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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes 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 Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1986) as well as the Ecole 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 Ecole 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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| 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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| 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 | |
| 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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| 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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| 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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| 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