Art as We Don’t Know It Cover First edition Detail from artwork Living Images, yeastograms by Johanna Rotko Edited by Erich Berger, Kasperi Mäki- Materials Reinikka, Kira O’Reilly, Content: Galerie Art Volume 135g Helena Sederholm Cover: MultiArtSilk 130g Producer This book has been produced Essi Viitanen in collaboration with the Aalto ARTS Books Bioart Society and Aalto Espoo, Finland University School of Arts, aaltoartsbooks.fi Design and Architecture. © Erich Berger, Kasperi Mäki- The publication of this book has Reinikka, Kira O’Reilly, Helena been made possible with the Sederholm and the authors support of Kone Foundation. Graphic design ISBN 978-952-60-8822-8 Safa Hovinen / Merkitys ISBN 978-952-60-8823-5 (pdf) Printed by Printon, Tallin, Estonia 2020 Contents Foreword 8 Introduction 10 Hybrid Ecology – To See The Forest For The Trees 86 Laura Beloff HYBRID MATTERs 104 Bioart Society Living Images, yeastograms 106 Alternative Biofacts – Life as we don’t (yet) know it 20 Johanna Rotko Markus Schmidt & Nediljko Budisa Sensing Machines in Artistic Practice 108 Merry CRISPR 38 Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka Bioart Society Ars Bioarctica 120 Deep Data Prototypes 40 Bioart Society Andy Gracie Maatuu uinuu henkii (Respiration Field) 122 Xenological Life Potentials 42 Teemu Lehmusruusu Adriana Knouf Machine Wilderness 124 Curie’s Children (glow boys, radon daughters) 50 Antti Tenetz, Ian Ingram & Theun Karelse Bioart Society Making_Life 134 Convergences I’am – Immortality’s Anti-Marta 52 Bioart Society Marta de Menezes & Luís Graça Labor 136 Doing Away with Life – On Biophilosophy, the Non/Living, Toxic Paul Vanouse Embodiment, and Reimagining Ethics 54 Marietta Radomska & Cecilia Åsberg OSG: Mapping a Hormone Hyperobject 138 Rian Ciela Visscher Hammond One Hundred Thousand Cities of the Sun 64 Crystal Bennes Ceramic Scar Tissue 148 Life as We Don’t Know It Know Don’t as We Life Christina Stadlbauer Blck Vlvt 66 Bartaku Dispersal 150 Paula Humberg Radical Witnessing and the Scope of the Real 68 Erich Berger Paradise in Mind – Living Landscape 82 Antero Kare Forgotten Histories of DIYbio, Open, and Citizen Science: Illuminating Multiplicity: Against the Unbearable Whiteness of Bioart 214 Science of the People, by the People, for the People? 154 Heather Davis, Elaine Gan & Terike Haapoja Denisa Kera Splice/Liitos 220 Manifestations 166 Bioart Society Leena Valkeapää Mothers and Others – Insurgent Kinmaking as Distributed Reproduction 222 Lifepatch Interview 168 Ida Bencke by Kira O’Reilly & Erich Berger The Oracles 236 Field_Notes 180 Mari Keski-Korsu Bioart Society The Contract of Art that Deals with Life (Sciences) 238 BioTehna + Vivarium – Towards the Aesthetics of Artificial Life 182 Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr Jurij Krpan What if this is the only world she knew? 244 Star-Dust 192 and Refigure Redraw Kira O’Reilly Anu Osva subsensorialXYZ 246 How to Educate Kids and Youngsters to Value Art and Science as Pia Lindman Equals – Pedagogy in Practice 194 Kristiina Ljokkoi & Tomi Slotte Dufva Bioart, Aesthetic and Ineffable Existence 248 Helena Sederholm Melliferopolis 208 Learnings/Unlearnings Ulla Taipale & Christina Stadlbauer PORK KANA CAR ROT 258 Lauri Linna Wombs 210 Margherita Pevere Glossary 260 Bioart Society 2008–2019 268 Notes 272 The Lost And Found Department 279 Shruti Sunderraman 8 9 Foreword artists and scientists alike, relate to observa- I congratulate the Bioart Society on working Foreword tion through complex instruments that translate towards bringing a sense of planet Earth’s emergen- bio-matter into information. Calibrating these de- cies and complexities through the language of art, vices, operating them with precision, sensing mat- while performing and acting in what Donna Har- ter, and naming it, are some of their prerogatives. away termed ‘situated knowledge’. I also congratu- In biology, as well as in physics or chemistry, what late Biofilia for their pioneering effort of launching a ow can we describe what art is today? Such their relationships with the Bioart Society and its is important are the interactions between matter: biological laboratory in the context of an art school a consideration must include the role of the many projects; Solu, Field Notes, Ars Bioarctica, information is combined and exchanged through and opening their services to the artistic commu- Hartist and the positions occupied by artists as well as their collaborative programs with Biofil- a composite of forces and mass plus some degree nity. The artistic proposals presented in this book, in the face of urgent planetary challenges. We must ia – Base for Biological Arts at Aalto University. of randomness. The complex chains of interactions and the work of the Bioart Society and Biofilia as a ask ourselves how artists engage with the material Through these structures the artists become collec- thus initiated remove both subject and object from whole, form a body of critical reflection that enrich- culture of today, whether it is biological, ecological, tors and natural relators: signals of natural phe- normal usage, revealing their oddness and