Digital Transplants

DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS: Mediated SciArt Curated by Bojana Ginn Introduction by Meredith Kooi Zine by ALTERED MEANS

tion, and imaging technologies to probe perception, consciousness, reality, systems, and nature -- topics and problems shared by scientists.

DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS: Mediated SciArt September 12-14, 2017 Lightroom Studio 115 N McDonough St Decatur, GA 30030

Mariana Manhães’ Então (Vaso Azul) (2013) and Thesethose (2011) are “organic machines” that respond to everyday objects and occurrences in Manhães’ life. These video and mechanical installations are systems that breathe, laying bare for us the interdependencies between life, technology, and places.

In Western culture, art and science have not always been separate from each other. In Greek philosophy, technē referred to concrete practices: craftship, artisanry, medicine, music. It also referred to the specific knowledge a practitioner gains by engaging with the Frank Gillette’s video Symptomatic subject or material.

Syntax (1981), produced for Until the Enlightenment, a philosoph- Electronic Arts Intermix and on loan ical movement that began in Europe in from the Whitney Museum of the 18th century, artist-scientists such American Art, is a video observation as Leonardo da Vinci partook in practic- of a watery environment. The es and studies that spanned the arts and undulating forms that traverse the sciences: engineering, anatomy, painting, screen are subject to no determination sculpture, mathematics. For example, except for physical laws that influence Leonardo da Vinci integrated his obser- their movements. The video provides vational researches and fine arts practic- us with a system that stands outside es, painting both the iconic Mona Lisa our “normal” understanding of time. and conducting anatomical autopsies.

Suzanne Anker’s animation MRI Butterfly (2008-2012) superimposes DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS presents a snapshot of contemporary art a butterfly and Rorschach inkblots on that engages biology as laboratory prac- an MRI brain scan. Though the buttice, research method, material, and the- terfly remains static, the layers prooretical framework. The works included duce a flapping effect. Serving as the in the exhibition employ video, installa- ground of the image, the MRI scan of

SUZANNE ANKER the brain, is the stage wherein perceptual play takes place.

Julia Buntaine’s Binding Problems (2014), on the other hand, separates the elements of perception into discrete objects in space. The colors of an apple, divorced from the fruit, puddle on the floor. Buntaine makes clear for us the complexities of everyday perceptual experience.

DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS introduces Atlanta audiences to the burgeoning field of art and science with works that have not previously been shown in the city. Many of these works, mediations through video documentation, visualize our world of interconnected organic, technological, and machinic entities. Additionally, DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS provides the viewer with contextual information and texts that have been important to the field including Arthur I. Miller’s Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art and Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, and issues of Sciart Magazine which was founded and edited by Julia Buntaine.

MRI Butterfly Video animation 54sec 2011

The lines between nature and culture are highly permeable.

And it is through this osmotic membrane that the overlapping domains of knowledge systems, novel technological interventions, and redefinitions of aesthetic practice are made possible. Our postmodern cabinet brings together things from the natural world and those from consumer culture, while the intermixing of clearly defined taxons continues to evade our innovative tasks.

Investigating the border-zones where fact meets fiction, the intersection of art and genetics, the neurosciences and natural history continuous to take a global turn. Customizing chemicals as vectors of cure, the contemporary scientific revolutions resurrect the avant-garde and spins its locus into the laboratory. Taxongenomic crash smashes Linnaeus’ beliefs while cohabitation abides between silicon and flesh. The transmutable molecule, DNA, is a bio-archive never failing to astonish in its infinite plasticity. It is something of a book of life and a recipe for surveillance, something of a deed to a body-part farm and something of an elixir of immortality.

Since the late 1980s many artists have turned their attention to working with biologically related concepts and materials. Of course the infusion of biology into the visual arts is not new in itself. For art critic Jack Burnham, a discrete change in art took place in the late sixties, not because it was a heeded proclamation by Arthur Danto that art was over, but because the visual arts began to partner with seminal processes and create alternative methodologies connected to art practice: earth works, systems theory, and real-time media became new working tools for artists. As early as 1969, in “Beyond Modern Sculpture,” Burnham saw the integration of “men and machines into optimally functioning systems as tantamount to creating synthetic organisms.” It is synthetic biology today that has captured the imagination of artists, designers, and scientists as a new molecular tool intended to transform matter and its attendant theoretical concerns. What is novel is the adaptation and exploitation of biologically-generated art which harnesses the advanced developments in technical apparatuses, making visible or statistically believable what has never been accounted for before.

-- Suzanne Anker

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights.

Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Walker Art Center; the Smithsonian Institute; the Phillips Collection; MoMA P.S.1; the JP Getty Museum; the Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charite, Berlin; the Center for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin; the Pera Museum, Istanbul; the Museum of Modern Art, Japan; and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, co-authored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste, and M/E/A/ N/I/N/G. Her work has been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Nature. She has hosted twenty episodes of the Bio Blurb show, an Internet radio program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA in NYC, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Art On Air. She has been a speaker at Harvard University, the Royal Society in London, Cambridge University, Yale University, the London School of Economics, the Max-Planck Institute, Universitiy of Leiden, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and Banff Art Center, among many others. Chairing SVA’s BFA Fine Arts Department in New York City since 2005, Ms. Anker continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and theSVA Bio Art Lab.

JULIA BUNTAINE Binding Problems Apple, acrylic paint Dimensions variable 2014

As an artist I am interested in what has proven to be the most complex puzzle, the epitome of emergence, the deepest well our sciences have examined: the brain.

The instantiation of form and function united, from the molecular to the level of Neuroscience as a discipline, my work seeks to address the beliefs, theories, and findings of the biological phenomenon of consciousness. Beginning with biological form or data, my work departs into the world of aesthetics as I manipulate the idea through the use of scale, metaphor, material, and form. Unlike articles and raw data, scientific ideas in the form of art inherently demand subjective judgment and interpretation, and my goal as a science-based artist is to provide my viewer an alternative way to understand the wonders of biology we have discovered in ourselves.

What neural mechanisms keep the colors of an apple where they belong? While it does not feel difficult, it is in fact remarkable that while separating the color, shape, and context of everything in our perceptual scene, all of which is processed in distinct and different parts of the brain, that everything ends up in its rightful place. You never mistakenly swap your friend’s skin color for the blue sky behind them, and vice versa. “Binding problem” is the term used in neuroscience and philosophy of mind literature which refers to the mystery of how the brain first separates and processes perceptual information, and then binds it all together into a single, coherent, conscious experience.

-- Julia Buntaine

Julia Buntaine is a neuroscience-based visual artist, director of SciArt Center, and editor in chief of SciArt Magazine. Buntaine attained her BA in neuroscience and sculpture from Hampshire College, her post-baccalaureate certificate in Studio Art from Maryland Institute College of Art, and her MFA of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including in shows in Amherst, New York City, Baltimore, Seattle, Madison, Princeton, London, Toronto, Knokke, and others. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of Johns Hopkins University. She also teaches, consults, curates, and frequently writes about art, and is currently the Innovator-in-Residence at Rutgers University. Buntaine lives and works in New York City.

FRANK GILLETTE

and experienced.

Symptomatic Syntax Video, color, sound 27min 20sec 1981

The function of the artist is to create new metaphors, new references to reality which re-relate man, his environment (nature), and his extensions (technology) so as to create and evolve new values and perspectives. As Gillette juxtaposes biological, ecological, and technological systems and their processes, he both redefines television and places these processes within the realm of aesthetics.

-- Judson Rosebush

Frank Gillette’s compositional elements are natural processes—juxtapositions of biological, ecological and technological systems. His work explores the aesthetics of these processes and the references between them.

The effects and influences of advanced communication technology are becoming increasingly important to the artist as well as the television-oriented public. Although Gillette’s work emerges from the interface between cybernetics and natural systems, it remains accessible, that is, it provides a complex experience in a complex form but is still concerned with the classical aesthetic. It is work which connects ecological principles and key contemporary information systems.

Implicit in Gillette’s thinking is the belief that the technology man has used to extend his dominance over nature has been so successful that it threatens to virtually destroy him and his environment. If man is to survive, he is impelled to develop ways to define technology in terms of the environment, rather than impose preconceived concepts of technology upon nature. The work suggests that man reunify his concepts of nature with his concepts of technology and that he reconceive them as being two parts of the same whole. Alternatives such as these need to be perceived, explored,

Curator’s Remarks from catalogue for solo exhibition Video: Process and Meta-Process at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse University (May 19June 18, 1973) Frank Gillette was born in 1941 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Gillette is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation, and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1984-85.

His work has been presented in solo exhibitions including at The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Howard Wise Gallery, New York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Whitney

Museum of American Art, New York.

In addition, Gillette’s work has been included in numerous group shows including at Kunsthalle, Cologne; Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany; Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others.

Merging a rich visual sensibility with an almost scientific engagement with taxonomy and ecological systems, Frank Gillette is a video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena.

An early theorist of video’s formal and aesthetic parameters, in 1969 he was a founding director and president of the influential video collective Raindance. With influences ranging from cybernetics to painting, Gillette was an innovator of the multi-channel installation form, experimenting with image feedback, time-delay, and closed-circuit systems. His seminal installation Wipe Cycle (1969) (with Ira Schneider) was included in the landmark 1969 exhibition TV As A Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. He lives and works in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY. -- Excerpted from EAI Catalogue

MARIANA MANHÃES Então (Vaso Azul) Animated video (antique vase from the artist’s collection), miniprojector, DVD play, LDR sensors, electronic circuits, PVC pipes, styrofoam, electric blowers, loudspeakers, plastic bags Dimensions variable 2013 Thesethose 2 animated videos (windows from the artist’s house), 2 LCD screens, DVD players, electronic circuits, electric motors, PVC pipers, electric blowers, plastic bags Dimensions variable 2011

It was during Iole de Freitas’ classes at Parque Lage in 2004 that I began to create and build machines, something I keep doing today.

