The Art and Science Experiment in the Age of CRISPR

In recent decades science-based art emerged, enhancing progressive encounters of the art world with cutting-edge technologies and the technosciences. With the rise of bioart, a variety of new materials, such as DNA, bacteria, cells, tissue cultures, and transgenic organisms, Genome Editing tools like CRISPR. entered art studios as a means of artistic expression.

Obviously, this made it necessary for artists to get acquainted with new epistemologies and a new logic of producing reality within the techno-scientific regime. By bringing their artistic endeavour to the public’s attention, science-based art has provoked greater reflection on the limits of manipulating and creating life.

Therefore, it is high time to shed some light on the relationship of ontology and aesthetics in the age of technoscience by focusing on the production of art that is related to technoscience; not only because of the technologies and tools it uses—but most importantly because from this relationship a new model emerges which is fruitful for understanding and interpreting our reality. Contributions will come from bioart, cancer research, cutting-edge artistic research, and media theory.

 

Contributors:

Suzanne Anker (New York, USA) The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (10 min)

is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She is chairing Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC since 2005 and continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Lab.

Frank Rösl (Heidelberg,  DE) The Art and Science Experiment: A Critical View (10 min)

is a professor and head of the Division of Viral Transformation Mechanisms Research Programme “Infection, Inflammation and Cancer”, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany. This field of research received considerable publicity when Harald zur Hausen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008, his mentor and colleague with whom Frank worked together for more than 15 years.

Margarete Jahrmann ( Vienna, AT) The Ludic Method: A playful form of artistic research or how to design more naturalistic experiments in cognitive sciences (10 min)

is an Austrian media epistemologist and artist working on activism, urbanism and play. She holds a professorship for Game Art and Game Design since 2006 at the University of the Arts in Zurich and since 2019 she is also active as Professor for Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Chair
Klaus Spiess (AT)

is specialized in metabolic psychosomatics and an artist, who runs the cross-disciplinary Arts and Science programme at the Medical University of Vienna, where he is Associate Professor at the Center for Public Health.

Co-Chair
Ingeborg Reichle (DE)

is the Chair of the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her primary area of research and teaching is the encounter of the arts with science and cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and synthetic biology.

About
LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world.

Program

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