[rohrpost] BioArt panel I and II at the 19th International Congress of Aesthetics, Krakow, Poland (21 – 27 July 2013)

[Ingeborg Reichle]

19th International Congress of Aesthetics, Krakow, Poland (21–27 July
2013) http://www.ica2013.pl/


BioArt Panel I:

Towards a New Transaesthetics: Aesthetics and Ontology in Current Bio
Art Practices

Chair: Dr. Ingeborg Reichle (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany)

Speakers:

• Dr. Ingeborg Reichle (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany)

• Prof. Dr. Nicole C. Karafyllis (Technische Universitaet
Braunschweig, Germany)

• Prof. Suzanne Anker (School of Visual Arts, New York, United States)

• Prof. Dr. Jos de Mul (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)


Bioart Panel II:

Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Art

Chair: Doc. Dr. Polona Tratnik (University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia)

Speakers:

• Prof. Dr. María Antonia González Valerio (National Autonomous
University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico)

• Prof. Dr. Miško Šuvaković (Faculty of Music, Belgrade, Serbia)

• Doc. Dr. Polona Tratnik (University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia)

• Dr. Melentie Pandilovski (Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada)



BioArt panel I and II:


Towards a New Transaesthetics: Aesthetics and Ontology in Current Bio
Art Practices
Dr. Ingeborg Reichle (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany)

During the last decade, the term ‘Bio Art’ has been the subject of
vital discussions as a description of the intersecting domains of the
biological sciences and their incorporation into the arts. The use of
biological material like tissue culture, plant breeding, and above all
genetic engineering as artistic media went hand in hand with debates
about the aesthetic value and ethical-ontological consequences of
bringing cutting edge science into the arts. The adoption of
bioscientific techniques and methods into the arts, however, not only
broached a highly controversial subject, it also opened up new ways of
artistic expression. With the emerging field of Bio Art, tissue
culture, bacteria, cells, and even genetically engineered organisms
have become part of the art world, raising questions about the
aesthetic and ontological status of live in the age of technoscience.

In the last decade we have seen a number of artists questioning our
concept of life while moving beyond the boundaries of art and science.
Debates about changing the face of our planet through geo-engineering
or debates about assembling life artificially in a petri dish through
synthetic biology challenge our concept of “live” in an age, where
“nature” seems to be increasingly human-made.

For almost half a century the modern life sciences have been able to
produce “artificial” living organisms that evolution has not brought
forth so far by using the methods and techniques of genetic
engineering. The concept of life as technology has been one of the
starting points of producing “biofacts,” which owe their existence
solely to the culture of experimentation and the expanding systems of
apparatus in the laboratory. The term biofact was introduced a few
years ago by the philosopher Nicole C. Karafyllis to restate a
systematic term for technically manipulated life by substituting
“arti” with “bio” in the word “artifact”. Until recently we understood
artifacts are artificial, constructed, and created objects.
Previously, constructed objects always belonged to the domain of
things. An artifact always stands for a thing, made by humans using
skills and techniques, and it is a collective name for artificially
created things as diverse as buildings, artworks, or machinery.
Biofacts can be regarded as biological artifacts, which mean they are,
or have been, alive. This conceptual deficiency, amongst other
reasons, arose because the technological philosophy up to now was
focusing to systematize technology and viewing “nature” always as “the
other” or “opposite” of technology. The contributions to the panel
“Towards a New Transaesthetics: Aesthetics and Ontology in Current Bio
Art Practices” seek to analyze the aesthetic and ontological
consequences of Bio Art, exploring a appropriate theoretical framework
that is drawn from the fields of philosophy, art history and the arts
itself in order to examine current Bio Art practices.


CV:
Ingeborg Reichle is a trained art historian and today active as
cultural theorist writing on contemporary art and new technologies,
with a focus on biotechnology and artificial life. She lectures since
2011 at the Hermann von Helmholtz -Zentrum für Kulturtechnik,
Humboldt-University Berlin. From 2005–2011 she was holding a research
position at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
In 2004 she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation on art in the age
of technoscience: Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und
Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience (Springer 2005), Art in
the Age of Technoscience. Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and
Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer 2009). Her habilitation
in 2013 dealt with the epistemology of images, diagrams and models in
art and science. She is co-editor of five books: IMAGE MATCH.
Visueller Transfer, „Imagescapes“ und Intervisualität in globalen
Bildkulturen (Fink Verlag 2012, with M. Baleva and O. L. Schultz),
Atlas der Weltbilder (Akademie Verlag 2011, with Chr. Markschies, P.
Deuflhard, and J. Brüning), Maßlose Bilder. Visuelle Ästhetik der
Transgression (Fink Verlag 2009, with S. Siegel), Visuelle Modelle
(Fink Verlag 2008, with S. Siegel and A. Spelten), Verwandte Bilder.
Die Fragen der Bildwissenschaft (Kadmos Verlag 2007, with S. Siegel
and A. Spelten). In 2010 she curated the bioart exhibition “jenseits
des menschen – beyond humans” at the Berlin Medical History Museum of
the Charité. Since 2000 she has been a guest lecturer at various
international institutions including the School of Visual Arts, New
York; the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), Boston; the Life-Science Lab, German Cancer Research Center,
Heidelberg; Timbusu College National University of Singapore;
SymbioticA at the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology,
University of Western Australia; School of Creative Media, City
University of Hong Kong; Lomonosov Moscow State University.