These machines can be made of cables and electronic circuits or pencil and sheets of paper.

Drawing actually has always been a kind of third arm for me. Less developed and shy at the beginning, it gained muscles a few years ago when I started to produce a series entitled Verbos Terminados em Ar (Verbs ending in Air). At first restricted to the glance of those who visited my studio, these Verbs took a life on their own after being shown to the public for the first time, alongside an installation, in a group show at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in 2013.

During that same year, I showed my works in a solo exhibition at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro: everything (machine-drawings and machines-drawn for the Paço’s Yard) made sense either together or individually, being only a single part or holding the whole within itself. At that point, the machine was no longer only a set of equipment physically connected through cables. Events started to take place through the relations between parts, which can exist separately or united among themselves, creating systems with or without the need to turn on the plug.

Today I call my machines installations or aerial drawings, and hesitate in naming my works on paper, which look like drawings, photographs, and even video animations. Because all is part of the same thing, which I don’t know exactly what that is. No wonder I often use linking words to title what I do; for me, every work connects elements of a very long phrase, filled with subjects, adjectives, and many commas, that I do not know how will end.

Things I do are connected to each other, they are sewn and glued to one another with no apparent logic. That’s all I know about them so far.

-- Mariana Manhães English version: Renato Rezende

RESOURCES & REFERENCES This list is by no means exhaustive.

ARTISTS Katherine Behar, http://www.katherinebehar.com/ Cao Fei, http://www.caofei.com/ Channel TWo [CH2}, http://onchanneltwo.com/ Critical Art Ensemble, http://critical-art.net/ Eduardo Kac, www.ekac.org Claire Pentecost, http://www.publicamateur.org/ Raqs Media Collective, http://www. raqsmediacollective.net/ subRosa, http://cyberfeminism.net/

Mariana Manhães’ work has been shown in several exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, such as The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh, USA; ShanghART Gallery; Shanghai, China; Bozar Museum / Europalia, Brussels, Belgium; Centro Cultural Banco de Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasílía, Brazil; Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, Berlin, Germany; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Museo de Arte Moderna, Salvador, Brazil; Museu Vale do Rio Doce, Vila Velha, Brazil; and Galerie GP+N Vollois / Natalie Seroussi, Paris, France.

She has presented solo exhibitions at Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro in 2013; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil - CCBB, Rio de Janeiro in 2010; Galeria Leme, São Paulo in 2008; and Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Niterói, Brazil in 2007.

Granted with relevant awards, Mariana graduated in Psychology at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói in 2001, and achieved her Masters in Communication and Culture at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 2012.

ORGANIZATIONS & RESEARCH CENTERS Ars Electronica, https://www.aec.at/ news/ Art and Science: European Digital Art & Science Network, https://www. aec.at/artandscience/en/about/ Art the Science, https://artthescience. com/ Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, https://www.banffcentre.ca/ Black Girls Code, http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ Black Girl Tech, http://home.blackgirl.tech/ Centro Multimedia, http://cmm.cenart.gob.mx/ Deep Lab, http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/projects/deep-lab Dorkbot: People doing strange things with electricity,, http://dorkbotsf. org/, https://dorkbotpdx.org/ org/

Electronic Arts Intermix, https:// www.eai.org Genspace, https://www.genspace.

MIT Media Lab, https://www.media. mit.edu/ SciArt Center, http://www.sciartcenter.org/ Science for the People, http://sciencefor-the-people.org/ SVA Bio Art Lab, http://bioart.sva. edu/suzanne-anker/ SymbioticA, http://www.symbiotica. uwa.edu.au/ Wave Farm, https://wavefarm.org/ ZKM - Center for Art and Media, http://zkm.de/en

GALLERIES & MUSEUMS American Medium, http://www.americanmedium.net/exhibitions.html ArtScience Museum Singapore, http:// www.marinabaysands.com/museum. html# Chronus Art Center, http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/ documenta, https://www.documenta. de/en/ Exploratorium: The Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception, https://www.exploratorium.edu/ International Museum of Surgical Science, https://imss.org/ ; https://imss. org/exhibits/#art LifeSpace: Science Art Research Gallery, http://lifespace.dundee.ac.uk/ The Museum of Jurassic Technology, http://www.mjt.org/ Transmediale, https://transmediale.de/

MAGAZINES & JOURNALS Art & Science Journal, http://www. artandsciencejournal.com/ HOLO: Emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology, http://holo-magazine.com/ Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology, https://www.leonardo. info/about Radical Software, http://www.radicalsoftware.org/ SciArt Magazine, http://www.sciartmagazine.com/

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

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Kac, Eduardo. Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits & Robots. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Moser, Mary Ann with Douglas MacLeod, eds. Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996.

