Event Time
Thursday, March 5, 2009
04:30 PM - 08:30 PM
Location
Information Law Institute, Room VH218
(40 Washington Square South)
Contact
Name: Council
Email: council.media.culture@nyu.edu
Radars & Fences II
Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology
In the age of genetics, biotechnology, and bioinformatics, life is increasingly fashioned and configured at the intersection of several discourses and practices, such as population genetics, molecular and informatic sequences, human enhancement technologies, and the therapeutic and agricultural applications of genomics.
Asides from raising crucial epistemological questions, these technoscientific practices compete for attention, credibility, and funding within the scientific community, the market place, and the public domain. But as the far-reaching implications of biotech research unravel, the opacity and secrecy surrounding the industry and the patenting of life become increasingly problematic. This is partly due to the difficult ethical questions raised by the life sciences, but also to the rapid extension of scientific knowledge production to a number of non-scientific environments.
As Bruno Latour (2001) has pointed out, the tendency of the experimental method to transcend its modern boundaries is the result of three distinct processes: 1) the end of the scientific laboratory as a secluded space available only to specialists; 2) the increasing agency of patients and ordinary citizens in formulating the scientific questions to be solved; 3) and the extension of the scale of scientific experiments to the whole planet, as in the case of global warming, AIDS, and so on.
Within this triple displacement, which turns the technoscientific experiment into a more and more collective endeavor, a thriving community of bioartists, researchers, and hobbyists have provided new analytical and activist models by which to intervene and participate in the life sciences. Through a broad set of hands-on interventions that provide a critique-in-action of both the political economy and the naturalization of the biotech industry, bioartists and researchers have fostered interspecies contacts, engineered hybrid life forms, and set up independent Biolabs. Together, they propose new scientific protocols and call for a wider, and far more direct participation among lay, artistic, activist, and academic publics.
Radars & Fences II features five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the "biological century."
Full conference overview and schedule can be found here:
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/
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This forum is being coordinated by doctoral candidate Marco Deseriis as part of a grant awarded by the NYU Council for Media and Culture with assistance provided by the Information Law Institute