Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art, by art historian Joanna Page

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Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.

While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded.

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change and environmental justice.

Is DNA Hardware or Software?

Is DNA Hardware or Software?

“In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots. They had harvested skin and cardiac cells from frog embryos, designed and sculpted them to perform particular tasks with the help of an evolutionary algorithm, and then set them free to play. The result— it’s alive! — was a programmable organism…” continue here

image: Project Twin

Tips for Collaborations: Getting Started in the field of Bio Art & Design

Working with scientists, biologists and bioengineers poses a difficult but rewarding challenge when you are a designer or design student exploring biodesign. In addition to the task of diplomatically reaching out to these people, there is the ongoing effort of communicating effectively and managing the collaboration. Additionally, working with new biotechnology can be extremely difficult.

In this PDF , you can find tips and tricks to get started. Written by Tony Cho as addition to the Biodesign Book.

Green Light: Towards and Art Evolution – George Gessert

How humans’ aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants. Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are prized for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen’s hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution. Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants-the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers. Read here

The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari

The Three Ecologies

Felix Guattari

Translated by
IAN PINDAR and PAUL SUTTON

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Secret Lives Of Colour, Kassia St Clair

Every colour has a story, and here are some of the most alluring, alarming, and thought-provoking. Very hard painting the hallway magnolia after this inspiring primer.’ Simon Garfield The Secret Lives of Colour tells the unusual stories of the 75 most fascinating shades, dyes and hues. From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso’s blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history. In this book Kassia St Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colours and where they come from (whether Van Gogh’s chrome yellow sunflowers or punk’s fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilisation. Across fashion and politics, art and war, The Secret Lives of Colour tell the vivid story of our culture.

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Field_Notes Publication

23 Oct 2013

Publication

Art as We Don’t Know It Erich Berger, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka, Kira O’Reilly, Helena Sederholm

Art as We Don’t Know It

Erich Berger, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka, Kira O’Reilly, Helena Sederholm (eds.)
Publisher: Aalto ARTS Books

What worlds are revealed when we listen to alpacas, make photographs with yeast or use biosignals to generate autonomous virtual organisms? Bioart invites us to explore artistic practices at the intersection of art, science and society. This rapidly evolving field utilises the tools of life sciences to examine the materiality of life; the collision of human and nonhuman. Microbiology, virtual reality and robotics cross disciplinary boundaries to engage with arts as artists and scientists work together to challenge the ways in which we understand and observe the world. This book offers a stimulating and provocative exploration into worlds emerging, seen through art as we don’t know it – yet.

Art as We Don’t Know It showcases art and research that has grown and flourished within the wider network of both the Bioart Society and Biofilia during the previous decade. The book features a foreword by curator Mónica Bello, and a selection of peer-reviewed articles, personal accounts and interviews, artistic contributions and collaborative projects which illustrate the breadth and diversity of bioart. The resulting book is a tantalising and invaluable indicator of trends, visions and impulses in the field.

The book marks the 10th anniversary of the Bioart Society but instead of looking back we joined forces with Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts to have a glimpse forward and to scan what kind of questions and topics in the realm of bioart, art&science and its politics could be relevant for our work in the coming years. The result is a 280 page volume in four sections with articles, reports, interviews, artist sections and more. The stunning cover image is from a yeastogram by Johanna Rotko and the amazing coppery design by Safa Hovinen.

We have an inspiring lineup of contributors which we are very grateful to for sharing their thoughts, ideas and insights: Markus Schmidt & Nediljko Budisa, Andy Gracie, Adriana Knouf, Marta De Menezes & Luis Graca, Marietta Radomska & Cecilia Åsberg, Crystal Bennes, Bartaku, Erich Berger, Antero Kare, Laura Beloff, Johanna Rotko, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka, Teemu Lehmusruusu, Antti Tenetz, Ian Ingram & Theun Borssele, Paul Vanouse, Rian Ciela Visscher Hammond, Christina Stadlbauer, Paula Humberg, Denisa Kera, Leena Valkeapää, lifepatch, Jurij Krpan, Anu Osva, Kristiina Ljokkoi & Tomi Slotte Dufva, Ulla Taipale & Christina Stadlbauer, Margherita Pevere, Heather Davis, Elaine Gan & Terike Haapoja, Ida Bencke, Mari Keski-Korsu, Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr, Kira O’Reilly, Pia Lindman, Helena Sederholm and Lauri Linna and with a foreword by Mónica Bello.

Check out the table of contents

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The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur

The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, 2009

W. Brian Arthur

More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology.

The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.

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The Book of Trees – Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, Manuel Lima

The Book of Trees – Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, 2014

Manuel Lima