Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research: Interspecies Ecologies (Fall 2019)
4.314/4.315
Public lecture by Joe Davis, the pioneer of BioArt
Followed by Q&A session
Joe Davis is a legend, a CAVS fellow, and a prominent artist in the field of BioArt, art that engages living matter. Davis, according to writer Patrick House “was the first to insert art in the genome of a living organism” (New Yorker, 2014). Currently, Davis is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT, and a research scientist at the George Church Laboratory at Harvard Medical School.
The lecture is a response to and actualization of a CAVS legacy of art on the environmental scale. It responds to a pressing urgency to develop aesthetics as an inquiry into so-called New Climatic Regime (Anthropocene). The idea is that the current ecological mutations — summarized by the notion of “environment” — help to revisit the history of the last five decades in a new light. In general, art, with its imaginative, speculative, and aesthetic power, takes on the important challenge of developing new representations and options for action in a situation that is still unclear.
Considering the urgencies of this time, and the specific interest in our class centered around the investigation of interspecies communication, Davis’s lecture is an invaluable addition for the ongoing discussion in our community and beyond.
This lecture is hosted by ACT and the Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research taught by Professor Gediminas Urbonas and Luíza Bastos Lages, TA and graduate student at ACT.
