Bioart

La tecnologia applicata alla biologia, il suo estendersi all’ecologia, il confluire del tutto nel paesaggio algoritmico si ritrovano in sperimentazioni artistiche riconosciute in generi come: nanoarte, bioarte, arte meteorologica ed ecologica, arte del network (net art e post-Internet). Mind the Gap rilegge i cambiamenti epocali che hanno seguito l’era informatica nello sguardo caleidoscopico dell’arte. Coltivati per lo più in un contesto di nicchie specialistiche, si rivelano punti di vista preziosi per ripercorrere la storia a ritroso, per poterla rallentare e soffermarsi su alcuni aspetti e momenti, prima inosservati, in realtà centrali. Il testo corre a ritmo serrato, oscillando tra ciò che l’arte vede e i metodi impiegati; sguardi che hanno saputo cogliere l’invisibile molto prima che si restituisse prova della sua esistenza. Adottarli può significare cambiare il modo di vedere e di raccontare. Questa è una di tante storie possibili.

In ihrem 2005 veröffentlichten Buch „Kunst aus dem Labor“ thematisiert die Medientheoretikerin Ingeborg Reichle die engen Verbindungen zwischen Kunst und Naturwissenschaften. Standen lange vor allem technische Medien im Zentrum medientheoretischer Erkundungen, so gehören heute biologische dazu: In der BioArt und der Transgenic Art wenden Künstler*innen Methoden der Molekularbiologie an, um genetische Codes zu manipulieren; in der Robotic / Artificial Life Art wird mit computerbasierten Simulationsmodellen gearbeitet. Künstler*innen kooperieren eng mit Naturwissenschaftler*innen, überführen Laborsituationen in den Ausstellungskontext, experimentieren mit gentechnisch manipulierten Organismen und thematisieren in Techno- science die Auswirkungen der Forschungen auf unser Leben.

In early 2017, I began a series of collaborative projects that investigated the material nature of the bacterial cellulose that is produced when fermenting tea in a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). I wasn’t interested in the popular SCOBY byproduct of the kombucha beverage itself, and its ‘probiotic’ effects. Rather, as a biotextile artist-scientist, my interest is mainly in the applications of that cellulosic mat, and how it can be explored as a biomaterial.
My first wearable bioplastic project, entitled Bucci, with biodesigner, Théo Chauvirey, involved the production of a hybrid cellulose material. The next collaborative project, entitled, Plump and Pliant (short title), was with art conservator, Courtney Books. Courtney was interested in experimenting to discover if it is possible to extend the life of kombucha cellulose works like Bucci, and more generally, ephemeral biomaterials that artists work with. Our invention led to the next project, with artist, Tagny Duff. I agreed to work with Tagny, to co-design and solely construct two new bags that would encase some of the vessels she had produced for her project. As a collaborator, I creatively interpreted two images of (pre)historic carrying containers, materializing her idea to make the vessels wearable by future humans.
This progression of ever-more successful collaborative projects also formed a net meshwork amongst a number of human actors who amplified each other: artists, designers, conservators, curators, gallerists, fashionistas, students, but also, of course, some nonhuman actors: microbes. I am, however, highly resistant to referring to the microbes we work with as, “collaborators” despite my desire to acknowledge their role in the process and meshwork.
(Images and text)

The presence of artists in biotechnology laboratories marks an important turning point in the history of cross-art science relationships : henceforth, cooperation between scientists and artists is no longer confined to the representation of a scientific object, but touches on the common creation of living beings. How to describe this bio-artistic creativity and its relationship with biotechno-logy? This paper will attempt to provide some answers to this question. We will discuss the relationship between biotechnology and society and the market to show that this new "environment" makes possible and includes the emergence of interdisciplinary practices such as bioart. We will resume the previous analyzes to determine more precisely the relationship between biotechnology and bioart. Finally, we will ask ourselves what the ultimate societal significance of this new bio-artistic creativity is.

