VISUAL DESCRIPTIONS OF LARVAL TREMATODA
A visual key to larval trematoda compiled with Britt Koskella.
Archive for March, 2007
Installation setup and opening weekend at Palmer Commons
click the above image for a quicktime timelapse movie of the installation process…
Information about the exhibition here…
Opening night…
Bio-artists bridge the gaps between arts and sciences | Chicago Tribune
Bio-artists bridge the gaps between arts and sciences | Chicago Tribune
-recent AP report on “bioart.” If find the ethics of suffering in the “bioart” context worth additional exploration you can view a PDF brief from the 2002 Aesthetics of Care symposium.
via emutagen.com
Network Entrepreneurship at the Interface of Art and Biology
I want to reflect on some aspects of the conversations from the symposium on Visual Culture and Bioscience and try to reframe the discussion with notes for myself.
A focal point for the discussion has been to discuss the roles artists play in laboratory settings. A good deal of discussion and effort has been directed over the years towards promoting opportunities and understanding the roles that artists perform alongside and/or despite scientists. Suzanne Anker also introduced the notion of “art as invention”–the migration of social spaces in a recent thread dealing with the social and cultural implications of bioscience.
While these are complex topics full of social and methodological implications, I sense a generalizable way of framing the conversation that, I think, warrants some consideration–if only because it might help draw others into the conversation.
Whatever the engagement of art and biology, be it through individuals, groups, and/or at the level of disciplines, there are certain instances of value created by these multifaceted interactions. Many of these have been discussed. However, these are not characteristic of only art and bioscience, but rather they seem to exists at all levels of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the practice of sensing opportunities and starting new organizations (of concepts even!) to seize on those opportunities.
Quoting Suzanne Anker:
Novel ways of thinking and doing can be socially, economically and politically beneficial. The wonder of invention is a creative springboard allowing the more adventurous to remix the given. Negotiating territorial discourses and practices requires tenaciousness and makes significant learning demands on the border-crossers…Invention can also be looked upon as incorporating an element of chance…For the artist, recognizing nuance and possibility in the process of making, is part of artistic creation. Another aspect, furthering collaboration and creative process is the random and not so random meeting of various practitioners at cocktail parties, lectures art exhibits and the like.
I like Suzanne’s sentiment–though I have to disagree about the role that chance plays in the interaction. Certainly there is an element of chance, but invention is much more an import/export process: “Negotiating territorial discourses, recognizing nuance and possibility, meeting of various practitioners.” From my point of view, the majority of what counts as interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary practice involves translation, mediation, organization, and consultation. If you are involved in an actively engaged import/export process of exchanging ideas, materials, methods…whatever…you generally increase the odds that chance will fall in your favor. The implications, especially for teaching and learning, are that the import/export process can be learned and developed while chance cannot.
Would you agree that a characteristic of artists is their ability to sense gaps in culture or social structures? Would you also agree that artists are able to bridge these gaps because they maintain affiliations and learning strategies that involve and leveraging the concerns of multiple groups?
I see at least two ways of looking at this:
Behaviorally–that is, what are the behaviors of artists and scientists that seek to make these kinds of bridges and border-crossings? A question to ask here is, “How?”
Functionally–that is, what are the benefits that these behaviors confer both for the individuals involved and for their “other” constituencies? A question to ask here is, “For Whom?”
From the behavior standpoint, this idea of entrepreneurship is critical. I admire the symposium participants’ overriding desire to identify new areas of investigation, their resourcefulness in building a practice and implementing projects, and their dedication–despite conventional “wisdom.”
Woven through this discussion have been themes of
- creating common ground,
- creating new holistic understanding, and
- resolving differences between disciplines through the development of a metaphor–visual or otherwise.
These themes, not coincidentally, characterize Wolfe and Haynes’ criteria for interdisciplinary synthesis (at least in terms of writing). (Wolfe, C. R., and Haynes, C. 2003. Interdisciplinary writing assessment profiles. Issues in Integrative Studies 21, 126–169.)
To what degree are the behaviors, practices, and methods of the artists and scientists involved in this discussion and elsewhere indicative of brokering–such that each is translating, applying metaphors, creating common ground, and resolving differences between groups? This brokering, I think, is a fundamental activity and the research seems to indicate that it can be learned.
For much of my argument about brokering, I am drawing from Ronald Burt’s work on structural holes and network entrepreneurship. Burt recent presented to NESTA on the topic of innovation.
The domain knowledge and landscape is also critical. The fact that so little is known about biology, and for that matter, about art, necessarily creates opportunities. These are amplified by the apparent and real methodological differences between biology and art practices. Thus, one explanation for why this is such a rich area of inquiry lies in the social, cultural, and ethical implications of bioscience–confounded by the social and cultural “holes” created when we try to align the constituencies and interests of biology and art.
Exhibition Announcement: Sui generis
Installation of Sui generis begins this week in the Windows Room (3rd floor) at Palmer Commons (hours: 7:30 am-11pm Mon-Sat). The exhibition is open now through April 13th, 2007.
Sui generis is a large-scale tectonic, systems-based installation designed to take into account related conceptual attributes of a chapel, scientific laboratory, carnival, and children’s nursery. Sui generis offers a cognitive retreat, a place for reflection, and a chance to come into close physical proximity with other organisms and ourselves. The installation will develop to encompass different attributes and further articulation over the duration of the exhibition.
