BioArt and Public Sphere Conference
October 17, 2005
About | Program | Speakers | Abstracts | Location | REGISTER
| Sujatha Byravan, Ph.D President, Council for Responsible Genetics |
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| Talk Title | Using the CRG as a case study for public engagement in science |
| Abstract | The Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) (www.gene-watch.org) is an organization that grew out of the identified need for public engagement in science in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1970s. The presentation will address the Council’s origins, the general methods that it has used over the past twenty-five years to foster an informed debate on the social and ethical impacts of biotechnology, and how some of CRG’s approaches to an issue evolve as the debates change. Specific examples of our efforts in the areas of genetic privacy and discrimination, biological weapons, human genetic modifications, and genetically modified foods will be described. |
| Bio | Sujatha is a biologist by training, who moved out of basic biological research several years ago because of various ethical concerns. Moving back to her native India, she was a science writer writing about gender issues, science, environment and politics. She is a Fellow of Rockefeller Foundation’s LEAD (Leadership for Environment and Development) Program and later served as Director of the Fellows Program at LEAD International in New York and London. She has been at CRG since mid-2002. |
| GABRIELLA COLEMAN Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University |
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| Talk Title | The Performance of Rationality: Psychiatric Survivors Critique of Bio-medical Psychiatry |
| Abstract |
What role does the experience of suffering, once transformed into willed political action, play in calling attention to the lack of accountability, transparency, and credibility in psychiatric science, notably as delivered by the pharmaceutical industry? In this presentation, I examine the recent rise of a political movement, whose members often call themselves psychiatric survivors in order to underscore the trauma experienced under various forms of forced psychiatric treatment (electroshock therapy, forced drugging and hospitalization, etc.). In contrast to the anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s and 1970s, psychiatric survivors do not fundamentally challenge the idea of illness. Instead, drawing on free speech and human rights discourses, they proffer a skeptic's attack on the current state of psychiatric science. For example, they question the therapeutic value of current uses of psychotropic drugs, which have become the de facto therapy for children and adults to treat a range of behavioral conditions; they launch protests against the pharmaceutical industry for doctoring their data and clinical trials; and the actively support research that seeks to understand how current psychiatric drugs may negatively alter brain chemistry. In short, they are calling for a more transparent and accountable form of science, in which they deem themselves as rational actors capable of critique, research, and decision-making, despite the popular representation of the mentally ill as unlikely co-participants in their treatment. In the presentation I give special attention to how the poetics of their political action performs a message about their capability to actively participate in treatment decisions and the broader science of psychiatry. Through the process of launching a sophisticated political programme that includes protests, hunger strikes, newsletters, conferences, book-writing, and organization building, they perform their rationality that is otherwise questioned by conventional medical discourse. |
| Bio | Gabriella Coleman recently finished an anthropology dissertation at the University of Chicago on the rise of expressive rights among Free and Open Source developers and the ways in which the F/OSS movement has challenged the economic incentive theory of intellectual property. In the past, she has also worked on the reconfiguration of ethnic identity through religious healing in Guyana, South America,and more recently, on Internet-based political activism, such as that of Indymedia, and its intersection with the principles of F/OSS. This year she is a fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University where she will continue to work on hacker ethics and politics with a focus on their re-articulation of IP law through free speech discourse. She is also starting on a new project that draws from this research to investigate the use of expressive and human rights among psychiatric survivors as a political vector to make claims against forced treatment and to halt the global exportation of an American model of psychiatry. |
| Michael Dorsey Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College |
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| Talk Title | Beyond Biopolitics: Towards a Political Ecology of Bio-Commerce |