allowing es our notions of how life, nature, environment and or any of the other media and matters within the nomena are picked up from the field and inspected, a refocusing of meaning and intent. science are intertwined. This book is both a fitting remit of the natural sciences. In many ways we must also biological specimens, rocks, minerals, debris What such ‘art as we don’t know it’ can do for us tribute to and celebration of that work. acknowledge that now more than ever, artists are from old plane crashes, lights in the skies, mythol- is to allow strange predictions of a world we don’t experimenters, those who through detailed obser- ogies, sounds, narrations, words and tales. As Allan see. As forerunners of radical ideas, artists could be Mónica Bello vation enact events that perform and devise the Kaprow once said ‘you reveal something and its taking their visions into something that is the most Barcelona topographies for new knowledges and enquiries. oddness by removing it from its normal usage’. The extreme. November 2019 This book, Art as We Don’t Know It, published contributors in this book craft ideas that talk about on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the the shadows in our understanding of the natural Bioart Society in collaboration with Aalto Uni- world that surrounds us. versity School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Why then bioart as an artistic movement man- demands that artistic practices of current times are aged to bring many of these questions together? challenged in favour of new locations for the arts. During the course of the 21st century so far bioart Scholars, researchers and artists participating in has grown to intervene with and hack interactions Mónica Bello is a curator and art historian. Since 2015 she is the Curator this publication have in common a multifaceted with other species and living matter outside of & Head of Arts at CERN, the official arts programme of the European exploration on the contemporary material culture. traditional biolab scenarios and areas of expertise. Laboratory of Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva. In her curatorial research This new role requires a transition between labo- Bio-artistic practice ranges from critical inter- and projects she discusses the way artists instigate new conversations ratory and artist’s studio, and a crossing between ventions into contemporary biotech practices to around emergent phenomena in our society and culture, such as the remote locations and urban spaces. No tangible proposals for techno-utopian solutions. Working role of science and new knowledge in the perception of reality. She was boundaries are imposed, interactions and inter- between fields and disciplines allows for such inter- Guest Curator of the prestigious Audemars Piguet Art Commission for ventions are reconfigured in these practices, and ventions and in these pages we can see how many Art Basel 2018. Prior to her arrival to Geneva she held the position of representational boundaries around the subjects of these new methodologies are being applied in all Artistic Director of VIDA Art and Artificial Life awards at Fundación of field-based research are reinterpreted. We may their diversity. Telefónica, Madrid, a pioneering award that fostered cross cultural wonder whether definitions of nature are accurate By bringing together both Finnish and interna- expressions around the notion of life. She initiated and ran the Department or if they intend to address notions of mutability tional artists for residencies and fieldwork in Arctic of Education at Laboral Centro de Arte, Gijón. She was co-founder – with and imprecise interpretations. landscapes, in biological laboratories and in their Ulla Taipale – of the Capsula curatorial platform. In 2004 her award- The authors of the following texts propose to own gallery space, the Bioart Society has spent a winning exhibition Organisms became one of the first exhibitions of bioart address these questions and present ideas about the decade inventing new topographies for enquiry in Spain. As an internationally recognised figure within art and science relationships between art and the natural sciences. and engendering a wide range of new projects and networks, Bello is a regular speaker at conferences and participates in These propositions are seen through the lens of associations. Taking the position of experimenters, selection committees, advisory boards and mentorship programs. 10 11 Introduction marked the 10th anniversa- clearly trouble the porous and provisional defini- Introduction ry of the Bioart Society and tions of what might be understood as bioart, and 2018created the impetus for the indeed definitions of bioart have been usefully and publication of Art as We Don’t Know It. For this generativity critiqued since the inception of the publication, the Bioart Society joined forces with term. the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of the Whilst far from being definitive, we consider Field_Notes – The Heavens Aalto University. The close history and ongoing col- the contributions of the book to be tantalising and HAB-Group.