Roots

Roots is a cyclical sculpture, a self-forming and composing crystal object in an aquarium, which takes on the qualities of a dream-like screen based on an old Persian myth about a bush that sprouts heads. Slowly and steadily, black crystals, whose structures resemble coral or nerve cells, branch out. Bubbles ascend like jellyfish. Branches break off and sink to the dark bottom, where they begin to dissolve and become thick clouds hovering over the scene. Audibly perceptible new growth begins on the ruins of the decomposition. Yet, the self-guided processes in Roots are based on an intelligent technical design and a regulated electrical current, set in motion by soft and hardware but not entirely controlled by it. Electricity is pulsed through the whole sculpture. It is the key to the constant transformation. Growth changes the flow of the current. The modified flow changes the growth.

Roman Kirschner’s installation materializes numerous principles central to the precursors of synthetic biology and their concept of programmable circuits and biological information modules. In fact, Roots employs a model of British cyberneticist Gordon Pask, who in the 1950s attempted to build a chemical computer on the basis of iron crystals formed in an iron-oxide solution under exposure to electrical current and which were, thus, to independently develop ever new circuitry. Too, Kirschner’s dynamic crystal genesis alludes to a time in the early 20^th century when the growth of crystal formations was often compared to the origins of organic life forms. Thus, for example, the French natural scientist, Stéphane Leduc, who formed the notion of “synthetic biology” for the first time some 100 years ago, saw strong resemblances among crystal formations, plant growth and cell tissues. For the synthesis of living phenomena, Leduc was concerned with studying precisely that grey area between the inorganic and the organic, in order, at some point, to synthesize “life” through the combination of the most basic units and their evolution. Roots translates those visions into a beguilingly poetic materiality.

Austrian artist Roman Kirschner studied philosophy, art history, and audiovisual arts. He is most interested in material processes of transformation and creates micro-universes from images, sounds and physical materialities.

Latent Figure Protocol (LFP)

The motifs of the Latent Figure Protocol (LFP) are manipulations of so-called “genetic fingerprints.” They are based on making visible the banding patterns created by gel electrophoresis, the process that is employed in DNA analysis. Vanouse subversively uses analytic laboratory methods for synthesis. Here, the process is used to create figurative images from a known DNA sample instead of the customary abstract patterns from an unknown DNA sample, so that significant motifs, such as ID, 01, the copyright symbol, the chicken and the egg, or the “skull & crossbones” pirate design, emerge. The artist demonstrates the technological constructedness of the biological identity cards supposedly inscribed into our bodies by mother nature herself. The abstract banding patterns brought forth by the DNA separation and imaging technology called gel electrophoresis are, however, equally as much the result of the particular enzymes, primers, and molecular probes employed in the experimental protocol. Vanouse thus wants to downgrade the scientific authority of the allegedly objective DNA fingerprint to the status of a subjective portrait. To be precise, a “genetic fingerprint,” as opposed to a found and analyzed dactyloscopic fingerprint, is not an imprint, needn’t come from the finger, but rather is a manipulated trace of the body in the form of blood, spit, sperm or skin cells, which has been synthesized through standard laboratory procedures. Vanouse reveals how such uncritically accepted turns of phrase as “genetic fingerprinting” become engraved in the public mind as infallible markers of identity. Yet, does not contemporary gene fetishism, as an argument for natural predetermination, rather serve to cement questionable social clichés and prejudices?

Paul Vanouse is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses the complex issues raised by new techno-sciences by deploying them within a practice of informed amteurism, unfolding as interactive installations, biological experiments or electronic cinema. Vanouse is an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo, New York.

Origins of Life: Experiment #1.4

Could life still be originating on earth today? This is a question asked my many.  The standard answer is “no.” Origins-of-life chemists assert that the oxygen in the current atmosphere would prevent the reactions necessary to produce prebiotic molecules such as amino acids and nucleic acids. Origins of Life: Experiment #1.4, developed by artist Adam Brown in collaboration with physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein and atmospheric chemist Maxine Davis at Michigan State University, is a performative art installation that stages a miniature model of the earth today as a live experiment. Will the common assumption prove true or false in this public laboratory setting?

Origins of Life: Experiment #1.4 is a further development of Adam Brown’s earlier installations of his Origins of Life series in which he re-enacted the famous experiments carried out by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. Their setting simulated the chemical and energetic conditions of the early earth, 4 billion years ago, resulting in the production of a number of organic molecules necessary for the origin of life. Likewise, Adam Brown succeeded in obtaining similar molecules in his aesthetic and sensual gallery installations, reminding visitors that all organisms and all biology are the product of a natural synthesis.

