What can an artistic approach bring to issues raised by the advances in genetic technology?
This is an interesting question on a broader scale and is actually a critical point in a current online symposium [Virtual Symposium On Visual Culture and Bioscience]. Here, Suzanne Anker prompts the notion that the biosciences may be considered to be experiencing a “golden age,�? the arts on the other hand, struggle not with public consumption, but with a more profound challenge to intrinsic identity and history. However, a few examples of what has been raised might be in place, such as Tissue Culture & Art Project, showing the “failure�? of the technology (tissue engineering) by playing with utopian concepts by reflecting on technological zeitgeists. Joe Davis, a research fellow at MIT, takes a different route by attempting to use biotechnologies to open spaces between different scales, one such example is his audio microscope another is his paramecium fishing contraption. Artistic approaches can serve to contemplate how the media informs the public on matters of technology, there are also practices that take place in the labs that are being reflected upon by artists and contextualization on what is being produced by labs in broader cultural terms. It is clear to us that organisms produced routinely in labs, methodologies and ideas are far more radical than many of the ideas from the surrealist movement and these practices radically transforms our culture.
What are you working on these days?
Current projects looks at how our relationship with nature changes through the use of living material as interactive sensors in which the objective involves producing plants with biosensors. It places itself within the artistic discourses surrounding plants perceptual response to mechanical stimuli and explores areas of human-plant interaction and our changed perception though such interaction. It springs out of protocols in producing plants with biosensors and takes into account the narratives that emerge. This research is also part of Laura’s PhD at UCL.
