Science as the artists muse.
Saturday, October 31, 2009 at 11:56PM We are entering an era in which artist inspiration comes, as never before, from the discoveries of modern science. Just as religious and mythological source had influence art before and during the renaissance, countless artists are now being moved by the need to capture the complexities and mysteries of modern world. If art imitates life, then art is an expression of beauty, the tragedy and the complexity of human condition. Central to imitating the human condition is the need to explore our sense of place and purpose in the world. If the discoveries of science were detached from this calling, then one would never expect science to inspire creativity in the artist.
In many ways science and art are profoundly similar. The best of each rise up from the depth of human creativity, nurtured by an individuals commitment to and passion for the discipline. In other ways science and art are profoundly different. Science is viewed as empirical and objective, art and speculative and subjective. It is easy to make the assumption that art and science contradict one another. Yet in spite of this, artistic and scientific practices have many commonalities, collecting, archiving, observing, speculating, abstracting, modelling, experimentally examine and using analogies and metaphors.
The theories and discoveries of modern science will, prove limitless in their potential to inspire human emotion and wonder. So while the artist and scientist approach to creativity, exploration and research can be seen in different ways and from different perspective, when working together they can open up new ways of seeing, expiring and interpreting the world around us.
This month i will blog a few examples of the many projects that are created in a scientific context, the lab. Artist who are discarding more traditional materials for those of living cultures or transgenic organisms.
The tissue Culture and Art Project
by oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au
A prototype of stitch-less jacket grown in a technoscientific Body
By growing Victimless Leather, the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is further problematising the concept of garment by making it Semi-Living.
The Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalised cell lines which cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stich-less coat like shape. The Victimless Leather project concerns with growing living tissue into a leather like material.
This artistic grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing ‘leather' without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.
Skin and the supple boundaries of self.
by Peta Clancy.
http://www.petaclancy.com
C-type print, from the series "she carries it all like a map on her skin
Peta Clancy holding a bacteria drawing from "Visible Human Bodies"
The series, Visible Human Bodies where developed during the artist's residency with the Cell and Gene Therapy Laboratory at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Visible Human bodies a series of photogrpahs of human figures drawn in Petri dishes using live bacteria. To make the figures Clancy dots pathogenic bacteria into a nutrient agar and incubates the dish for several days to allow the figure to grow. Like the latent photographic image, the figure drawing only becomes visible after a process of development in a suitable environment. Constantly changing as it grows, the bacteria can cause the figure to mutate in unexpected ways. These Visible Human Bodies consequently remind us that even in controlled environments, the body remains vulnerable and volatile - constantly transforming itself within ways which are beyond our control.
Her work also investigates the relationship between skin and the self by focusing on the delicate skin of the eyelids and lips. Notions of the eyes as windows to the soul, or the mouth as a space through which our emotions and thoughts are conveyed, problematically maintain the binary opposition between the body's inside and outside that Clancy seeks to unsettle in her work. To Clancy, her sense of bodily presence is embedded in the skin. As an organ of perception and communication the skin gathers and stores a range of emotional and corporeal sensations. "she carries it all like a map on her skin" address how these sensation inscribe themselves in the skin to form a map of physical and psychological traces on the body. Wether her engagement is with the skin or the microscopic forms that can so profoundly affect our lived experience, her photographs challenge us to consider some of the many ways that our sense of self is continually formed and reformed in a dynamic relation between culture and the body.
It's not easy being green.
by Eduardo Kac.
http://www.ekac.org/specimen.html
Eduardo Kac engineered this transonic bunny with scientist Louis_Marie Hondebine and Patrick Prunet at the Biology of Development and Biotechnology Unit. Kac implanted and enhanced GFP gene in an albino rabbit, which normally has pink eyes and white fur, under and ultra violet light the rabbit glowed bright green. Unfortunately the research laboratory which censored the rabbit and refused to let Eduardo keep it. The artist then starts a campaign to liberate the rabbit and have it live with him in Chicago. My favourite action is the Alba Flag (2001) which he installed in front of his house to mark her absence.
2000 was a rather trubled year, people in France were still talking about the infected blood scandal , the mad cow disease, people were afraid of a future made of cloning and health uncertainties, digital doomsday, etc.The press jumped on the story but was actually more interested in the conflict between the lab and Eduardo than in the project itself.
Specimen of Secrecy is about Marvelous Discoveries is one of Kac's latest works. For the series, the artist made some "biotopes", living pieces that can be hanged on the walls of a gallery like a painting. Except that the works are living, they change during the exhibition in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions, their exoskeleton is the frame. They are both subjects and objects. Each of them constitutes a self-sustaining ecology comprised of thousands of very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials. If you provide them with light and water, their color explode. The rabbit never left the laboratory but the bacteria of Kac's Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries could leave the lab, they are pet bacteria.
Hullabaloo and Oblivion
In NATURE?
by Marta De Mendezes
http://www.martademenezes.com/
Marta De Mendezes creates live butterflies with wing patterns never seen before in nature. The artist achieved this by interfering with the normal developmental mechanisms of the butterflies. The butterflies are simultaneously natural (their wings are made of normal live cells, without artificial pigments or scars) but designed by an artist. This work was performed during a residency in Paul Brakefield’s laboratory at the University of Leiden, in The Netherlands. The work was exhibited for the first time in Ars Electronica 2000, Linz, Austria.
Reader Comments (2)
thank you for your article,My problem has been resolved.
-Breitling Super Ocean exact replicas
UBB
Remember replica tag heuer slr
what should be remembered, and forget what should be forgotten.Alter what is changeable, and accept what is mutable。replica tag heuer link