Where is the artefact? Biofacts and the shifting boundaries of Arts
and Technology
Prof. Dr. Nicole C. Karafyllis, Technische Universitaet Braunschweig

In everyday life, we are quite sure, what artefacts are; for instance,
automobiles, screwdrivers and houses. And we are also quite sure, that
landscapes, bodies and skin are not artefacts. But what are they? In
modernity, they cannot be regarded as nature any more. But then, what
are they? Or is this the wrong question? BioArt exactly poses this
second-order question, that is, if the ontological question “What are
they?” is still a good one.

The classical realms of artifacts are technology and the arts. When we
look at biotechnological approaches, we get not inspired to ask “What
are they?”, but: “What are they good for?” Artefacts in technology
have to function according to a specific purpose; as a mean they serve
a defined end. In everyday life, we do not experience artifacts as
media, as long as they function. Their mediality shows only as
mediality, when they do not function any more. That means,
technological mediality becomes obvious only ex negativo, by becoming
dysfunctional, by disappointing us. Not so in the arts which, per a
common definition, do not serve utility. There, the mediality of the
artefact shows, when the artefact irritates. When it loses its power
of irritation, its specific mediality is lost.

This line of argumentation has not solved the problem, what
landscapes, skin and bodies are. Rather it can emphasize which
theoretical and political difficulties arise, when artists use fluid
and living artefacts. As I will argue, the common notions of the
relation between the artefact and its mediality dramatically change in
BioArt. Commonly, we do not regard bodies and tissues as created and
designed, though we believe that they function according to a given
purpose. However, in biotechnological modeling are many stages of
technical design involved, which preconfigures the form, in which
BioArt can act and create (endogenous design). Therefore, the artist
has to find a new mode of difference to his/her work of art in so far
as this work still is aimed to embody some emancipative and irritating
potential.

CV:
Nicole Karafyllis is a trained philosopher and biologist, and since
2010 chair of the department of philosophy at Technische Universität
Braunschweig (Germany). 2008-2010 she held a professorship in
philosophy at the United Arab Emirates University in Abu Dhabi (UAE),
followed by a visiting professorship on Cultural Philosophy of Science
2007 at the University of Vienna (Austria). Her habilitation in 2006
dealt with the phenomenology of growth. Karafyllis main areas of
research are: philosophy of science and technology, biotechnologies
and the arts, philosophy of culture and intercultural exchange.
Selected publications: N. C. Karafyllis: Biologisch, Natürlich,
Nachhaltig. Philosophische Aspekte des Naturzugangs im 21.
Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Francke 2001 (in German). N. C. Karafyllis, G.
Ulshöfer (Ed.): Sexualized Brains. Scientific Modeling of Emotional
Intelligence from a Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008.



The Cultured Cell: Reframing Life
Prof. Suzanne Anker (School of Visual Arts, New York, United States)

Revisioning life through technological intervention continues to
create living matter in novel and sometimes controversial ways. From
frozen embryos and stem cells to purple and orange cauliflower to
bio-printed organs, the cultured cell is a living technological
entity. Coming into existence through means of mimicry, how can these
organisms be classified in Linnaean terms? Tissue culturing of plants
can create a million molecularly identical plants from a small amount
of stock. Plants can be made from stems and leaves, assigning a new
status to seeds. In light of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” we now turn our
attention to mechanical reproduction of living entities. This talk
will address the expanding fields of Bio Art and design and the ways
in which they are being incorporated into the social order.

CV:
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the
intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a
variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to
large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has
been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and
galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute,
the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the JP Getty Museum, the
Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charite in Berlin, the Center for
Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the Museum
of Modern Art in Japan. Her book The Molecular Gaze: Art in the
Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, was
published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. She has
hosted twenty episodes of the Bio Blurb show, an Internet radio
program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA in
NYC, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Art On Air. has been a speaker at
Harvard University, the Royal Society in London, Cambridge University,
Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck
Institute, Universitiy of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for
Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London,
Banff Art Center and many others. Chairing SVA’s Fine Arts Department
in NYC since 2005, Suzanne Anker continues to interweave traditional
and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and
the Nature and Technology BioArt Lab.