What is transgenic art? How does it influence the landscape of contemporary visual art culture? What is the relationship between art, science, and life? This book focuses on important artistic developments brought forward by the use of genetic engineering techniques.
Aside from carrying out a critical analysis, all the artists who combine genetic material of different origins are identified and recounted. The book provides an interpretation of the creativity that inevitably involves the most significant aspects of social life, showing a radical cultural redefinition. The objective is also to indicate, through an unpublished documentation, the most significant changes that have emerged in contemporary art since the last decade of the 1900s.
Although limited in scope, transgenic art is an important field in the current cultural system which, when associated with other performative practices, compels us to review the actual meaning of “art”.

in vitero was an artistic research project investigating the relationships between human and non-human organisms used in technoscientific research. Nine species commonly used in scientific research were cared for over a period of seven months within a scientific laboratory and an art gallery. This article discusses the aesthetic experiences of this prolonged interspecies care through the lens of alterity, a phenomenological mode of negotiating relationships between self and other. It extends this concept from solely human associations to those between human and non-human organisms. Ambiguities and contradictions that arise through caring for organisms that do not ‘look back’ are explored. The technoscientific use of these organisms is recontextualised within an artistic context in order to undertake the new category work necessary in defining human/non-human relationalities.

Mit der Entstehung der Bio-Art sind die Ausdrucksmittel der Künste reicher geworden, den traditionellen Ausdrucksmitteln sind neue biologische Medien an die Seite getreten, deren Spektrum von transgenen Organismen bis hin zu synthetischer DNA reicht. Biotechnologische Methoden und Verfahren zur Manipulation und Rekombination des genetischen Codes auf molekularer Ebene faszinieren von Beginn an Wissenschaftler und Künstler gleichermaßen. Heute ist die Faszination, Kunst im Labor herzustellen, der Erkenntnis gewichen, dass der Mensch die Welt im Zeitalter des Anthropozän in ein großes experimentelles Labor verwandelt hat – mit ungewissem Ausgang.

Ingeborg Reichle: Bio-Art: Die Kunst für das 21. Jahrhundert, In: Kunstforum International, Kunstnatur | Naturkunst. Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur, 258 (2018)

This paper explores the nature of habitual spaces as well as the uncharacteristic ones in the
development of Bio-Arts. I have concentrated on two projects: The BioARTCAMP, led by Dr.
Jennifer Willet, where participants explored the intersections between science and art in a
fully functional biological science laboratory high up in the Canadian Rockies, and TOXICITY,
a total white box experience (Plug-In ICA, in Winnipeg), co-curated by Dr. Willet and myself,
imagined not only as a showcase of the best Bio-Art practices in the country and
internationally, but also as an attempt to reconstruct the current environmental situation
and the socio-political contexts by looking into modes of contemporary cultural and
technological production, which I co-curated together with Jennifer. The project stemmed
from, and unified in many ways, our practical work as curators and artists, but it was
naturally also grounded in our academic work.
The BioArt Camp included building a portable Bio-Lab on the premises of an ex-internment
camp (where Ukrainians were held in the Rockies during WWI), with a very engaging Open
House event in order for the public to interact with the artists and scientists, as well as a
Conference. The complexities of setting an improvised but fully functional biological science
lab up in the Canadian Rockies certainly refer to phenomenological aspects of spatiality,
giving a deeper meaning to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habitual space, referring to neither
‘explicit comprehension nor blind reflex’. The nature of the BioArt Camp as public space
added art-science rituals, which in turn became a setting of the habitual. The habitual
knowledge, thus acquired, makes knowing and doing work with biotechnology a process
that is somewhat intuitive, and certainly generates enthusiasm for the creation of habitual
knowledge in process. If one was to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty one could draw a conclusion
that Biotechnology never seizes to amaze, and through its complexity, radically reconstructs
relations between politics and nature, allowing for a reassessment of how we look at life
today. One could not help but amazed and aware of the magnificence of Banff National Park
and Jennifer’s vivid description of the natural beauties of Banff and the surrounding
mountains as a giant petri-dish! Only one fully dedicated to, and obsessed with, Bio-Art
could come with a description like that.

The artwork of Brandon Ballengée can be analysed as a re-materialized form of post-digital Media Art, taking into account historical accounts of media as milieu stemming from the natural sciences, and using frogs as living measuring devices.  Ballengée’s holistic practice includes eco-actions and participatory survey field trips in the spirit of amateur science, the collecting and conservation of amphibians or other wetland species with deformities and malformations – or promoting the growth of such anomalies in controlled laboratory simulations.  His selective breeding and micro-surgery projects to intervene in natural developmental processes, the presentation of these animals either alive, or cleared and stained in a highly aestheticized fashion, or the colourful, oversized and abstract, yet seemingly alive scanner photographs of the specimens’ physiologies, encompass an expansive range of transdisciplinary practices.