| Abstract | Capital is increasingly seeking ever wider domains of the body, nature, and science as loci for commerce and accumulation. Agro-chemical and pharmaceutical corporations look to ecosystems and native plants for genetic resources; while nanotechnology corporations look to the molecular and atomic levels for arenas of new commodification. This paper explores competing and contrasting rationalities of 'nature' and science held by "expert" actors variously engaged in producing and negotiating practices of bio-commodification and resultant (bio)technologies. Further the paper investigates the cultural and epistemological constraints shaping what is said and thought about articulations of science and capital in expert circles. Via a series of provocative multi-media vignettes the paper examines how kapital-philiac-scientists in myriad international fora make romantic claims about indigenous engagements and knowledge of biology; it traces the degrees to which molecular biologists, supportive of transgenic agriculture, compartmentalize biotechnology discourses, advancing some arguments as 'scientific', and dismissing other critiques of biotechnology corporations as extra-scientific, emotional arguments. Through these cases and others, the paper seeks an exegesis and elucidation of the many modalities of both expert understandings, mendacity and comporadorism in the nascent field(s) of bio-commerce. The paper pushes readers to consider how these understandings are shaped by underlying assumptions regarding the boundaries between science and society, nature and culture. The paper utilizes a mélange of methodological approaches: political ecology, political economy, inter alia, to explore the imbrications between capital, nature, and science as they are played out on the ground by myriad actors. The paper also elaborates the economic as well as socio-cultural meanings and practices that surround these new (bio)technologies as they give rise to new instantiations of bio-commerce at scales from 10-9m to beyond 1 AU (Astronomical Unit). |
| Bio | Dr. Michael K. Dorsey is Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College (USA). He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources and Environment; Yale’s Forestry School & the Anthropology Department at The Johns Hopkins University. Dorsey’s researches international and domestic environmental (in)justice; with a sub-focus on resource management conflicts. Currently he is writing a volume examining bio-commerce in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon basin. Dorsey teaches courses on the above as well as on international environmental policy issues. Dorsey has been lecturer at: the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Netherlands); Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Sweden); and University of Witswaterstrand (South Africa). |
| JENS HAUSER Independent Art Curator, Writer, Cultural Journalist and Film Maker |
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| Talk Title | Bio Art - Taxonomy of an Etymological Monster |
| Abstract |
Bio Art is a proliferating and mutant term. Biology's ascent to the status of ‘hottest' physical science has been accompanied by, on the one hand, the inflationary use of biological metaphors in the scholarly disciplines that study culture and, on the other, a wide range of biotech procedures that are simultaneously providing artists with the themes for their work and the expressive media with which to realize them. As this has transpired, the evolution of the term "Bio Art" has somewhat resembled the recent hyperbolic career path of the gene-hype launched by techno-industrial special interest groups in the 1990s that, in the wake of its zenith in conjunction with the media frenzy surrounding the Human Genome Project, has been slowly subsiding in the last few years: Bio Art has not unfolded and developed in accordance with prescribed master codes of a determinant post-avant-garde manifesto; instead, it has been subject to a process of social drift and diverse influences from its aesthetic environment. Four central tendencies can be observed:
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| Bio | Jens Hauser (D/F), born 1969, is a Paris based art curator, writer, cultural journalist and film maker. He has organised a huge show on biotechnological art at the National Arts and Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique Nantes/France, including eleven artists employing biotechnology as a means of expression, and published L'Art Biotech' (2003). His forthcoming exhibitions deal with the paradigm of "skin as a technological interface". He is teaching at universities and art schools internationally and is a PhD candidate in media studies at Ruhr University Bochum. Hauser has written and given conferences about the interaction of film culture and video games and on contemporary music.He is the director of creative radio pieces, sound environments and documentary films which have been shown in festivals and as video installations in museums. He is also regularly contributing to the european cultural channel ARTE since 1992, and is currently involved in two long-term film projects about bioart. |
| RACHEL MAYERI Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Digital Media, Harvey Mudd College |