The biotechnological sublime
Prof. Dr. Jos de Mul (Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

In my talk, I will investigate the phenomenon of the technological
sublime. Although the category of the sublime has a long history, it
became a dominant concept in nineteenth and twentieth-century
aesthetics. In (post)modern culture however, we witness a fundamental
transformation of the experience of the sublime. Although originally
the concept of the sublime predominantly referred to a specific
rhetoric effect, in the nineteenth century the sublime became strongly
connected with the artistic representation of overwhelming phenomena
in nature. I will argue that in the course of the 20th century, the
sublime increasingly becomes entangled with the experience of
technology. At first, we seem to witness here a return of the sublime
from nature to technology, even though the point of departure was an
alpha-technology (rhetoric), whereas the return concerns the domain of
beta-technologies, such as nuclear physics and information technology.
However, in the age of biotechnologies (such as genetic modification
and synthetic biology), the sublime seems to regain a natural
dimension. Mediated by biotechnologies nature becomes a ‘second’ or
‘next nature’. Illustrated by some striking examples of recent
'bio-art' it will be argued that in the age of biotechnology the
difference between nature, technology and art will gradually vanish,
and new dimensions of the sublime will become manifest.

CV:
Jos de Mul is full professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at the
Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and scientific
director of the Research Institute Philosophy of Information and
Communication Technology (φICT). He has also taught at the University
of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Fudan University (Shanghai) and he is a
regular Visitor of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and
the Tokyo Institute of Technology. From 2007-2010 he was president of
the International Association for Aesthetics. His publications
include: Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State
University of New York Press, 1999) , The Tragedy of Finitude.
Dilthey's Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004),
Cyberspace Odyssey. Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Destiny Domesticated. The
Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Technology (State University
of New York Press, Autumn 2013). He is the winner of the Praemium
Erasmianum, the Dutch Research Prize for the Humanities. His work has
been translated in more than a dozen languages.



Towards the Question for the Art: Implications of Biotechnology and
Ontology for a Possible Aesthetics
Prof. Dr. María Antonia González Valerio (National Autonomous
University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico)

What is art? One of the main questions that aesthetic ontology has
postulated and has tried to address from the point of view of general
ontology, that is, from the question about being. The reflections that
philosophy has done around this question (For analytic aesthetics the
leading question has been: “Which are the artworks?”) has been central
to think upon the possibilities of art regarding the way in which it
corresponds itself – or not – with a certain way of being of reality.

But reality is nowadays constructed in the realm of technoscience and
not only in an empirical level, but also in a transcendental one. The
production of art is related to technoscience not only because of the
use of technologies –and recently of biotechnologies- in its making,
but most importantly because in this relationship a model from which
to comprehend and interpret reality emerges.

Therefore, the question what is art should be posed in the light of an
ontology that deals with technoscience and the production of reality
within biotechnologies.

CV:
María Antonia González Valerio is a philosopher working in the fields
of aesthetics and ontology, with a focus on biotechnologies and the
arts. She is full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is the author of two
books: Un tratado de ficción. Ontología de la mimesis (Herder, 2010)
and El arte develado (Herder, 2005). She is co-editor of five books,
the most recent: Pròs Bíon: Reflexiones naturales desde el arte, la
ciencia y la filosofía (UNAM, 2013). She is the head of the
interdisciplinary research group Art+Science based at the UNAM and the
coordinator of the arts collective BIOS Ex machinA (workshop for the
fabrication of the human and the non-human). In 2012 she curated the
bioart exhibition “Sin origen/Sin semilla (Without origin/Seedless)”
at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (MUCA) Campus Roma and
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).


Art, Politics, Technology, and Science – Spectacularisation
Prof. Dr. Miško Šuvaković (Faculty of Music, Belgrade, Serbia)

Contemporary relations between art, politics, technology, and science
may be identified as a field of obsessions and phantasms about
representing the 'truth of the world/life', or, alternatively, as a
field of obsessions and phantasms about performing the 'regulation of
world/life'. The concepts of this representing and performing should
be understood as practices of exemplifying generically the conditions
of the truth and potentiality of forms of life. Bioartists concerns
representing the truth conditions and performing the regulation of
living, that is, biological material. By means of this representing
and performing, the invisible and abstract world of the 'knowledge of
life', which science and technology posit before events and situations
of life, becomes visible. It is not that art thereby becomes science
or technology, but rather that through art, science and technology
become visible with all of their effects and consequences in the real,
living world. The function of art is to spectacularise the complex
field of relations between science, politics, and technology with
regards to forms of life.