Published in: Tiere und / als Medien
ed. by Jessica Ullrich & Stefan Rieger, Tierstudien 18, 2020.

https://neofelis-verlag.de/verlagsprogramm/zeitschriften/tierstudien/1014/tiere-und/als-medien

ISBN(Print): 978-3-95808-315-8
ISBN(PDF): 978-3-95808-366-0

Technology and art define and continue to reshape the world we live in. Re-imagining what we know as real or as a solid ground, pushes not only our opinions and understandings of nature to the limits, but with new inventions and experiments, both the mind and the body, the language, and the world itself seems to be making room for a different sphere and fresh rules. Thenceforward a subsequent fusion towards substitution of the former with the latter was imminent. In other words, contemporary artistic practices reach the climax-through video and digital art, of critically engaging in their means of expression as much scientific and technological advance as never before, changing the face of art forever and completing the revolution of sociological and political infusion into the field of art. Less orientated towards the past, the present paper aims at reviewing the changing role of technology played in the art of the present with an interest taken in the artist status and the public involvement. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary experimentation central to contemporary art is given attention in order to point out how individual aesthetics have been gradually replacing general aesthetics.

In 2017, I was invited by ASCUS Art & Science, a public- access research laboratory for artists and scientists based in Edinburgh, to become artist-in-residence at the Society for Applied Microbiology (SfAM) Annual Conference at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, as part of the ASCUS Artists are Present programme. The aim of the residency was to research the work of SfAM through the conference, leading to the development of a commissioned work for SfAM’s headquarters in London.

Death, decay, and transcendence are transformed if interpreted from a microbial perspective. This paper constructs a non-anthropocentric approach on a microbial scale through the concept of microbiopolitics, an expanded notion of biopolitics with the inclusion of ​zoe​, a postanthropocentric interpretation of ecological relations, focused on the life of microorganisms and introducing an ecological thought for the microbial planet. This research explores, in particular, the work of Latin American artists Ana Laura Cantera and Gilberto Esparza as a form of material speculation that opens up alternatives of thought grounded on the accountability of biological and technological matter, its limits and possibilities.

Is science the new art? Taking this provocative question as her starting point, art historian Ingeborg Reichle examines the fascinating responses of contemporary artists when confronted with recent scientific and technological advances. In the last two decades a growing number of artists has left the traditional art venues to work in scientific environments like the laboratories of molecular biology, robotics, and artificial life. From this new art forms like „Transgenic Art“ and „Bio Art“ have emerged. These art forms differ dramatically from traditional artistic approaches that explore life: they have crossed the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, and thus provoke passionate debates about the growing influence of science and technology.

This first comprehensive survey presents an informative selection of significant artworks in 294 color illustrations and provides a broad overview of this new and relevant development in art.

Artists like Suzanne Anker, Brandon Ballengée, Louis Bec, Guy Ben-Ary, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Catherine Chalmers, the Chapman Brothers, Jaq Chartier, Peta Clancy, Kevin Clarke, Critical Art Ensemble, Joe Davis, Marcel Duchamp, George Gessert, Peter Gerwin Hoffmann, Eduardo Kac, David Kremers, Steve Kurtz, William Latham, Edgar Lissel, Kazimir Malevich, Reiner Maria Matysik, Jon McCormack, Niki Nickl, Steve Miller, Simon Penny, Patricia Piccinini, Jane Prophet, Marc Quinn, Oliver Ressler, Ken Rinaldo, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Gary Schneider, Karl Sims, Pam Skelton, Nell Tenhaaf, Herwig Turk, K. D. Thornton, Stephen Todd, Gail Wight, Adam Zaretsky and many other artists are presented.

Many contemporary artists are attracted by bioengineered life, genetics and biotechnology; this phenomenon can be explained by the artist's role: over the centuries artists have been interpreters of ideas and socio-political and scientiic phenomena. They have described, criticised, or - more often - acclaimed, their contemporary society and its socio-political powers.
Therefore current attention, paid by artists to biotechnology, is perfectly understandable and justiiable, as pertaining to the very role of the artist.
Introduction: We are going to characterise what has to be intended as bioart, as well as introduce an analysis of the potentiality of this multifaceted experiment as a crossing bridge between scientiic, technological and bioethical issues.
Methods: Comparison between selected bioartworks and bioartistical research projects in order to characterise their ethical, philosophical and socio-political aims.
Conclusion: A conscious involvement in the interdisciplinary debate between bioaethics, bioarts, and science in general is needed to ind solutions that can be shared in this globalised world.

