Visual Cultures in Art and Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences Workshop (original) (raw)
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Contemporary visual epistemic practices in the biological sciences raise new questions of how to transform an iconic data measurements into images, and how the process of an imaging technique may change the material it is ‘depicting’. This case-oriented study investigates microscopic imagery, which is used by system and synthetic biologists alike. The core argument is developed around the analysis of two recent methods, developed between 2003 and 2006: localization microscopy and photo-induced cell death. Far from functioning merely as illustrations of work done by other means, images can be determined as tools for discovery in their own right and as objects of investigation. Both methods deploy different constellations of intended and unintended interactions between visual appearance and underlying biological materiality. To characterize these new ways of interaction, the article introduces the notions of ‘operational images’ and ‘operational agency’. Despite all their novelty, operational images are still subject to conventions of seeing and depicting: Phenomena emerging with the new method of localization microscopy have to be designed according to image traditions of older, conventional fluorescence microscopy to function properly as devices for communication between physicists and biologists. The article emerged from a laboratory study based on interviews conducted with researchers from the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) at Bioquant, Heidelberg, in 2011.
AI & SOCIETY, 2020
Bio-art epitomizes a coalescence of art and sciences. It is an emerging contemporary artistic practice that uses a wide range of traditional artistic media interwoven with new artistic media that are biological in nature. This includes molecules, genes, cells, tissues, organs, living organisms, ecological niches, landscapes and ecosystems. In addition, bio-art expands into conceptual art using biological processes such as growth, cell division, photosynthesis and concepts of the origin of life and evolution, explaining them as new artistic media. In this time of global challenges, bio-art communicates thoughts and feelings that involve relationships between the artist, science, public and the biological organism or biological concept. This article reviews the major challenges and driving forces that contributed to emerging biology-centered art and design.
Graphing genes, cells and embryos : cultures of seeing 3D and beyond
Biologists have always visualized their objects to a greater extent than physicists or chemists. Since the early 19th century, hand-drawings, professional illustrations, idealized diagrams, microphotography are extensively used, followed by time-lapse motion pictures in the 20th century, for visualizing the data and supporting one's own analyses. Nowadays, current visual practices encompass video and digital imaging, including virtual dissections and rotating panoramas of embryonic features. In general, these scientific images are means to store and exchange experimental data and to generate specialized knowledge of biological objects. The objects can be individuals, like an embryo or egg, cells, biomolecules, or yet sets of animals or plants. In contrast with physical entities, they are visually flexible phenomena, whose boundaries, extension and identifying details are studied to explain dynamical structures and processes like embryogenesis, cell morphologies, or biomolecular networks.
Antonie van leeuwenhoek, (DOI) 10.1007/s10482-013-9951-z , 2013
The connections between biological sciences, art and printed images are of great interest to the author. She reflects on the historical relevance of visual representations for science. She argues that the connection between art and science seems to have diminished during the twentieth century. However, this connection is currently growing stronger again through digital media and new imaging methods. Scientific illustrations have fuelled art, while visual modeling tools have assisted scientific research. As a print media artist, she explores the relationship between art and science in her studio practice and will present this historical connection with examples related to evolution, microbiology and her own work. Art and science share a common source, which leads to scrutiny and enquiry. Science sets out to reveal and explain our reality, whereas art comments and makes connections that don’t need to be tested by rigorous protocols. Art and science should each be evaluated on their own merit. Allowing room for both in the quest to understand our world will lead to an enriched experience.
Bioart: a Brand New Critique of Contemporary Science
Bioart is an artistic experience born several decades ago that explores life, science, biotechnology and art in new ways. Using developments of science in a creative way, some artists started their exploration by having organic matter used as an expressive medium: the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs made manipulating genome possible, as well as wide applications of genetic engineering. That also made a new research possible, in which bioethical questions are investigated by transcending the conventional notions and applications of art, ethics and science. Bioartists aim at discussing problems related to activities that shape the relationship between man and biotechnology, in order to explore both the concerns and moral, social and political issues that those activities arise. They are rather ―provocative‖ in their search for a bridge ―between two cultures‖ as Vesna suggested in her paper in 2001, following the distinction posed by Snow in his essay The two cultures. There are several different issues at stake in bioartistic expressions and in bioartworks. Let us see some examples: Davies and Kac use recombinant DNA to demonstrate the capabilities of encounter between art, science, biotechnology. Some activities in the sector of transgenic art (Joe Davies and the manipulation of Escherichia coli bacteria; Eduardo Kac and rabbit GFP Bunny) try to cope with genetic engineering in a problematic way. Sometimes they do not press a discussion about risks that genetic engineering entails in blurring the boundaries between different species. On the contrary, they risk to pose biotechnological manipulations as something easy to achieve, thus making them unproblematic. The consequences on social attitude and the valorization of genetic engineering are major implications of their bioartworks. In other cases bioart performances stimulate a reappraisal of feminist discourses on science, biopower and possible ways in which female body is conceived by contemporary society. We can mention Orlan and Chrissy Connant as two women bioartists trying to disseminate a feminist critique about — respectively — standard woman beauty and female social role in society. Their work is again provocative: for example Orlan underwent some aesthetical surgical interventions that became part of performances (chirurgie performance series). Chrissy Connant made a project named Chrissy Caviar, dealing with harvesting her gametes and conserving them in a particular case. Chrissy Caviar is perceived both as a selling commodity for reproductive technologies (IVF) and as a luxury good. They address some problematic questions, giving new forms to old voices in feminist criticisms against male domination on women. In many forms and under several circumstances, art is proposing itself as a full criticism of science and technology, thus entering the domain of philosophy, and helping seeing things under different perspectives, while using very powerful media to arise public interest in the ethical debate. It seems although paradoxical that criticisms come from bioartists that employ the same biotechnologies they aim to dissect in order to bring them under the eye of ethical concern.
