ARTISTTALK » bacteria

ArtistTalk Best Interview Award Winner!

neja — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 10:26:44 +0000

Agaconda: To explain the sense to the world. Joe Davis in 8 Chapters, 10’39”
is the winner of ArtistTalk Best Interview Award.

This is the man who implemented a fragment of Heraclitus into the gene of the white eyes of fruit flies, who made bacteria listen to jazz, who put a map of the Milky Way into the ear of a mouse and broadcasted vaginal contractions into space. This is the man who grew the information about intransitivity of human being back to the biological world, whose life story is driven by curiosity, creativity, and a desperately honest interest in the use and evolution of human capabilities. Joe Davis, the man who kissed an alligator… This conversation was compiled from private talks and public discussions during Ars Electronica 2012.

The international open call for the best interview with a cultural worker received over 80 submissions. Jury formed by MoTA, CIANT and WRO decided to award the First Prize and three Honorable Mentions. The winner received a 1000,00 eur prize and a visit to the opening week of the 15th WRO Biennale in Wroclaw. The award ceremony took place at DCF Cinema House in Wroclaw on 8 May 2013.

The interview was published in the Outerviews book.

Howard Boland (UK)

neja — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:36:47 +0000

Art from Synthetic Biology’ employs novel standardisation processes in genetic engineering (i.e. synthetic biology) to develop genetic characteristics in bacteria that can expand language and boundary conditions of art. As an immersive and independent practice, it reflects on how artists come to assimilate recombinant affordances of bioscience towards art production and what critical issues are thrown up through such approaches. The research addresses how art may help broker understandings of non-human biological systems and what sort of interfaces we can build to enable such access.

John Paul (UK)

neja — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:39:00 +0000

Edmund Burke associated the sublime with immensity, with perception of danger and also with the microscopic and the infinitely small, whilst notions of beauty were to be found in things that were safe, smooth and small. Seen through the right kind of lens bacteria are things of beauty. They lend themselves to the sublime by virtue of their absolute numbers, their diversity and their history that stretches back through geological time. Some are deadly pathogens.

It is becoming increasingly practical and affordable to determine the genetic code of bacteria, although the technical and data management issues that relate to the millions of chemical bases that compose a single genome are daunting. The idea itself almost feels dangerous. Modernising Medical Microbiology is a research programme that is creating a framework to translate whole genome sequencing from the research arena into the world of routine tests. By sequencing whole genomes it becomes possible to determine characteristics and compare the relatedness of bacteria at the highest possible resolution. For example, sequence data from clinical specimens can be used to link infections in different people without the need to link cases by using contact tracing information.

It would be of interest to the public to acquaint themselves with the implications of whole genome sequencing to the future of science and medicine. Contemporary art offers a medium through which some of the messages from genome sequencing research may be communicated to a wider audience.