As a non-visual mode of communication, body odour plays a significant role in perceptions of self-identity, the identification of others and the social and psychological aspects of interpersonal exchange. What is more, it is a reflection of our genetic make-up, state of health and our environment. The use of perfume to mask or control body odour is a long-established practice extending from early civilisations. Sprayed on the skin, perfume is understood to stimulate mood or memory, effect cognitive performance or confidence, and even influence sexual attraction. Modern advances in manufacturing technologies however are producing a shift in methods of fragrance delivery. From conventional sprays we are moving toward microencapsulated garments and sensory fashion designs that respond to biometric measures such as heart rate or body temperature. Against this background of technological innovation in fashion and beauty practices, self-labelled ‘body architect’ Lucy McRae has developed the Swallowable Parfum (2011). Wresting smell back into the realm of the conceptual, McRae and collaborator, synthetic biologist Sheref Mansy, propose the release of a unique genetic scent ‘synthesized from the body’s natural processes,’ and emitted through perspiration. Crossing the dermal threshold, Swallowable Parfum internalises what has previously been an external bodily practice. Can McRae’s project be seen simply as an evolution of technological advances predicated on cosmetic surgical procedures that transform the body? Will such a product render subjects alien from their biological selves, and produce crises in relations with others? Does this speculative project widen the scope of olfaction, or can we understand this as yet another way of colonising bodily functions that are recuperated back into commodity? This chapter will explore these possibilities, including the prospect that Swallowable Parfum has the potential to create a revised ‘epidermic self-awareness,’ transcending its own difference to create a new, even if synthesised, embodied subjectivity.

This paper examines a series of experimental art-science projects that attempt to resurrect dead or endangered forms of life. Focusing on works by Marguerite Humeau, Diemut Strebe, Pinar Yoldas and Svenja Kratz, each of which was developed in close collaboration with scientists, often in laboratory environments, the paper approaches art-science collaborations of this sort as a flourishing field of emerging and experimental art. It takes as its central onbject of concern the shared practice that has made recent art-science collaborations so productive: their mutual interest in reimagining the possibilities of life and the body in an era in which these can be so fundamentally re-engineered, which this paper examines this under the rubric of ‘speculative biology’. The multi-disciplinary art projects examined in this paper thus invite us to reflect upon the precarity of life, during a period that finds itself at the crossroads of a rapidly increasing series of extinction and climate change events, on the one hand, and an equally rapidly accelerating scientific and technological capacity to reengineer life and living materials, on the other.

There is an evolution gap in modern human that is, between his biological body and contemporary technology. Hence, the biological body has to be redesigned to respond to high technology and the prospect of its space habitation.
The artificial evolutionary step after Modern Homo Sapiens, is Transhuman, a transitory being with more powerful physical, intellectual and psychological abilities, having as a visionary target, the Posthuman. The bio-ethics issues arising from the prospect of Transhuman, touch on both the sphere of society, and also, the evolutionary stage of his consciousness.
Quantum Mechanics research into biophotonics leads us into the logical assumption that all biological systems on our planet are interactively interconnected, not only through the generally accepted food chain of biosystems, but also biologically, through a biophotonics’ network.
In an ideal, Planetary Civil Society, a possible counterweight to financial globalization may be a transcultural planetary network of minds, which will be connected in a non-hierarchical, and accessible by everybody, interactive network that combines the silicon technology with Biophotonics.
If the aim is the maturing of consciousness of contemporary Human, then Roy Ascott’s vision for Telenoia is of defining importance for the holistic redesign of life. This is where society, science and intercultural technologies meet in the spirit of a new Art, where the “post” prefix is not required to determine itself.