Where Art and Science Meet: Genetic Engineering in Contemporary Art
kunsttexte.de, 2003
In the twentieth century, there was probably no more popular scientific term than «gene» and no other scientific discipline's images and visual metaphors achieved the status of all-pervasive cultural icons like those of molecular biology. The significance ascribed to genes, in anticipation of mapping and marketing them, extends far beyond their immediate role in heredity and development processes. The form of pictorial representation of the human genome in the shape of a double helix and images of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes are today no longer neutral descriptions of human genetic processes but rather have advanced to the status of ornaments and vehicles of a mythological and religious meaning of «life itself». Already around 1900, early representatives of the young discipline of genetics exhibited a tendency to indulge in utopian rhetoric, conjuring up visions of a «biological art of engineering» or a «technology of living organisms», which did not confine itself to the shaping of plants and animals but aspired to setting new yardsticks for human coexistence and the organisation of human society. Then, as now, the heralds of this «biological revolution» were predicting nothing less than a second creation; this time, however, it would be an artificially created bioindustrial nature, which would replace the original concept of evolution. In contemporary art, many exhibitions in recent years have taken as their theme the effects of this «bio-logical revolution» on people's self-image and on the multi-layered interrelations between art and genetics. However, in contrast to the first encounters between art and genetics, which began in the early twentieth century with art's visual and affirmative engagement with genetics, today these «scientific» images are decoded through the linking of art and the images of the life sciences and a new way of reading them results. Artists take the terminology of the sphere of art and apply it to the technically generated images of molecular biology or other life sciences, question their claim to «objec-tivity» and «truth», and render them recognisable as a space where other fields of knowledge and cultural areas are also inscribed. With the aid of an iconography of images from science, the attempt is made to decipher the cultural codes that these images transport additionally.
Design and biotechnology:an exploration of the possibilities of objectifying living organisms
The Journal of the School of Design Issue number 4 , 1996
In this paper I will look at current artistic trends, as well as recent developments in biotechnology that in the future may transform living organisms into objects. The concept of technological progress as a part of a linear perception of history that may exceed its limits is analysed, and the need for re-evaluating the concept of progress is emphasised. The role of biotechnology in technological progress, as well as the potential of biotechnology to change our perception of progress by applying natural processes in most basic terms, is highlighted. The relationship between art and technology is examined and shows that in some cases art explores technological advances before they occur. The work and the views of body artists Stelarc and Orlan are discussed, as well as those of some other artists. Bioethics is introduced as a scholarly way to examine biotechnological development, and it's revealed that not much has been done in respect to issues that are not directly connected to humans. This area seems to be where design can come in and explore the prospects of living objects and their manipulation. The need for a closer relationship between design and biotechnology, in order to produce a better future, concludes this paper.
Speculative Biology in the practices of BioArt
Artlink. Contemporary art of Australia and the Asia-Pacific, vol. 34, no. 3, 2014, special issue, Bio Art: Life in the Antropocene, 2014
With the emergence of Bio Art, biotechnology became part of the art world. By bringing cutting edge technologies closer to the public, Bio Art has provoked wider reflection about the ethics of turning biology into technology and in particular has raised questions about the aesthetic and ethical status of manipulating living organisms. By showing transgenic organisms in galleries and museum contexts, Bio Art drew attention to the fact that biotechnology had already crossed the divide between the artificial and the natural back in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the selective manipulation of living organisms for artistic purposes provoked passionate debates about the shifting concept of life, a concept that has changed dramatically since the arrival of biotechnology within the frame of technoscience. Art emerging from the laboratory opened up non-normative debates about life and its limits in the crossover between Bio Art, ethics, sciences, and the humanities, and also framed controversies about the growing influence of science and technology and a bioscience-based economy on our societies as well as on the fine arts. Whereas in the early days Bio Art primarily sought to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology or tissue engineering, current Bio Art practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist and how fragile these limits are in an age that some have termed the Anthropocene. Altering nature deliberately using biotechnology – in a scientific laboratory or in the kitchen at home – is still a vital topic in Bio Art. However, because we have transformed our entire planet in recent centuries into a kind of laboratory where traditional distinctions between natural and artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted by the enormous ecological problems and challenges that exist today, speculative biology is now becoming a major issue in Bio Art. One of the most promising approaches of bringing Bio Art and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison is demonstrated in the work of the Turkish artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas, who has lived in the USA for more than a decade.