEspalioux" in Pamiers, the "Salle Aubette" in Strasbourg and the “PAD” art fair in Paris
Tissue cultures, genetic modification, bacterial colonies. Over the last decade, more and more artists have been giving up the studio in favor of the laboratory.
In the spring of 2008, curator Paola Antonelli at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was forced to kill a work of art. A thumb-size “jacket” cultivated from mouse tissue that lived inside a sterile glass ball, Victimless Leather was not your typical museum piece. The cells were very much alive—and they were multiplying. So rapidly, in fact, that five weeks into the exhibition, they were threatening to clog the incubation system that kept them alive. Antonelli would have to cut off the nutrient supply. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “There was no way I was going to switch it off,” she recalls. “I can’t even kill a mosquito.”...
This collision between the art of deception and the science of perception has also intrigued artists Michele Barker and Anna Munster, who bring this fledgling area of enquiry into the media art realm with HokusPokus. Comprising one half of the visual arts program in Performance Space’s 2011 Exchange season, this collaborative work employed an interactive cinematic magic show to explore the corporeal aspects of seeing. The artists’ playful and experimental journey into neuroscience was paired with a stunning immersive installation in the main space informed by the biological sciences, Peta Clancy and Helen Pynor’s The Body is a Big Place, with sound by Gail Priest, which engaged the organ transplantation process to challenge the disconnect we have with our own bodies and to create greater empathy for this remarkable yet often misunderstood medical procedure...
RealTime plus OnScreen online and print arts magazine covering innovative practices in media art, digital art, hybrid art, performance, dance, visual art, sound and music, film in Australia and internationally
Artist Ren Ri (who trained at Tsinghua Academy of Art and Saint Petersburg State University in Russia) creates art that is influenced by his childhood—one that occurred amongst the beautiful scenery of Wuhan’s lush vegetation. “Back then, I was spending a lot of time observing animals and plants; my passion for moulding was parallel to an interest for insect ethology,” he recalls. Thus came the inspiration for his project “Yuansu II” which is crafted from the extraordinary medium of beeswax.
ISEA is one of the world’s most prominent international arts and technology events, bringing together scholarly, artistic, and scientific domains in an interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactivity, and electronic and digital media.
ISEA2017 invites to reflect on the contributions that art, design, and technology provide as alternatives for social development based on respect for natural biodiversity and having pacific coexistence of the communities. ISEA2017 welcomes submissions in three broad categories: academic (papers, posters, panels, and roundtables), creative (artworks, installations, performances, and design cases) and learning (residence, workshops, tutorials, artist or designer talks, and institutional presentations).
L’exposition Cells Fiction, qui interroge l’univers du microcosme, présente les travaux de dix étudiants de Master, réalisés dans le cadre du programme de recherche Images, Sciences et Technologies conduit par l’Esä, Ecole Supérieure d’Art du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, en association avec le Centre d’art Espace Croisé et le laboratoire TisBio (CNRS, Université Lille 1). Pour réaliser leurs projets, les étudiants ont travaillé au sein du laboratoire de microscopie photonique Tisbio, à l’interface entre la biologie, l’informatique et la physique. Si certains ont étudié les minéraux ou les propriétés de la lumière, beaucoup ont travaillé à partir des cellules, humaines ou végétales, ces plus petites unités du vivant. Quelles informations contiennent-elles ? Leur division, qui s’opère à notre insu, peuvent-elles nous apporter des informations autres que strictement scientifiques sur nous-mêmes ? Peut-on les faire « parler » différemment : ont-elles un son, une odeur ? Les séances au sein du laboratoire se sont multipliées depuis sept mois, conduisant les uns et les autres à affiner leurs projets, à les nourrir de lectures scientifiques, à répéter les expériences et les phases d’observation. ...
cellF is the world’s first neural synthesizer. It is a real “wet-alogue” Synthesizer. cellF’s “brain” is made of a biological neural network that grows in a Petri dish and controls in real time an array of analogue modular synthesizers that were custom made to work in synergy with the neural network. It is a completely autonomous, wet and analogue instrument.
In 2012, Guy Ben-Ary received a fellowship to develop a biological self-portrait, and decided to portray one of his juvenile dreams: to become a rock star.
Guy Ben-Ary had a biopsy taken from his arm, then he cultivated his skin cells in vitro in the labs of SymbioticA at UWA, and using Induced Pluripotent Stem cell technology, he transformed his skin cells into stem cells. When these stem cells began to differentiate they were pushed down the neuronal lineage until they became neural stem cells, which were then fully differentiated into neural networks over a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA) dish to become - “Ben-Ary’s external brain”.
The MEA dishes that host Ben-Ary’s neural networks consist of a grid of 8×8 electrodes. These electrodes can record the electric signals (action potentials) that the neurons produce and at the same time send stimulations to the neurons – essentially a read-and-write interface to the “brain”.
This project starts in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Covering between 700000 and 15 million square kilometers, the site is a monument to plastic waste on a global scale. Referring to Kantian aesthetics, it is a truly ‘sublime’ kinetic sculpture built by all the nations around the Pacific Ocean through many years of mindless, unsustainable consumption. As environmental activist and discoverer of the Trash Vortex Captain Charles Moore boldly claims, ‘the ocean has turned into a plastic soup.’ From primordial soup to plastic soup, An Ecosystem of Excess asks a very simple question: ‘If life started today in our plastic debris filled oceans, what kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?’
