See here for a really interesting interview with Adam Zaretsky - on the very excellent blog We Make Money Not Art

INTERSPECIES

Private view: 6pm Friday 23 January 2009
24 January – 29 March 2009 (open Tuesday to Sunday)

Cornerhouse
70 Oxford Street
ManchesterM1 5NH.

Touring to London and Edinburgh

‘Interspecies: artists collaborating with animals’ consists of four new commissions by artists working closely with different species of animal, and three existing works, stimulated by the anniversary of Darwin’s birth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7721955.stm

See The Scientist.

British biologists have received government approval to create the world’s first human stem cells from hybrid embryos, part pig, part human.

The Warwick Medical School team, led by Justin St. John of the Clinical Sciences Research Institute, was granted the country’s third animal-human embryo license from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which goes into effect today (July 1).

Images from the version made for Bluecoat, Liverpool, March 2008.

 What is the importance of artists working in the lab?

What kinds of rituals do interdisciplinary Art and Biology practices entail?

14th May, The University of Exeter.

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THE AESTHETICS OF LIFE is a one day event on BioArt, a contemporary form of art which uses LIFE as a medium. The event will give non-specialists the opportunity to participate in a wet biology workshop and to reflect along with the artists on the kinds of practices and rituals interdisciplinary Art and Biology collaborations entail.

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ADAM ZARETSKY and JENNIFER WILLET

in (RE)embodying Biotechnology (J. Willet) and Birdland: Avian Developmental Embryology Arts Project (A. Zaretsky)

Chair: Marie-Pier Boucher [link]

Respondents: Kira O’Reilly, Daro Montag, Brian Degger

 Originally Commissioned by HOME for One to One Salon series, London, January 2005

The piece emerged out of pig biopsies I have made from piggy bodies in the large animal facility in University of Western Australia as part of my research in tissue culturing skin whilst at SymbioticA.

Each of these pig I have seen killed, taken skin form and then cultivated it in the laboratory. Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Lace out of flesh.
The pigs are standing in my stead, my body, as eventually I will work from a biopsy of my flesh.

One female pig carcass
One female human body
The two move together very slowly over the course of several hours
Audience members enter the space one at a time for 10 minutes.
The are invited to touch the human animal and non-human animal
First they are instructed to put on a pair of latex gloves and then to spray ethanol onto the gloves.
They are also reminded that they can just look and stay a while.

Click here for a Quicktime movie of images:

inthewrongplaceness HOME 2005

Tissue Culture & Art Project, received second prize in the prestigious international competition VIDA 10.0, rewarding excellence in artistic creativity utilising new technologies and artificial life.

On behalf of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts received the prize at the VIDA 10.0 Awards Ceremony and Gala Anniversary, held in Barcelona on the 29th of November, surrounded by artists, critics and experts in the relations between art, technology and biology.

A pioneering award in this field, this is the first time VIDA awarded a prize to a work based on biotechnology rather than electronics. Artistic director of the VIDA awards, Daniel Canogar, explained that the work met with much discussion inside the jury. NoArk was awarded second place as it dealt with the concept of life, in a broader sense.

NoArk will be exhibited in 2008 at ARCO, the international contemporary art fair in Madrid, as part of VIDA’s 10th anniversary.

For more information and video visit:

VIDA 10.0       www.telefonica.es/vida

“Catts and Zurr, the artists of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, call the biomass that grows in NoArk’s bioreactor a semi-living or sub-life neo-organism. Because of its origin in tissue samples of various kinds, their “chimerical blob” still participates in the vast domain of living things. But it is orphaned, bereft of parentage or kinship, abandoned by the Linnaean classification system that depends on organismic coherence. Yet NoArk’s sub-life is incorporated into a novel dynamic system that becomes its living context: the social body that receives and responds to it. NoArk consists of a transparent vessel reminiscent of an eighteenth century curiosity cabinet, which houses both the bioreactor and a collection of dead and preserved animal specimens. These components rotate together on a turntable and relentlessly expose viewers to the ineffable quality of living cells, whose properties are so imminent to us yet so elusive. The cell is the basic self-organizing unit of life. Cultured in a medium, abstracted from life as we know it, it is transformed into a synthetic embodiment of life processes and their artificial replication. This technique of abstraction is familiar enough in the science lab – biochemist Stuart Kauffman called it “second life” long before the virtual world of the internet took up the name – but it is radically new as public display in the cultural domain. The semi-living thing we see in NoArk is afflicted by an excess of freedom to cross boundaries between definitions and taxonomies, just like the limitless tagging and cross-referencing that characterizes digital information. As long as the semi-living is on life support, its bio-information persists through time and space, and poses the startling question of how such information can be deployed in “first life.”

“On Wednesday afternoon, last week, curator Jens Hauser gave us the low-down on the upcoming SK-INTERFACES exhibition which will take place on 1st Feb - 30th March in the framework of Liverpool 2008 European Capital of Culture.

The event will demonstrates how artists today are artists using skin, materially or metaphorically, as an interface, and going beyond the descriptive surface of the skin, to explore issues of xeno-transplants, trans-species and trans-racial exchanges.

After an era of de-materialization (”everything digital”), contemporary art is showing a tendency of phenomenological re-materialization, a re-integration of corporality. Besides, instead of representing objects, graphic depictions or simulations, the art is gearing towards transformational processes with performance characteristics. Lastly, as the creation of the new Hybrid Art Category at Ars Electronica this year demonstrated, the existing categories are not sufficient anymore to represent the current state of technology-based art.”

See :http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/009816.php

for the full entry which includes a reference to my work inthewrongplaceness.

Last night I begun watching Pasolini’s Porcile

The artists featured in this greenmuseum.org Aer project look critically at the issue of air quality and use various methods to raise awareness of the issue among the public. Because air is invisible, artists are faced with the challenge of making the intangible real. Because air pollution is a silent killer, artists are challenged to give a voice to the body’s dependence on clean air. Most of the featured projects blur the line between art and activism, and all the artists are changing public understanding of the air around us, questioning accepted norms of ownership of and responsibility to the air we must breathe to live.http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aer/The Australia artist Sarah Jane Pell recently approached me about remaking and preforming a work of hers called interdepend, see http://www.greenmuseum.org/c/aer/projects/interdepend/index.htm for details and images.Sarah has set up a site dedicated to our collaboration on this revisit to interdepend, which we aim to realise and exhibit in 2008.  Sometime ago now we discussed the myths of the selkie, the seal women who shed their seal coats and skins to walk and pass amongst human.The transmogrification between human and seal in the shallows of the seal haunted waters articulates wonderful ideas of metamorphosis that have been embedded in many cultures for centuaries and yet indicate contemporary notions of transformation and liminal embodiments, alterities and terrors via technologies and sciences. They suggest the shakey boundaries and taxonomies that our biosciences posit and action in chimerical lifes and hybrid actuations.