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| Talk Title | Stories from the Genome |
| Abstract |
Stories from the Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction places contemporary genetics within a history of speculative theories about human heredity and reproduction. To understand scientific theories as stories - provisional, imaginative, unaware of their own blind spots and biases - one need only look to the past. The video contains mini-documentaries on genetics history: one on the 17th century homunculus theory, which cast God as the creator of the bloodlines of aristocrats and peasants; another, on the 19th century artist-zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who popularized Darwin in Germany and planted the seeds for its eugenic interpretation. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, scientific ideas like homunculus theory and "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" had an attractive narrative symmetry and far-reaching explanatory power. Their proponents tautologically employed entrenched prejudices about hierarchy between the races, classes, and genders to justify their theories. Despite blatant contradictory evidence, homunculus theory held for two hundred years, until cell theory could better explain embryonic development. Eugenics, of course, held not only in Germany, but also in the USSR and USA, until only fifty-odd years ago. A character not unlike Craig Venter, the former CEO of Celera Genomics, alternately narrates the documentary segments (described above) and journal entries. Venter invented a "shotgun" gene sequencing method that dramatically accelerated the identification of individual genes. With gene patenting at stake, "Darth Venter" as he was dubbed by the press, threatened to decode the human genome years before the target date of the Human Genome Project, a public, international consortium of scientists led by Francis Collins. Ultimately, the historic publication of the human genome was shared by both private and public groups, gracing the cover of Science magazine amid much fanfare about the diversity, ironically. The video begins with a egocentric and insecure CEO-geneticist who admits to using his own genes as the basis for the map of humanity's genome - as Venter scandalously confessed. The character identifies a marker for Alzheimer's in his genes (after this point, the fictional and factual part ways), he creates clones of himself as researchers and specimen, doctors and patients, and sets them to work on a cure. |
| Bio | Rachel Mayeri is a video and installation artist whose work often deals with the intersection of science, art, and society. STORIES FROM THE GENOME was supported by Creative Capital and won a 2004 "International Media Art Prize Top 50 Nominees" prize, sponsored by ZKM. As Guest Curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology she contributed to the production of the permanent exhibit, MIRACLES AND DISASTERS IN RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE THEATER MECHANICS. She recently compiled a DVD of videos by artists and scientists entitled SOFT SCIENCE (www.soft-science.org), which is distributed by Video Data Bank. Her previous video work includes THE ANATOMICAL THEATER OF PETER THE GREAT (1999), animations for BIOSPHERIA: AN ENVIRONMENTAL OPERA (2001), and THE ELECTROPATHIC SANITARIUM (1992). Mayeri's work has been screened at numerous venues nationally and internationally, including including Pacific Film Archive, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Ars Electronica. She has received funding from the Getty Institute, the University of California, and the California Council on the Humanities. |
| Claire Pentecost Associate Professor and Chair Department of Photography, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Talk Title | Outfitting the laboratory of the symbolic: towards a critical inventory of bio art |
| Abstract | The orientation that much of the current generation of artists and intellectuals inherited as part of the cognitive apparatus of postmodernism included a critique of the authority of science in western history and society. Today several things look different than they did when many of us began to approach biotechnology from positions outside the field. Under the Bush administration we have witnessed a campaign to radically redefine science and its position in the culture. To a great extent the paradigm of this redefinition is that of religion, but it has also encouraged populist bashing of scientific authority of all forms. This comes in the wake of 25 years of erosion of the concept of the public good by neoliberal ideology and policy, including transfer of responsibility for funding public institutions of research and learning to commercial interests. Even as the effects of biotechnological applications become more deeply entrenched in every aspect of our lives, the practice of science itself is assaulted by pressures that would deform it as a tool of privatized advantage and attendant government policy. In this context I would like to propose some possible criteria for evaluating so-called bio art. How does the work address the