This issue, edited by Jens Hauser and Lucie Strecker, aims to scrutinize both the epistemological and aesthetic potential of the notion of ‘microperformativity’. The concept denotes a current trend in theories of performativity and performative artistic practices to destabilize human scales (both spatial and temporal) as the dominant plane of reference and to emphasize biological and technological micro-agencies that relate the invisibility of the microscopic to the incomprehensibility of the macroscopic. Investigations into microperformativity redefine what art, philosophy and the technosciences actually consider a ‘body’ today, in times when performance art shifts towards generalized and pervasive performativity in art. Microperformative positions enquire how artistic methods can engage critically with technologies that exploit life on a microscopic and molecular level to merge bio- and digital media, including for global capitalization. How can performative art and discourses inform these processes to think biopolitics and necropolitics in relation to the dystopia of economy and the utopia of ecology alike? This issue contains contributions on biotechnological performances, physiological processes and micro-gestures, traditional rituals and techniques of craft, on microperformativity seen through the lens of the natural sciences, as well as in economics in times of algorithmic finance and high frequency trading. Performance Resarch (Routledge) Vol. 25, No. 3: ‘On Microperformativity’ (2020) Issue Editors: Jens Hauser, Medical Museion—University of Copenhagen & Lucie Strecker, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Direct access to the full digital version of the publication: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rprs20/25/3?nav=tocList

Link for purchasing physical copies from the Centre for Performance Research Bookshop: https://thecpr.org.uk/product/25-3-on-microperformativity/

Physarum polycephalum (slime mould/mold) is an organism used in scientific research that is commonly found in piles of leaf litter and human composts. Intelligent yet brainless, P. polycephalum forms a fan-like network of tendrils in its quest for food. Each tendril moves almost visibly by cytoplasmic streaming – a pulsing movement of the liquid inside its cell walls. It is simultaneously beautiful and repulsive – an oozing, bright yellow, lace-like blob. This paper proposes to engage in a (s)mattering of Baradian “agential cuts” to draw out the intra-active performativity of this evocative critter. A dialogue is established between scientific and artistic ontoepistemologies, focusing on how (and why) the matter of slime mould/mold matters. Visual images from explorations which include P. polycephalum are woven through the paper, to support Karen Barad’s assertion that “meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” [1, p.821].

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.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

The use of the living beings and organisms as a medium in art increased after the Second World War. During the 1960s, some artworks were related to an ecological consciousness, or to the beginnings of computer science, which was associated with biology at this early stage. Both of these two modes of using the living are now finally together, in what is called biotechnological art.
Defining the living beings is a deeply political issue, as we may see, for instance, in the problematic of animal rights, defended by the environmentalist movement. When does life begin? What is specific to human life? What is the value of life? As Hans Cova has written, “instead of changing the world at all costs, it would be better to ensure that it doesn’t disappear right before our (in)credulous eyes”. The huge changes effected by the evolution of knowledge in biotechnology and science confirm the human temptation to control life. This type of questions haunt works using living elements. In such works, artists use a problematic type of material and have to deal with its political aspects. Through works by Fujiko Nakaya, Piotr Kowalski, Tissue Culture and Art, and Art Orienté objet, I examine the work of artists engaged in this political discussion on our future life (of plants, animals, and humans).

This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity of art-encounters to reconfigure and reinvent the subject. Drawing principally on the innovative conceptualization of habit articulated in the philosophies of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze, where it is theorized as a much more volatile and creative force of repetition that makes change possible, I first explore how habit pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its ontogenetic emergence from material and affective processes and ecologies, as well as its plastic susceptibility to immanent disruption. Second, and through an engagement with the bioaesthetic and micropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that it is precisely on the ontogenetic terrain of plastic habits that art-encounters might be understood to intervene. I unpack this empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), whose ‘semi-living’ installation art, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking perceiving, and relating to the nonhuman.

The aim of this introductory paper is twofold. First, we seek to illustrate which are the difficulties into which one runs when one attempts to give a precise definition of what bioart is. Our hypothesis is that every attempt at such definition runs into a paradox. Indeed, if on the one hand, every definition seems inevitably reductionist, unjustly omitting one or more elements, on the other hand, defining and constraining the study area is a necessary preliminary step to understand the artistic phenomenon known as bioart. In the second part of our paper, attention will be focused on the ethical issues that bioart confront us with. These issues are all the more relevant, given the fact that bioartists often make use of biotechnologies to manipulate living organisms for artistic purposes.

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.

I am presenting the project Art & Science
Meeting, carried out by the Laznia Centre for Contemporary
Art in Gdansk since the beginning of 2011
(I developed the concept in autumn 2010 and run until now), by first discussing
its framework and the context which shaped
it, then describing its essential characteristics and,
finally, up-to-date history and completed projects.