CV:
Miško Šuvaković was born in 1954 in Beograd. He has been co-founder
and member of conceptual artistic Group 143 (1975–1980). He was
co-founder and member of informal theoretic and artistic institution
“Community for Space Investigation” (1982–1989). He is member of
theoretical platform TkH (Walking Theory, from 2000). He teaches
aesthetics and theory of art, Faculty of Music, Belgrade (Professor).
He teaches theory of art and theory of culture, Interdisciplinar
studies, University of Art Belgrade. He published 32 books in Serbian,
Croatian, Slovenian and English, among others recently: Impossible
Histories, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006; Pojmovnik teorije
umetnosti, Orion Art, Beograd, 2011; Surplus Life: The Philosophy of
contemporary art and form of life, Horizonti, Ljubljana, 2011.


The Quest for Survival: Art with Biotechnology
Doc. Dr. Polona Tratnik (University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia)

In the biotech century we have been facing a tremendous development of
the field since the middle of the twentieth century. Biotechnology as
the knowledge-power has been perceived as revolutionary, promising
that the man is soon to become the “master of the evolution”. Since
the computer paradigm signifying the swing of genomics art has found
its mission in reflecting and discussing this segment of reality.
Humankind has been aiming to gain the ultimate power with
biotechnology, however only art projects reveal this striving and link
it to another, rather modest yet utmost ambitious goal: the quest for
survival.

Today, in Slovenia one can find perhaps the most vivid scene of
practices in the convergence of art and biotechnology in the world,
transferring the technologies, knowledge, methodologies and living
matter into the world of art. Yet they are not meant to be naïve,
non-reflexive playing with life. The artists have developed rich
conceptual challenges and technological platforms in order to discuss
complex but very relevant actual issues, such as those of biopower,
anthropocentrism, survival of the species, biological adaptation to
extreme environmental conditions, genetically modified food products
and possible cannibalism as means of survival tactics, etc. These
aspects present extreme aesthetic and political confrontation of
public with the levers of the need to foster the development of
biotechnology.

CV:
Polona Tratnik is the president of the Slovenian Society of
Aesthetics. She is the head of the Department for Cultural Studies,
docent for philosophy of culture at Faculty of Humanities and research
associate at Science and Research Centre of the University of
Primorska, director of Horizonti Institute. She was a Fulbright
Visiting Scholar and Guest Professor at University of California Santa
Cruz in 2012 and a guest professor in Beijing, Helsinki, Mexico etc.
She is an author of five monographs, one forthcoming: Hacer-vivir más
allá del cuerpo y del medio, Mexico City: Herder, and one just written
(Conquest of Body. Biopower of Biotechnology).



Biopolitics and Aestheticization of Toxicity
Dr. Melentie Pandilovski (Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada)

The paper looks into how “Toxicity” entrenches itself into what
Phenomenology sees as the co-constitution of society and technology.
Namely, the cultural deciphering of the toxic societal terrain
resonates with current socio-economic global transformations. The
topic of toxicity reconstructs not only the current environmental
situation, but also socio-political contexts by looking into modes of
contemporary cultural and technological production, the extraction of
minerals, toxic waste, local and international policies,
community-based responses, and the thematic of production, consumption
and disposal.

The paper looks into the extended role that Biopolitics maintains
today with the crucial question of how Biotechnology shapes life, and
therefore attains the central role in society. In fact Biotechnology
adds a complexity of layers that allows it to radically reconstruct
the relations between politics and nature, allowing for a reassessment
of how we look at life today. The trajectory of the development of
Biopolitics is altered, for life appears not to be what we have
originally assumed that it was, and therefore the regulation of life
cannot continue under the premises of what had been previously taken
for granted. The dualities of power and right, sovereignty and law, do
not leave the contemporary Biopolitical discourses for a minute.
Biopolitical conflicts appear in the real and virtual worlds involving
NGOs, governments and corporations. They also involve issues of energy
control (choice of fuel material and alternative energy sources), the
causes and consequences of environmental changes and sustainability,
life, death and appearance.

The paper considers the changes that Toxicity causes in the cultural,
socio-political and ecological landscape relating to art and
technology, science, art and philosophy, and the methods & manners of
the “infiltration” of biotechnology into every facet of ordinary life.
The Bio-political characteristics of Toxicity can be seen by some in
line with eugenics, as the toxins will most certainly lead to
sterility of the indigenous population, and are to be seen in
correlation with the degenerative pathology of the prevailing
illnesses such as alcoholism, STDs, obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.


CV:
Melentie Pandilovski is an art historian, theorist, curator, and
critic. He is Director of Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada. Previously he was the Director of the Visual and
Cultural Research Centre, Euro-Balkan Institute in Skopje, Macedonia;
Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, South
Australia (2003–2009); and Director of the (Soros) Contemporary Art
Center in Skopje, Macedonia (1998–2003). He has curated more than 100
exhibitions and organized numerous symposia, conferences, and
workshops, in Europe and Australia, such as SEAFair (Skopje Electronic
Art Fair) in the period 1997–2011.