A new breed of artist has migrated from studio to laboratory to explore the new palette biological and medical technologies offer. A working laboratory will be set up in the main space of PICA to cultivate living tissue into art.
SymbioticA Research Group experiment with the capabilities of a rat’s neurone.
Take some embyonic rats neurones, place them over silicon chips, connect to visual art output devices and what do you get? Can we really call this an artist? Can a semi-living cybernetic entity be as creative and unpredictable as the mind of a living-being? The research and development of this hypothesis continues at PICA and a laboratory in Georgia, Atlanta. A series of experiments will be performed in order to explore the relationships between the input of music, images and other stimuli and the output the neural activity expresses through robotic drawings.
Tissue Culture & Art Project present their evolving pigs wings and the birth process of semi-living worry dolls.
TISSUE CULTURE AND ARTIFICIAL WOMBS grows live tissue worry dolls and the viewer is invited to confess their worries to these semi-living creatures. Is giving birth to worry dolls truly cathartic?
PIG WINGS - plays with the idea of science making the impossible possible. By cultivating pig bone-marrow stem cells into models of wings, TC&A anticipate the horrific (bat wing), the angelic (bird wing) and obsolete (dinosaur wing) potentials of a world where pigs could fly.
Adam Zaretsky (USA) debuts MMMM – an installation that stimulates more than just your mind.
Vibratory Arts Research is more stimulating than it sounds. In MMMM...(Macro/Micro Music Massage) the audience is invited to become part of a live experiment by vocally vibrating each others rear ends. Zaretskys favourite artistic offering to public experience is the reinsertion of fun for funs sake into the social. Sit back, relax and put yourself under the microscope.
Amy Youngs (USA) armours a nude cactus in her sculpture Rearming the Spineless Opuntia.
Through cloning, humankind has engineered creations such as the spineless opuntia, a cactus that lacks it original defense mechanism - its spikes. Youngs has sculpted a mechanised armour to protect this unnatural plants vulnerability. When approached its metal armor closes up and opens when people move away from it. It reveals the folly of protection in its heavy reliance on technology and the impulse to protect the vulnerable, human-engineered creation.
IMAGE:
Rearming the spineless Opuntia
- Amy Youngs (USA)
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