The graduate students from the York and Ryerson joint program in Communication and Culture are putting off their annual “Intersections” conference next weekend, March 12-14, 2010. This year’s theme is “encounters.” You can check out the website here for more info.
Conference events will be taking place at the Ryerson campus, downtown. I thought the keynote on bioart, living viral tattoos and cryobook archives might be of interest to some of you (Saturday March 13 at 7:00 PM). Here’s the blurb:
Creative Keynote
Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 7 pm
Student Campus Centre, Room SCC 115
Ryerson University
55 Gould Street
“Visceral Encounters”
with Tagny Duff
Assistant Professor in Communication Studies
Concordia University, Montreal
Cellular tissue, genetically modified organisms and biotechnological practices such as tissue engineering and genetic engineering practices are emerging materials and techniques in “new” media art practices, or biological art. Artists are now working in science laboratories, and creating art objects with biological techniques and materials.
While the wet, fleshy, visceral quality of such work generates copious material for theoretical writing on the changing status of bodies, art, technology and science, the artworks proper (and organisms featured within them) are rarely encountered in physical form. Rather, the encounter is mediated through documentation circulated via various distribution networks in the form of epi-texts, websites, PowerPoint presentations, photographs and video documents. These documents are often read as indexical references to the biological art work and/or the process of its making, when in fact, such representations are heavily mediated and can be read as generating legitimacy and authority to the scientific, biomedical image. These documents accrue symbolic value for works that most viewers will never experience in meatspace. Why and how are biological works rarely accessible in public presentation yet simultaneously generating and regenerating plentiful substitutes and documents?
This presentation will explore some of the aforementioned concerns in relation to the projects Living Viral Tattoos and Cryobook Archives created in collaboration with scientists, a plastic surgeon and artists between 2007-2009. These biological art projects featured the use of biological virus (lentivirus cloned HIV1) and donated human ex-plant tissue. Corporeal materiality is foregrounded in these works at a time when digital media technologies, such as anatomical/surgery dissection procedures using computer simulation software, full-body x-ray scans at border crossings, digital finger and retinal scans, and thermal imaging software are changing conventional forms of visceral encounters with wet bodies.
Tagny Duff is an artist, researcher and educator based in Montreal. Her biological art works, performances, videos, and net art works have been exhibited nationally and internationally for over a decade. Recently, Living Viral Tattoos (2008), the installation, was officially selected for the ISEA 2009 Exhibition (Belfast, Ireland). The video component was featured at the Moscow Biennial (2009), National Centre for Contemporary Art 2008 (Keliningrad, Russia) and IX MediaForum and Moscow International Film Festival 2008 as part of Evolution Haute Couture, curated by Dmitry Bulatov. Other recent exhibitions include Performing Diagnostics (2009) Articule (Montreal, Canada), Moist Media Archives Prototypes (2008) Perth Institute of Contemporary Art 2008 (Perth, Australia) and Recursive Symmetry (2008) Gallery Aferro (New Jersey, USA). Living Viral Tattoos (2008) and Cryobook Archives (2009) were created during two separate residencies at SymbioticA, The Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts in Perth, Australia between 2007-2009. The works will be featured in a solo exhibition Viral Memorabilia at the FoFa Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal) in 2011. Duff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University and is the founder of Fluxmedia, a research/creation network for artists and researchers interested in the convergence of art, science and technology.
