Steve Kurtz case dismissed
After almost four years, the mail fraud case against bioartist Steve Kurtz has been dismissed.
More details at the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund.
{ Monthly Archives }
May 2008
“Transgenic Tombstones”
In today’s transgenic news, the intriguing Biopresence is a bioart project combining the tree and human “essences” of DNA. According to the artists’ statement,
Biopresence creates Human DNA trees by transcoding the essence of a human being within the DNA of a tree in order to create “Living Memorials” or “Transgenic Tombstones”.
More at the Biopresence website.
Life As Surplus
New in the series In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science
LIFE AS SURPLUS: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era
Melinda Cooper
University of Washington Press, April 2008, $25 paper
From the development of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s to the second Bush administration’s policies on stem cell research, Cooper, a research fellow with the Centre for Biomedicine and Society, Kings College London, connects the utopian polemic of free-market capitalism with the growing internal contradictions of the commercialized life sciences.
“A book of topical timeliness and conceptual and political importance. Cooper reads two terms–biopolitics and neoliberalism–in exciting, exceptional ways, and provides an astute account of contemporary American political culture.” — Kaushik Sunder Rajan, author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life
For more about the book, including the table of contents, please visit our website.
cfp: College Art Association Annual Conference
“The Ecological Imagination: From Land Art to Bioart”
This session considers the relations between art and ecology, from Land Art to recent work in Bioart (including transgenic art and ALife). It invites scholars of contemporary and new media art to find connections among unframed art practices as seemingly diverse as those of Robert Smithson and Eduardo Kac. It also invites panelists to think about the relations between contemporary ecological art practices and the discourses on bioethics and biopolitics. What imaginaries of “life” are produced by the art practices of Karl Sims, CAE, and others? How might we understand artworks that invite our empathetic identification with artificial creatures? How have our notions of visualizing landscape altered from earthworks to Geographic Information Systems (GIS)? What aesthetico-political commitments can we trace in visualizations of climate and other environmental data? Papers might focus on any art practice or movement in the 20th-21st century period.
Session Chair:
Rita Raley, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of English, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170
Deadlines for paper proposals: May 9, 2008