alienation of the nonspecialist public from science? Does it demystify scientific procedures by making them plain? Does it bring a materiality to the abstraction that makes the scientific realm remote to most outsiders? Does it defetishize the commodity status of the knowledge product by making the conditions of its production visible, specifically the mechanisms of funding and profit? Does it expose or intercede in the juridical and property structures that increasingly make scientific knowledge proprietary and therefore legally exclusive? Does it distinguish between the conventions of science as a discipline and the aims of commercial, and often geopolitical interests? How does it position the figure of the scientist? How does it position itself in relation to activist or organized social efforts that seek more public control over the commercial application of the same bio- technologies? My purpose is not to preempt the play of the fuzzy signifier with proscriptive oversight, nor to imply that any work should meet one checklist of criteria. However, I want to further clarify the potential of artists’ contributions, acknowledging that the symbolic formulation of these phenomena can have as much impact as the legal, regulatory or commercially engineered aspects of their reality. |
| Bio | Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer, engaging a variety of media to interrogate the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge. She has exhibited and lectured in the U.S., South America and Europe, and recently enjoyed a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Bellagio, Italy. Having spent years tinkering in a conceptual laboratory for ideas about the natural and the artificial, her most recent projects concentrate on industrial and bioengineered agriculture, the alternatives and the trade regimes that force one over the other. At Transmediale 05 in Berlin, she work-shopped a beta phase of VisibleFood: an open content database and website exposing the hidden costs of the global corporate system that produces our food. Pentecost is Associate Professor and Chair of the Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches photography, drawing, critical theory and interdisciplinary seminars. |
| Paul Rabinow Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley |
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| Talk Title | Contemporary Nature: On Modernism and Romanticism in Paul Klee, Gerhard Richter, and Synthetic Biology |
| Abstract | forthcoming |
| Bio | Paul Rabinow received his B.A.(1965), M.A.(1967), and Ph.D.(1970) in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He studied at the …cole Pratique des Hautes …tudes in Paris (1965-66). He is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley where he has taught since 1978. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980); was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (1987); taught at the …cole des Hautes …tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1986) as well as the …cole Normale SupÈrieure (1997), was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Iceland (1999). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation Professional Development Fellowships (for training in molecular biology). He is co-founder of the Berkeley Program in French Cultural Studies. He was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998. He received the University of Chicago Alumni Association Professional Achievement Award in 2000. He was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the …cole Normale SupÈrieure for 2001-2. He was named STICERD Distinguished Visiting Professor- BIOS Centre for the study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics (2004). |
| Jennifer Reardon Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz |
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| Talk Title | Reckless Driving: Race Through Global Capital and Mass Spectrometry on Highway 5 |
| Abstract | This multi-media presentation draws upon ethnographic fieldwork at a leading biotechnology company in the American West to explore how the meeting of the arts and science studies might help us to understand the paradoxical and vexing constructions of race in contemporary human genetic variation research. |
| Bio | Jenny Reardon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Adjunct Research Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in August 2002. From Fall 1999-Spring 2002, she was a Fellow in Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She taught in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University from 2002-2004. Her book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, was published with Princeton University Press in December of 2004. |
| Abha Sur Lecturer, Program in Women’s Studies & Program in Science, Technology, and Society MIT, Cambridge, MA |
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| Talk Title | In the contradiction lies the hope": Reflections on Science, Race, and Caste |