In order to experience the installation, visitors will be invited to raise their heads through one of the two holes in the floor underneath. When inhabiting the interior, the two viewers will be confronted not only with the shadowscape, but also with each other. As the architecture is elusive in its source, it invites diverse interpretations–a carnival sideshow, a Zen garden, a Victorian greenhouse, a virus, or perhaps even a flower awaiting pollination.
The title Sui generis indicates an idea, an entity or a reality that cannot be included in a wider concept. In intellectual property law, exclusive rights are granted for the creation and development of plant breeds, databases and traditional knowledge (among others) to reflect that the subject matter is a product of the intellect.
For more background, explore a database of terms and concepts associated with the design of Sui generis as well as documentation of the construction process.
In his work, Gabriel Harp recombines visual art and life science (epistemology) through the processes of critical design and network entrepreneurship. Often working at the interfaces of evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, education, and visual culture, his work investigates the roles of metaphors in education, science and policy and the primacy of visual signals in the discourse surrounding genomics and biotechnology. Collaborating with Zack Denfeld and others, Gabriel is currently developing a visual map of patent claims on the human genome.
Organelle View published in Nucleic Acids Research
The collaborative work of graduate student Gabriel Harp and Chris Landau (MFA ’06) on the Organelle View project was published in the January issue of Nucleic Acids Research.
“The project makes a gigantic leap in the distribution of biological data–moving it beyond the conventional representations of names and numbers to embrace the visual and organismal aspects of cellular and molecular forms”, says Harp.
“Organelle View is a scientific visualization application allowing users to dynamically generate a visual interpretation of data from Organelle DB. Organelle View presents a searchable interface with a three-dimensional representation of an archetypical cell. Rather than representing organelles and subcellular structures by text, Organelle View offers an artist’s rendering of a cell and its major organelles. At present, we have chosen a budding yeast cell (S.cerevisiae) as the model for Organelle View, largely because protein localization has been studied quite extensively in yeast; future versions of Organelle View will incorporate additional cell types from other organisms.”
(Wiwatwattana, N., Landau, C.M., Cope, G.J., Harp, G.A., & Kumar, A. (2007). Organelle DB: an updated resource of eukaryotic protein localization and function. Nucleic Acids Research, 35, D810-D814.)
Mini-grant for Integrative Projects (A&D LIfe)
A&D Life Mini-Grants
With support from the Rackham Graduate School, A&D Life is pleased to be able to offer small project grants in support of activities that make bridges between art, design, and life science-related concerns. Small grants of up to $300 are available to teams whose projects share the concerns of A&D Life.
The focus of A&D Life is to:
1) understand the diversified viewpoints and approaches that structure creative engagement with the life sciences,
2) identify historical and contemporary precedents for work in these areas,
3) employ these theoretical and historical connections as catalysts for creative practices,
4) register creative work as research that documents the complex, shifting relationships of art practice at the interface of contemporary social and scientific endeavor.
Up to three (3) such grants are available and will be awarded on a competitive basis. Funds may be used for materials and/or expenses related to the project. Recipients will be asked to provide a brief presentation of their work (in progress or otherwise) at an A&D Life workshop.
Requirements:
Teams must be composed of at least two individuals including at least one faculty member and one graduate student.
Applications should not exceed a one-page description of the project, research, or creative work to be carried out. Include a list of team members, and a brief list or description of the interdisciplinary connections or network to be realized.
Applications may come from any Rackham department or school-associated teams. Please submit proposals by February 25th to gharp@umich.edu
DEADLINE EXTENDED
Suspense, narration, and science…?
This is a response to Carl Djerassi’s post on the topic of IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE as part of the Virtual Symposium On Visual Culture and Bioscience.
The public discussion is at http://visualcultureandbioscience.blogspot.com/
Immaculate Misconception! What a great title! I would love to see the play; it sounds very interesting.
This series of comments reminds me of the similarities between scientific narrative as it is presented in, for example, journal articles and the dramatic narrative evident in theater and film. The common narrative arc for science (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion) depends very much on cause and effect and follows closely the style of narration in film (exposition, some change in knowledge, a goal-oriented plot, investigation, and finally the climax).
I’m curious about the didactic quality often associated with information transmission and its role in pedagogy. Alfred Hitchcock remarked that, “Suspense is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention… It is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved… [The] conditioning of the viewer is essential to the buildup of suspense”.
Suspense is vital to narration in theater and film and is implicitly embedded in scientific communication both within the discourse of science and between researchers and the “public” audience.
One might argue that the usual style is a broad kind of suspense that keeps the audience in the dark about what will happen next and creates uncertainty. This kind focuses only on the protagonists so that when anything significant happens, it is a surprise to the viewer. As such, their responses can vary more widely depending their prior knowledge, which may or may not prepare them.
A second kind of suspense keeps the audience attentive through the use of deadlines and frequent shifts in perspective from the protagonist to other “actors” human or non-human.
I’d be curious to hear what theater folks and others who deal with stories and plot structures have to say about the use of these tactics to shape and moderate scientific narration.