While the early atmosphere simulated by Miller and Urey consisted of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and heated de-ionized water, subjected to electric sparks, Origins of Life: Experiment #1.4 now also integrates currently existing gases such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide to drive the reactions. The display also reflects the presence, today, of large oceans and thus contains seawater rich in sodium, chlorine, calcium, sulfur and potassium. It further includes minerals such as calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate, representing lime, calcite, marble and apatite. The outcomes are unpredictable – will unexpected molecules indeed be synthesized?

Adam Brown is a concept-driven artist whose creative research incorporates art and science hybrids that include robotics, molecular chemistry and emerging technologies. His works take the form of installations, interactive objects, videos, performances and photography.

Que le cheval vive en moi

The performance Que le cheval vive en moi (May the horse live in me) is an extreme, medical self-experiment with a blood-brotherhood beyond species boundaries. With this performance the French duo Art Orienté objet calls for greater ecological responsibility from humans, whose technologies increasingly instrumentalize other animals and plants. The artist Marion Laval-Jeantet has turned herself into a proverbial “guinea pig,” allowing herself to be injected over the course of several months with horse immunoglobulins (glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum, and which, for example, can function as antibodies in immune response) and thus developing a progressive tolerance to these foreign animal bodies. In February 2011, having built up her tolerance, she was able to be injected with horse blood plasma containing the entire spectrum of foreign immunoglobulins, without falling into anaphylactic shock—the intention being that the horse immunoglobulins would by-pass the defensive mechanisms of her own human immune system, enter her blood stream to bond with the proteins of her own body and, as a result of this synthesis, have an effect on all major body functions. Immunoglobulins are biochemical messengers that control, for example, the glands and organs of the endocrine system, which is also closely tied to the nervous system, so that the artist, during and in the weeks after the performance, experienced not only alterations in her physiological rhythm but also of her consciousness, which were characterized by heightened sensibility and nervousness. After the transfusion, Marion Laval-Jeantet, on stilts, performed a communication ritual with a horse before her hybrid blood was extracted and freeze-dried. This risky undertaking alludes to the possibility of healing autoimmune diseases using foreign immunoglobulins as therapeutic “boosters.” Here, as the artists maintain, “the animal becomes the future of the human.” As a radical experiment whose long-term effects cannot be calculated, Que le cheval vive en moi questions the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain “homeostasis,” a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of “synthetic transi-stasis,” in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation. The performance represents a continuation of the centaur myth, that human-horse hybrid which, as “animal in human,” symbolizes the antithesis of the rider, who as human dominates the animal.

The French duo Art Orienté objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin) has been creating works concerned with the environment, trans-species relationships and the questioning of scientific methods and tools since 1991.

Living Chemistry & A “Natural History” of Protocells

The installation Living Chemistry shows the formation of precursors, or models of living cells formed by the innate, complex chemistry of molecules existing at the interface between oil and water. Due to chemical interactions these so-called protocells are able to move around, sense their environment, and exhibit complex behaviours observable to viewers. Here, a protocell metabolism has been designed and engineered through the considered selection of the chemicals involved. The three panels on display contain a system where a water-based droplet in an oil phase exhibits life-like properties by virtue of so-called saponification occurring precisely at the oil/water interface. Furthermore, the chemistry is given a rich jewel-like appearance by the addition of the coloured salts, revealing a new kind of animated crystal garden.

Protocells share some of the physical-chemical properties of living organisms; they are “not yet alive” but are considered the missing link between the barren early earth and the first living organisms in evolution. Such protoplasmatic structures, created directly from their constituent lifeless chemicals, were studied already in the 19th century, prominently by Otto Bütschli in his Untersuchungen über Strukturen (1898). But in the context of today’s synthetic biology, protocells are becoming a central interest for other reasons. While attempts to make cells function with a totally synthetic genome have been successful, it still remains a great challenge to actually synthesize the cell itself as the basic unit of life and have it serve, then, as a “chassis” for genetic circuits.

A chemical protocell system is also aestheticized in the short film A “Natural History” of Protocells by Rachel Armstrong and Michael Simon Toon. Unlike in biology, where the life enabling functions are taking place primarily inside the cell, here, the life-like properties of the simple chemical protocell system are observable at the surface of the droplet. Oil molecules react with a strongly alkaline environment, giving rise to the emergence of moving crystalline microstructures. Subtitles suggest an ongoing dialogue between those entities, developing hypothetic emotional narratives that stress the human desire to see even the smallest units of “life” through an anthropomorphic lens.

Rachel Armstrong conducts collaborations between the arts, sciences and architecture. She is Co-Director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at the University of Greenwich in London. Her research investigates a new approach to building materials called “living architecture” which seeks to apply the properties of living systems to large-scale constructions.

