CAC Atelier 09 | Make Art Out of Your Friends: Biotechnology in a Cooperative Society
Date:
04.05.2019 (Saturday)
Time:
11am – 4:30pm
Venue:
Chronus Art Center (No.18, No.50 Mo Gan Shan Rd, Shanghai)
Language:
English
The oldest and most common historical technology is biotechnology. Sourcing materials from their own biospheric niches, humans are a pervasively technical animal, turning the vehicles we live in into the instruments with which we carve them out. Molecular biology has most recently added another layer to this legacy, making speculation of history. Futures are mapped in the commons of cultural continuity.
Special guests Tiare Ribeaux and Yasmin Jaidin will join us to showcase the level of sophistication that is possible in biomaterial creation. Taking this inspiration, Erik Zepka will lead the group through the biochemical principles behind turning living tissues into malleable and usable materials you can build and imagine with. With the right science there is no real limit to what organisms you start with, so users will be encouraged to bring their own waste or any food or biological thing they have or are interested in.
The workshop will culminate in each participant producing a work of art original not only in its critical aesthetic conception but in the very scientific properties of its materials. Creation becomes in the context of the artist creator.
Erik Zepka
Erik Zepka is a conceptual media artist, curator, scientist and theorist interested in opening paradigms of empirical and interdisciplinary research. Through education, publication and exhibition he explores methods by which our knowledge can be made more robust and experimental. As an artist he has exhibited around the world, from Nabi Museum (Seoul, Korea), Humlab (Umea, Sweden), and the Tate Modern (London, UK), to Culture Hub (New York City, USA) and the IT Inkubator (Regensburg, Germany). As a scientist his research ranges from Immunology and Pathology to Environmental Health and Chemistry. He helped found both XOX Labs and the Open Science Network, and has to date contributed to open scientific research in over twenty countries spanning from the American to Asian continents.
Tiare Ribeaux
Tiare Ribeaux is a new media and interdisciplinary Hawaiian – American artist, filmmaker and curator based in the Bay Area. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of B4BEL4B gallery, co-founder of REFRESH Art, Science, and Technology; and heads the Art-Science program at Counter Culture Labs. As an interdisciplinary artist, her work explores the entanglements of human technologies, biology and infrastructures with mythologies, the environment, and microbial/non-human species. She is interested in living systems, deep/dark/media ecology, rhizomatic networks, speculative futures, multi-species ontologies, and collaborative entanglements.
Yasmin Jaidin
Yasmin Jaidin is a Bruneian contemporary artist currenty teaching at Maktab Duli Sixth Form Centre. Her practice revolves around materiality by working with media that can be found in the everyday like sugar, flour, grass and soil. She experiments with its physical state and is concerned with its ecology when it is displaced from one environment to another. She holds degrees at Goldsmiths and the University of the Arts London, and has exhibited internationally at such venues as Laforet Museum in Tokyo, Off Modern in London, the Manila Metropolitan Museum, and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. Her work exhibits a fidelity to the chosen material, combining minimalism and process into an object oriented practice.
