1. Lecture 17: Spaces of Bioart
CHID 222: Biofutures, Autumn Quarter 2011
Associate Professor Phillip Thurtle, CHID and History

2. Spaces of Proiphylactic Bioart

3. Catherine Chalmers
 1957-

4. Rhino

5. Blind Sterile

6. Down Syndrome Mouse

7. Robotic Rat

8. Rodents, Fluorescent Mouse

9. Fluorescent Mouse

10. Fluorescent Mice

11. Normal and Obese

12. Spaces of Much Prophylactic
bioart
 Bioart as a critical or imaginative response from
one specialized sphere to another
 Artist as expressive agent
 Space as inert

13. Insect Series
 “Insects are a window into the unimaginable. Their
biology and behaviors are routinely bizarre and
enigmatic to us – they are refreshingly outside the human
perspective. I think that our experience can be
enhanced by an attempt to understand and give
meaning to other life forms. Yet, is it possible that a
human-centric viewpoint is setting the stage for an
impoverished environment?”

14. Leaf Cutters: Offerings
Insect Gift Economies

15. Leaf Cutters, Offerings, Yellow
Offering

16. Pink and Orange Offering

17. Red and White Flower Offering

18. American Cockroach

19. Drinking

20. Dining

21. Hiding

22. Molting

23. Sex on a bed

24. Teddy Bear

25. Safari

26. Execution Series
Rethinking death and communication

27. “Death ties us to the roach in a unique way. We kill them – they
survive. We kill ourselves – they survive. I wanted this body of work,
though, to get away from the discussion of specific deaths. So my
executions were reenacted with already-dead bugs. I have been
raising roaches for years and consequently collecting the dead for
years; their corpses animate this part of the project. The “Execution”
series is not about the suffering humans have endured at the hands
of humans, but what other species have endured at the hands of
humans. I do not want, in any way, to diminish the pain and horror
that we have experienced through the centuries with these
methods of killing. It is the opposite perspective: not looking in but
looking out across the animal barrier that I am endeavoring to
explore through this work.”

28. Hanging

29. Burning at the
stake

30. Gas Chamber

31. Floating Corpses

32. Spaces of Vitalist Bioart

33. Spaces of vitalist Bioart
 Needs to merge, or fold, scientific
and artistic space
 Space now generative (no longer
inert)
 Allows for change and
transformation

34. Folding spaces
 Joe Davis (1953-)
Pamela Ferdinand
wrote, "Davis eschews the art
versus science
argument, insisting that he
speaks both languages and
could not possibly tear the
two disciplines apart in his
own mind.", The Washington
Post Monday, November

35. http://www.joedavisthemovie.com/filmclips.html

36. Audio Microscope
“I found that slightly different acoustic signatures
corresponded to slightly different species of
microorganisms. Paramecium multimicronucleatum for
instance, has a slightly different audio signature than
Paramecium caudatum. The signatures of a given
species however tend to be uniquely distinct to that
species. So as it turns out, the two plants of the same
species must indeed "sing the same song", unless
perhaps the Ecuadorian brujo knows of some
exceptional organism unlike those we have observed to
date.”

38. David Dunn

39. http://www.acousticecology.org/index.html

40. Communication as vitality
 Art moves from “expression” into “experimentation” with
generative spaces
 Folds together spaces usually kept separate
 These then create new spaces
 New spaces as new types of connectivities
 Each new space promotes new forms of life and new
types of death