| Abstract | Recent advances in Genome research have reinvigorated debates about race and caste, bringing to the fore the entanglement between the social and the biological. My paper investigates the competing world views of subalterns and elites, each utilizing aspects of Genome research. I will argue that while in most instances science has been mobilized by the elite to legitimate and rationalize social inequities in this one instance science is also being marshaled by the subalterns in the cause of social justice. |
| Bio | Abha Sur received her Bachelor and Masters degrees in Chemistry from the University of Delhi and her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, worked for several years in molecular electronic spectroscopy, and is now a lecturer in the Program in Women's Studies at MIT. Her current research is on caste, gender, and nationalism in modern Indian > science. She was a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Harvard University and at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. Abha Sur is a long standing member of the Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, a Cambridge based organization that raises awareness about issues of social justice through seminars, panel discussions and cultural events in the area. She received the Peace and Justice Award from the City of Cambridge for her work with the Alliance and has been selected as one of the peace commissioners of the city. |
| SymbioticA (Oron Catts, Gary Cass), Arts & Science Research Group, University of Western Australia, Pearth | |
| Talk Title | SymbioticA Biotech Art Workshop |
| Abstract | The SymbioticA Biotech Art Workshop ran at the University of California (Irvine) was a five day intensive workshop which dealt with hands on exploration of biological technologies and issues stemming from their use. The workshop introduced participants to issues, concepts and techniques relating to contemporary art practices dealing with the manipulation of life. Emphasis was placed on developing critical thought, discussing ethical issues and exploring cross-disciplinary experimentation in art. Current and historical practices dealing with the manipulation of living systems were traced through exploring art, culture and biotechnology. The tools of modern biology were demonstrated and performed through artistic engagement, which in turn opened discussion about the broader philosophical and ethical implications into the extent of human intervention with other living things. The practical components include laboratory protocols, dealing with microbes, DNA extraction and gel electrophoresis, genetic engineering, selective breeding, plant and animal tissue culture and basic tissue engineering techniques. The original intention of the workshop was to introduce the life sciences to artists and theorists, to expose them, through hands-on experiences, to as much biotech as we could fit in to a week. This knowledge would hopefully inspire new thoughts, discussions and projects. We attempt to give the participants enough information to develop an interest and enable their imagination to lead on to a project or work of 'bioart' and to de-mystify some aspects of biotechnology by increasing their basic knowledge. By de-mystifying science, we hoped that participants' future engagement with the issues raised in the workshop will be from a direct experiential familiarity. The workshop is run as one of the activities of SymbioticA: the art and science collaborative research laboratory in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and critique of life sciences. SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind in the world, in that it enables artists to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. SymbioticA sets out to provide a situation where interdisciplinary research and other knowledge and concept generating activities can take place. It provides an opportunity for researchers to pursue curiosity-based explorations free of the demands and constraints associated with the current culture of scientific research while still complying with regulations. SymbioticA also offers a new means of artistic inquiry, one in which artists actively use the tools and technologies of science, not just to comment about them, but also to explore their possibilities. |
| Bio | Oron Catts is the Artistic Director of SymbioticA, artist/researcher and curator.
Founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) in 1996. The Tissue Culture and Art Project is an on-going artistic research and development project into the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. Oron’s pioneering research in wet biology art practices and in particular the use of living tissue from complex organisms.
Co-Founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at The School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA is a research laboratory dedicated to the artistic exploration of scientific knowledge in general, and biological technologies in particular. It is the first research laboratory of its kind, in that it enables artists to critically engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department.
Curator of two major biological art shows Biofeel (2002) and BioDifference (2004) Was a Research Fellow at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2000-2001).