The project introduces pelagic insects, marine reptilia, fish and birds endowed with organs to sense and metabolize plastics as a new Linnean order of post-human life forms. Inspired by the groundbreaking findings of new bacteria that burrow into pelagic plastics, An Ecosystem of Excess envisions life forms of greater complexity, life forms that can thrive in man-made extreme environments, life forms that can turn the toxic surplus of our capitalistic desire into eggs, vibrations, and joy. Starting from excessive anthropocentrism An Ecosystem of Excess reaches anthropo-de-centrism, by offering life without mankind.
Overcoming any borders, be they external borders or one's own, is invariably accompanied by a feeling of their other predestination. The matter seems to lie not even in the fact that man in himself is a creature implicating restrictions, and only through it and thanks to it he can overcome them - it is rather that while leaving a border one always approaches another border. In the long run, by repeatedly reproducing the border situation, the man rather ritually recreates the only verge, a reminder-verge, over which he - a being formed within the framework of his heredity flow - is initially denied possession of power. Namely, he cannot possess power over the borders set by his birth and death… Nothing can bring out this essentially simple speculation better than issues of time and technologies that claim abolishment and removal of time constraints. The pioneering direct manipulations in this field, performed via bio- and genetic technologies, definitely belong to the most significant milestones of the current era and are an important step forward in the development of the general theme of "borders" within European cultures, and a new subject in the exploration and realization of this theme. Never before, it seems, has the price of such research been so breathtakingly high: man begins to reshape himself according to his own conceptions. By decoding our biological structure and learning to alter it, we gain power over our own evolution. We start traveling into the unknown …
Kevin Kit Parker wants to build a human heart. His young daughter loves the New England Aquarium in Boston. In this Science report, father’s and daughter’s obsessions have combined in an unlikely creation: a nickel-sized artificial stingray whose swimming is guided by light and powered by rat heart muscle cells.
Incorporating advances in engineering, cell culture, genetics, and biomechanics, the “living” robot is “clearly a technical tour de force,” says Adam Summers, an integrative biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle. And some think that by melding cells and artificial materials into a pulsating structure, the device brings Parker’s dream of engineering a human heart a step closer. “One can imagine that one day we can use this technology to rebuild parts of the human body,” says Kedi Xu, a neural engineer at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
(Art)ScienceBLR is a public laboratory at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology for artists and designers to engage with scientific practices. Residencies, exhibitions, workshops, talks...
We look at the artistic, social and political implications of technologies from computing to biotechnologies. Our work exists at the intersection of art-science and pedagogy, creating spaces of dialogue and interaction between artists, designers and scientists.
Since our inception in 2009 we have focused on using DIY techniques to build low-cost laboratory equipment, so as to offer more accessible forms of engagement with the life-sciences.
We also run a community electronics and BioLab which encourages students and the community to make/hack and prototype.
My approach to a sculpture seeks to frame nature so one can experience it more intimately,” says British artist Wolfgang Buttress, whose 17-metre high Hive installation opens at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London on Saturday. “I want visitors to feel enveloped, wrapped-up and involved in the experience, rather than adopting the position of an external observer.”
How much do you know about bees? - quiz
Its 170,000 pieces of aluminium, suspended from the ground, appear as a twisting swarm of bees from afar, but as you come closer it becomes a hive-like structure of latticework whose low humming sound and hundreds of flickering LED lights draws you in to a multi-sensory instillation. The intensity of sound and light is controlled by the vibrations of honeybees in an actual hive at Kew that is connected to the sculpture. ...
Robertina Šebjanič /based in Ljubljana/ is working in the cross field of art – technology – science.
Her art – research focus is since several years oriented towards the project developed in the field of Living systems (bio-art), AV performances, noise/sound art, installations and interactive ambiental responsive immersive environments. The context for her ideas and concepts is often realized in collaboration with other authors (artist, scientist, humanist, makers, hackers…), and through interdisciplinary and informal integration embodies in her work.
Une installation slovène propose d’entrer dans une interface humain-champignon. L’occasion de réfléchir sur la communication entre espèces et le bio-art.
C’est un œuf oblong, blanc et strié, qui ressemble à une capsule spatiale de série Z. J’entre et je m’allonge. On me tend un casque audio, puis un capteur à tenir pressé contre mon pouce. On enserre mes bras et mes jambes avec des demi-cercles de plastique. Au-dessus de moi, la lumière est douce et pulsée.
Puis un son industriel retentit dans le casque, le plastique se met à vrombir et contre toute attente mon cœur s’emballe. Il est vrai qu’on m’a annoncé que j’allais être connectée à une interface humain-champignon, à travers les battements de mon cœur. C’est un peu normal qu’il soit désarçonné...
La designer et architecte Neri Oxman conduit la recherche pour trouver des façons de faire interagir la fabrication digitale et le monde biologique. En travaillant à l'intersection de la conception par ordinateur, de la fabrication additive, de l'ingénierie des matériaux et de la biologie synthétique, son laboratoire est un pionnier d'un nouvel âge de symbiose entre les micro-organismes, nos corps, nos produits et même nos bâtiments.
In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the developing technology of forensic DNA phenotyping and the potential for a culture of biological surveillance. Designed as an exploratory project based on emerging science, the forecast of Stranger Visions has proved prescient. For an example of DNA phenotyping at work in forensics check out the companies Parabon NanoLabs and Identitas and read about their collaboration with the Toronto police. Also see Mark Shriver's research at Penn State on predicting faces from DNA.
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