Miller, Arthur I. Colliding Worlds: How Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Conand Women: The Reinvention of Nature. temporary Art. New York: W.W. Norton, New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Kluver Billy, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose. Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Popper, Frank. Art of the ElectronTechnology. New York: Dutton, 1972. ic Age. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel London: University of Chicago Press, Visions in Space, Time, and Light. New 1970.

York: William Morrow and Co, 1991.

Malloy, Judy (ed). Women, Art & Tech- Penny, Simon., ed. Critical Issues in nology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Electronic Media. Albany: State University of New York, 1995.

WEBSITES Art in Sciences, https://artinsciences. com/ Rhizome, https://rhizome.org/

Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991): 773–97.

BOOKS Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Star, Susan Leigh, (ed.), 1995, Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology, Albany: SUNY Press.

Behar, Katherine (ed.) Object Oriented Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Druckrey, Timothy with Ars Electronica (eds). Ars Electronica: Facing the Future. A Survey of Two Decades. Cambridge, MA and London: the MIT Press, 1999.

Goldberg, Ken (ed). The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001.

Fleck, Ludwik. The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Edited

by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton. Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

BOJANA GINN DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS Curator

MEREDITH KOOI DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS Assistant

Interdisciplinary artist and former MD and scientist Bojana Ginn graduated from Medical School in Belgrade, Serbia in 2001, and completed her MFA in Sculpture at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2013. Merging art, science, and technology, Bojana creates multimedia installations, sculpture, and photography.

Meredith Kooi is a visual and performance artist, critic, curator, and educator based in ATL. Using research-based and process-based practices, Meredith engages radio broadcast, performance, drawing, mapping, writing, book-making, zines, video, photography, and installation to illuminate the embodied and multi-layered nature of place.

In recent years, Meredith has been working collaboratively, connecting with others in conversations, oftentimes broadcasting those dialogues on air using her platform ENTER THE BUCKY DOME ZONE. She is currently working on a large-scale community-based audio project, The SWATL Oral History Project, which recently received a grant through the Office of Cultural Affairs.

One of her first student works resonated with the international SciArt community and was presented at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium in Brussels, and in Ghent, Boston, and Baltimore. While at SCAD, Bojana was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and for the Outstanding Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center. After completing her studies, as a resident artist of the prestigious Studio Residency at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Bojana was awarded a 2014 Tanne Foundation Award that she shares with her husband and artistic partner, Brian Ginn.

From 2011 to 2016, Meredith was the editor and assistant director of Radius, an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago. In 2014, she founded the curatorial and publication platform ALTERED MEANS, which has produced the exhibitions and acBojana was honored to be an art- companying catalogues at venues in ist-in-residence for the 2015 Global Atlanta.

Summit on Ethics in Bio-Engineering.

For her trans-disciplinary work, her un- Her art and cultural criticism can orthodox use of materials, and her in- found in publications such as ART corporation of video and sound digital PAPERS, ArtsATL, Bad At Sports, technology, Bojana was a finalist for the Number, and Temporary Art Review.

2015 World Technology Award in Art. Meredith is finishing up her disserHer work and writings are shown and tation titled “the ether swaddles me | published in Atlanta, nationally, and in you | us: Towards a Feminine Poetics Europe. Her video work was exhibited of Transmission Art� in the Graduate at the 2016 Venice Architectural Bien- Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emonale. Most recently Ginn was awarded ry University. She received her MA in at 2017/18 Working Artist Fellowship Visual and Critical Studies from the at the Museum of Contemporary Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Georgia. Bojana lives with her husband (2011) and her BA in Environmenand son in Decatur, GA and serves as a tal Studies from Denison University fellow of The World Technology Net- (2007). work, NYC.

DIGITAL TRANSPLANTS: Mediated SciArt Curated by Bojana Ginn Introduction by Meredith Kooi Published by ALTERED MEANS Atlanta, GA USA 30310 http://www.alteredmeans.us info@alteredmeans.us Book design: Meredith Kooi Cover Image: Suzanne Anker, Remote Sensing (18), 2013

ALTERED MEANS is an amorphous, experimental curatorial and publication platform that adapts to the different works, mediums, and concepts presented in each project. Not tied to a physical space, though based in Atlanta, GA, ALTERED MEANS presents its projects through a variety of methods including gallery exhibitions, performances, printed matter, and more to be determined.

ALTERED MEANS September 2017