Gary Cass Gary is a key scientific collaborator with SymbioticA: the art and science collaborative research laboratory based in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. As a scientific technician with the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences; teaching laboratories, his broad range of skills (see below) have been utilised over the last ten years. He is capable of tutoring and demonstrating many aspects of agricultural and related scientific practices. He has worked with many art projects engaged with biological specimens in these labs (see below). His innate ability to teach science led to him co-ordinating and running the SymbioticA Biotech Art Workshop across Australia at Universities and Art Festivals and at Kings College, London. The University of California Workshop will be the fifth workshop in this series. |
| Charis Thompson Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley |
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| Talk Title | Stem Cells and the Politics of Things in Science |
| Abstract | In this paper I look at stem cells as a means to raise classic questions about the relations between science and politics in the US, and to re-examine the question as to whether things can have politics. These issues are particularly salient at this time, given that the current Federal administration has frequently been characterized as anti-science, and given that stem cells are considered a key exhibit for this claim. I end with a comparative perspective on other stem cell regimes around the world. I bring transnational feminist, science studies, and history of science perspectives to bear on these questions. |
| Bio | Charis Thompson is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is Co-director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center, and the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologie s (MIT Press, 2005). She is currently writing a book called Stem Cell Nations. |
| Faith Wilding Chair, and Associate Professor of Performance Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Talk Title | A Cyberfeminist Politics of BioArt |
| Abstract |
Faith Wilding will discuss the work of the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa, which produces participatory performance projects with the object of inciting critical public discourse about key issues concerning ReproTech, bio/medical- technologies, and the politics of biotechnology and BioArt. subRosa's chief mode of art production is "site-u-tational" (site+situation), a form of situated participatory performance revamped for the information age. This variety of performance is trans-disciplinary; it employs various new and old media to create open-ended performative environments in which participants can engage with objects, information technologies, embodied activities and experiences, and interact with each other and the performers. When successful, such projects generate a dialogue of conflicting and various voices, and question the taken-for-granted codes of public interaction and methods of knowledge production operating in every day life. They create an emergent and ephemeral public and a temporary discursive public space, where the unique language of art enables participants to experience and understand some of the political, social, and real-life material effects of the new digital and biotechnologies. subRosa projects have addressed Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART); egg donation; embryonic stem cell production and distribution; International flesh markets of organs and stem cell trafficking; and transsex/Intersex human rights issues. |
| Bio |
Faith Wilding is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator who collaborates with groups and individuals both nationally and internationally. Currently she is a member of subRosa, a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining tactical media, activism, and politics to explore and critique the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies in women's bodies, lives, and work. Wilding is Associate Professor and Chair of Performance Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. subRosa produces artworks, performances, workshops, contestational campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums. Recent Wilding/subRosa performances/exhibitions: "The Interventionists", MASSMoCA; "BioDifference" Biennial of Electronic Arts, Perth, Au.; YOUGenics, Betty Rymer Gallery, SAIC; "International Markets of Flesh," Performance International, Mexico City; "ExpoEmmaGenics," Intermediale, Mainz; "Cloning Cultures,"National University, Singapore; Welcome to the Revolution, Zurich; Art of Maintenance, Kunstakademie, Vienna. Publications:Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices. Autonomedia, 2003 (co-editor, writer). Numerous essays including in The Power of Feminist Art. Abrams, 1995. Grants: NEA, NEH, NYSCA, PCA, Creative Capital. |
| Dr. TAU-MU YI Assistant Professor in Developmental and Cell Biology Member of the Center of Complex Biological Systems University of California, Irvine |
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| Talk Title | The Aesthetics of Biological Design |
| Abstract | Nature has served as the inspiration for artists since the beginning of Humankind. Underlying this natural beauty are systems of incredible complexity and functionality. Are biological systems intrinsically beautiful, or have we been conditioned to perceive natural objects as being pleasing to the senses? Indeed, why should aesthetic considerations matter at all in the survival of the fittest? Or, perhaps there is a fundamental relationship between form and function. In this short talk, I will describe my research on symmetry and the breaking of symmetry in biological systems. I will then use this example to attempt to explore some of the issues raised above. Finally, I will make some remarks on how the interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and scientists can help convey this mind-boggling complexity and beauty to the general public in a manner that is both educational and inspiring. |
| Bio | Dr. Tau-Mu Yi is interested in the design, function, and robustness of biological complex systems. He is especially fascinated with G-protein signaling systems, which are the primary sensors in eukaryotic organisms including humans. Much of his research is in yeast where the G-protein system mediates the polarization of cells in the direction of mating pheromone cues. One of the major challenges is choosing the appropriate language for describing these immensely complicated systems. |
A Project, Research and Conference Initiative between the ParasiteLab at UCI and xDesign at UCSD. Contact: info@parasitelab.net
SPONSORS (in alphabetical order):
California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology |
UCI Arts Computation Engineering Graduate Program
UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts |
UCI International Center for Writing and Translation |
University of California Humanities Research Institute
UCI Research & Graduate Studies |
UCI School of Biological Sciences