This weekend the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a conference exploring the interface of biology and the visual arts. It was something of a scattershot program, and not completely satisfying. There were some provocative moments, though, and it was interesting to watch a divide emerge between conceptual and figurative methods for visually engaging with the living world, and to catch a glimpse of how this interface might be changing.
In his keynote address, Paris-based curator Jens Hauser established an important distinction that cast a shadow over the rest of the proceedings. Citing works by Wim Delvoye, Eduardo Kac, and other artists who use methods based in biotechnology, Hauser argued for a critical bar to which art interacting with the biological sciences should rise, and that something important is changing. Whereas work a decade ago would abstract images, content, and information from biological objects as source material for largely representative projects, he argued in favor of more recent works that employ biological processes in ways that blur the lines between biology and art. In Hauser's judgment, Kac's genetically engineered rabbit and mice are key examples of this trend.
I didn’t have the sense that any of the artists speaking on Saturday was entirely successful in taking up Hauser’s gauntlet, although there were several high points in the program. Check out Laura Splan’s Blood Scarf, for example, weaved of medical tubing and hooked up to an intravenous feed that fills it with the wearer’s own blood. Many of her pieces explore our queasy relationship with medicine and our bodies. There was also a very entertaining session juxtaposing Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest project and work by Andrew Biewener, a Harvard biologist who studies the mechanics of animal locomotion. For many years, Jansen has been evolving a race of incredible, larger-than-life animals constructed of plastic electrical tubing and able to harness the wind to walk across the Dutch shoreline. See some wonderful video of his creatures at his website, or drive up to Mass MOCA to see his piece in their current show, The Believers.
Michael Joaquin-Grey also presented works that mixed scientific metaphors, although many in the audience seemed more interested in Zoob, a toy system he helped to design. Zoob is a sort of Lego set for the DNA age, and it appears to allow an impressive range of experimentation. For Grey, this tactile experience of play is an important counter-activity to much of children’s play today, which is increasingly conducted on the screen. (On a related topic, see also this interesting article about the vanishing experience of childhood play in open space.)
Running in counterargument to Hauser’s thesis were a number of presentations focusing on the importance of visual representation as a tool for thinking about the tiny scales at which biology happens. For working scientists, images can become essential tools for organizing data and for thinking about physical entities much too small and complicated to observe with any degree of precision. Columbia University's Wayne Hendrickson explained the importance of computer modeling in his efforts to understand protein structure and interactions, while Jonathan King of MIT discussed the importance of good diagrams to good pedagogy.
Wearing my editorial hat in the coming weeks I’ll be working on producing an eBriefing on the conference. I’ll post a message here when it goes live. For the time being, check out the last arts-related eBriefing we did. You can listen to presentations by V.S. Ramachandran on synasthesia, Margaret Livingstone on what art can tell us about the brain, and Barbara Tversky on good visual communication.
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