The Beall Center for Art + Technology presents WETWARE: art | agency | animation
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BEALL CENTER FOR ART + TECHNOLOGY PRESENTS AN INTERNATIONAL INTERMEDIA ART EXHIBITION FOCUSED ON SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
IRVINE, Calif. (January 27, 2016) -- The Donald R. and Joan F. Beall Center for Art + Technology at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts will mount WETWARE: art | agency | animation featuring contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of Synthetic Biology to make works that come “close to life” itself. The artistic team will also present Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium in partnership with the UCI Newkirk Center for Science & Society and the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems on Friday, February 5, 2016, from 3pm – 5pm. WETWARE will open to the public on Saturday, February 6 with an Artist Reception from 2pm – 5pm. The exhibition will be will be on display through Friday, May 7, 2016.
WETWARE: art | agency | animation
WETWARE: art | agency | animation, curated by David Familian and Jens Hauser, features art in the light of today’s convergent living technologies: While artists have previously staged “Artificial life” through the hardware and software of computers and robotics to simulate living systems, increasingly it emerges from wetware itself. Whether touching upon the brain’s position between spiritualism and metabolism, the synthesis of luminescent protocells from scratch, or microbes that possess the technical ability to make gold and clean water, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of synthetic biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.
WETWARE presents beaded necklaces containing synthetic amino acids, protocells to simulate movements of phytoplankton, bacteria that produce energy to run a musical synthesizer, a desktop gene machine, A-Life parasites fed with electro trash, as well as an artificially grown brain-in-a-vat nourished with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. The exhibition juxtaposes art projects that creatively and critically investigate the anthropocentric mindset in engineered moist “Artificial life,” and the responsibility that arises with it. In WETWARE, the concepts of art, agency, and animation acquire new meanings, while aliveness is questioned in terms of components, circuits, and systems.
The exhibition features international artists who have increasingly extended their work towards wetware practices: Adam Brown, Gilberto Esparza, Thomas Feuerstein, Klaus Spiess & Lucie Strecker and Orkan Telhan. In addition Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand and Anna Dumitriu present new works developed during their three-week residencies at the Beall in collaboration with the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems and the UCI Newkirk Center for Science & Society.
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Special Event
The UCI Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the Beall Center for Art + Technology and the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems present
Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Feb. 5, 2016, 3pm – 5pm
Startling new developments in “gene editing” have raised profound issues regarding changing and enhancing existing life, creating new life forms, and the origin of life. At the same time, contemporary artists have started to engage with laboratory methods in the context of synthetic biology. These issues will be explored at the UCI Newkirk Center for Science and Society’s Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium being held in conjunction with the opening with the exhibit WETWARE: art/agency/animation at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, with the cooperation of the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems and supported by The Beall Family Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The symposium will explore issues surrounding the emerging field of synthetic biology in an era in which so-called “limit biologies,” as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich puts it, “come with the promise to reboot the life sciences.”
Featured panelists to date:
Lori Andrews (Chicago-Kent School of Law)
Adam Brown (Artist)
John Chaput (Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC Irvine)
Carl Cranor (Philosophy, UC Riverside)
Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (Artists)
Peter Donovan (Biological Chemistry, UC Irvine)
Anna Dumitriu (Artist)
Gilberto Esparza (Artist)
Chang Liu (Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine)
Markus Schmidt (Biofaction, Austria)
Klaus Spiess & Lucie Strecker (Artists)
Simon Penny (Studio Art, UC Irvine)
Orkan Telhan (Artist)
Moderated by Jens Hauser (Curator, University of Copenhagen)
For more information on the symposium and to RSVP, visit: http://newkirkcenter.uci.edu
