Opening Night Party: Thursday, October 25, 6-9 pm
701 Mission Street at Third, San Francisco
415.978.ARTS (2787), www.ybca.org

This blog is under construction. Please check back frequently for updates.
Further inquiries: Sophia Wang (sfw@berkeley.edu).
Life Becomes Art in BioTechnique

There was a time when cutting-edge biology experiments were as simple as cross breeding pink and white flowered pea plants. Gregor Mendel, a 19th Century priest and scientist, earned the title “the father of modern genetics” by doing just this. Today’s lab-based research in genomics, genetic engineering, bioinformatics, and biochemistry seem a far cry from Mendel's gardening experiments, but are they?

BioTechnique, an exhibition that opens this October at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, breaks down the seemingly high barriers to entry for non-experts, exposing the ethical, cultural, and ecological issues and implications surrounding biotechnology.

BioTechnique presents a visually rich assortment of organisms, semi-living objects, and devices as artworks crafted using biological techniques. Examples include Denise King’s “paintings”—terrarium habitats colored by the bacteria living within them, and The Tissue Culture and Art Project’s “victimless” leather, grown using sophisticated laboratory equipment. The artists participating in BioTechnique are invested in the life forms they alter or support, and relate to their artworks as caretakers and as technicians.

To place this work, based in the idea of manipulating living organisms, in a broader historical context, the exhibition also includes artifacts created by biological engineers, industrial technologists, and ecological researchers.

Participants:
Aqua Forest Aquarium
The Artesa Winery/ Codorniu Spain
Brandon Ballengée
The Exploratorium
Golden Gate Orchids
Denise King
Plant’It Earth
The Quake Group, Stanford University
Philip Ross
Tissue Culture & Art Project
Allison Wiese

Catalogue:
BioTechnique will have an accompanying full color catalogue with essays by acclaimed art historian Pamela Lee, ecological philosopher George Gessert, and science scholar Adrienne Mayor. With an introduction by Phil Ross.




10/8/07

Public Program: Get Small, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, December 4th, 2007

Presented by:
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Film Screening: Get Small

December 4th, 2007, 6:30-8:30pm
YBCA screening room
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
 701 Mission Street @ 3rd, San Francisco
Admission: free

What vast landscapes and dynamic dramas are hidden in the universe that exists beyond the naked eye? BioTechnique curator Phil Ross curates and moderates an evening of short films about what life looks like when it is really tiny, featuring the work of contemporary microscopists from around the Bay Area, state of the art computer simulations of cell-sized interactions, and a not-to-be-missed presentation of Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level, in which a 1970's Stanford professor and students portray a choreographed depiction of protein formation.

Also featuring films and footage by Paul Berg, Jean Painleve, Drew Berry, and others.

Further information:

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts:
YBCA Events Listing
1 comments

Public Program: BioAesthetics, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, November 26, 2007

Presented by:
California College of the Arts
Graduate Fine Arts Program

BioAesthetics

November 26, 2007, 7-9pm
Timken Lecture Hall
California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
Admission: free

For more information contact Sophia Wang, Public Programs Coordinator: sfw@berkeley.edu

Biological entities serve as potent allegories for ideas of origination, purification, and the affirmation of a human role in the order of nature. This panel presentation and discussion will address the aesthetic language and landscapes of complexly regulated biological systems. Speakers include: Oron Catts, founder of SymbioticA, the world’s first collaborative art and science laboratory; Richard Doyle, Professor of English, Science Technology & Society and Information Science & Technology at Penn State University and Beatriz da Costa, Assistant Professor of Arts, Computation, & Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

Oron Catts will present the early history of tissue culture laboratories and the guiding ideas that have given them form, Professor Doyle will give a presentation entitled “LSDNA” on ethno-psycho-botanical images, and Beatriz da Costa will speak on biopolitical activism.

Further information:

California College of the Arts:
CCA Events Listing, November 2007

Oron Catts:
The Tissue Culture & Art Project

Richard Doyle:
Richard Doyle: Mobius

Penn State, Department of English Faculty Directory

Beatriz da Costa:
Beatrizdacosta.net
4 comments

Public Program: Who Owns the Garden? Bioethics and the Art of Design, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, October 30, 2007

Presented by:
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Community Conversation:
Who Owns the Garden? Bioethics and the Art of Design

October 30, 2007, 6:30pm
YBCA screening room
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
 701 Mission Street @ 3rd, San Francisco
Admission: free

For more information, contact Sophia Wang, Public Programs Coordinator: sfw@berkeley.edu

As part of BioTechnique and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Community Conversations series, artists and horticulturalists Amy Franceschini, George Gessert, and Marina McDougall will engage the public in a discussion of the history and politics of owning something that is alive. Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers, an art collective devoted to the design and implementation of interdisciplinary, multimedia work that is relevant to its environmental and spatio-temporal contexts. George Gessert is a writer, artist and plant breeder who focuses on the intersection of art and genetics, and who specializes in facilitating and exhibiting new plant hybrids. Joining them will be Marina McDougall, curator, garden planner, and writer on the culture of scientific research.

Further information:

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts:
YBCA Community Conversation: Who Owns the Garden? Bioethics and the Art of Design

George Gessert:
Online Directory for Leonardo, Journal of Arts, Sciences and Technology

UCLA Design/Media Arts 98T Resource on George Gessert

Amy Franceschini:
Futurefarmers

Marina McDougall:
Calfiornia College of the Arts, Faculty Listing

Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve
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