About the course
“BioArt: Contemporary Art and the Life Sciences” is an innovative course that will allow for non-specialist students to engage theoretically and practically in the biological sciences towards fostering a critical participatory engagement with the biological sciences from a fine art perspective. This course is a studio art and science crossover lab intended for students from various disciplines to foster interdisciplinary exploration of the intersections between art and life through hands-on laboratory protocols, critical readings, and the production of contemporary artwork” (from the course syllabus)
Course instructor: Jennifer Willet
Course blog: http://leidenbioart.blogspot.com/
We did it all: bacteria swabs, mammalian tissue culture, gfp bacteria modification, diy dna extraction. And we argued for hours...
The course was concluded by the live art event "InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies", a performance/ picnic at the garden (Museumtuin) of the National Museum of Ethnology (Museum Volkenkunde) in Leiden. “BioArt: Contemporary Art and the Life Sciences” was part of the Honours programme of Leiden University.
Motivation
I’ve been keeping an eye on bioart related projects, initially attracted by what I conceived as a disrupting potential: being busy myself with the concept of disruption and the challenge of expectations/ preconceptions, I saw opportunities for blurring clear-cut dichotomies such as the living/non-living and the natural/ artificial.
But mainly, I got interested in bioart as an example of applied inter-disciplinarity. I often find myself within that hybrid area produced by the interplay of art and science and I (still) believe that exciting opportunities can emerge when crossing disciplinary boundaries and allowing for exchange and interaction across domains or expertises. To this respect, bioart is an interesting experiment, with considerable output, which I was curious to observe in practice.
Last but not least, working at the bioinformatics department and dealing with bioimaging data without being familiar with the methods and practices of biology and without any lab experience struck me as an inconsistency. So it was time to put on the white coat...
Caged Bacteria (2008)
Caged Bacteria are petri dishes turned into small wire cages.
Caged Bacteria were influenced by discussions on boundaries and mutual exchange. They are a play between openness and closeness and a visual contradiction of intuitively tight structures and practices. Petri dishes are to be sealed; cages are to constrain animal life, but what becomes of a petri dish cage? And how does it compare to the usual inhabitancies of laboratory life?
Caged Bacteria are also the result of my personal interest in practices of display. They remember traditions of displaying life and briefly contemplate the potential rhetorics of displays of bioart works. Were we to put GMOs into the cages, would they be imprisoned? Were we to bring bioart in the museum, would it be behind bars?
a few days later...
Diffuse Interventions (2008)
by Sonja van Kerkhoff, Kaisu Koski, Amalia Kallergi
Diffuse Interventions is a video work about the idea of boundaries, a concept which we soon identified as a common denominator of our experiences in the lab. The work discusses boundaries both as borderlines to be reached and/or crossed and as contact surfaces across which diffusion may occur.
For a video excerpt visit: http://www.livingorganism.org/?page_id=115
Paper: Bioart on Display- challenges and opportunities of exhibiting bioart
Part of the course's requirements was to write a paper on a topic of our choice. Mine was on exhibiting bioart. A preview follows:
"Bioart on Display- challenges and opportunities of exhibiting bioart"
the tissue seems to grow well...- Introduction
- What is bioart?
- Where to find bioart?
- On exhibiting bioart
- The living exhibit
- A laboratory inside the gallery
- Exhibiting the absent
- Of processes
- The biotechnological process
- The interdisciplinary process
- Conclusions - future discussion
The paper is in need of a good review and it mostly identifies the challenges rather than addressing them, but if anyone out there is interested in the full text, please go ahead!