Nanoputians

Using the tools of chemical synthesis, the ultimate in designed miniaturization can be attained while, at the same time, producing those structures and organic forms we best recognize: those that resemble humans. James Tour and Stephanie Chanteau have christened their anthropomorphic molecules NanoPutians, after the Lilliputians in Jonathan Swift’s classic, Gulliver’s Travels. Each of the ten bottles in the exhibit contains innumerable populations of NanoPutians, each with its own individual head dressing; only a few milligrams of material correspond to some 100 billion billion of these 2 nano-meter-tall anthropomorphic, carbon-based molecules. They are obtained via a separate synthesis of the top and bottom body-portions, followed by adjoining at the “waist”, with multiple syntheses converging to a whole: body-part-like descriptions such as “head”, “neck” and “legs” are used in order to perform the chemical genesis of molecules whose formulas evoke activities such as dancing, working or cooking.

Tour and Chanteau initiated their NanoPutians as an educational art and science project. Beyond the molecular-sized domain, there is no conceivable alternative upon which to tailor architectures capable of programming cohesive interactions between the individual building blocks. While synthetic chemists have long been captivated by this molecular dimension, their fascination is rarely shared by the general public, who most often view chemical structures as difficult-to-grasp abstractions formulated by complex algorithms, except when molecules resemble macroscopic objects, such as the spherical fullerenes like the C₆₀ molecule. The NanoPutians illustrate the human desire to ascribe life-like features even to our technical creations and to metaphorically inscribe anthropocentrism into the microscopic scale of chemical synthesis or synthetic biology.

James M. Tour and Stephanie Chanteau Maya are synthetic organic chemists involved in educational outreach programs. James Tour is currently Professor of Chemistry, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, specializing in nanotechnology. Stephanie Chanteau Maya received her doctorate in organic chemistry at Rice University in 2003 and currently works as an engineer for Intel Corporation.

Pigeon d’Or

Pigeon d’Or proposes the use of pigeons as a platform and interface for synthetic biology in an urban environment. Tuur van Balen’s project attempts to make them defecate soap! By modifying the metabolism of bacteria naturally occurring in the gut of pigeons, synthetic biology allows to add new functionality to animals commonly seen as vermin and “flying rats,” turning them into tools for urban disinfection. In collaboration with James Chappell, the artist has designed a special bacteria that, when fed to pigeons, turns their faeces into a biological window soap. It has been created using “biobricks”, standardized genetic building blocks collected in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts set up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003. One “biobrick” lowers the pH level in Bacillus subtilis, the other makes it express lipase, a grease-digesting enzyme.

This both micro and macro scale art project addresses the ethical, political, environmental and safety-related consequences of synthetic biology. Will we suddenly care for the manipulated pigeon’s health – while usually trying to poison them without remorse? Will we treat pigeons differently once they become useful for cleaning our cars? Is it dangerous to release products of synthetic biology into the environment?

Van Balen has designed two functional objects: The first one is an architectural contraption by which pigeons potentially become part of the museum space. The pigeonry, attached to the museum windowsill, allows the pigeons to be fed and thus indirectly enhanced to clean the city of Vienna. The second artefact is an interface for parked automobiles, allowing pigeons to land and defecate soap on the windscreen.

Tuur Van Balen uses design objects, interventions and narratives to explore the political implications of emerging technologies in our everyday lives. Since 2008, he has been working on bringing design into the world of synthetic biology and vice versa. He is also a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art in London.

Bacterial Radio

Bacterial Radio exhibits several bacterially-grown platinum/germanium electrical circuits (crystal radios) on glass substrates. Joe Davis, in collaboration with Ido Bachelet and Tara Gianoulis from Harvard Medical School in Boston, used bacteria altered with variants of a gene from orange marine puffball sponges (Tethya aurantia) to plate electronic circuits on Petri dishes and microscope slides. This gene codes for a protein – silicatein – that normally forms Tethya aurantia’s glass skeleton, its tiny, glass, needle-like spicules composed of silicon and oxygen. Variants of this gene have now been optimized to plate metallic conductors and semiconductors including germanium, titanium dioxide, platinum and other materials. Here, genetically-modified bacteria are embedded in non-conductive materials containing metal salts, and then optically induced to plate specific, electrically conductive circuits. These Bacterial Radios on display are connected to high impedance telephone headsets, antennae and ground, so that visitors may use them to actually listen to AM radio broadcasts.

Using the gene silicatein for his Bacterial Radio, referring to the pervasive use of silicon-based products for telecommunication devices, Joe Davis takes the underlying metaphors literally, and ironically reverses the main goal of synthetic biology by applying biological principals to electronic engineering, instead of vice versa. While synthetic biologists attempt to create “genetic circuits” made out of standard biological parts, devices and systems, frequently citing electronic engineering as their most favorite metaphor, critics argue that living organisms are too complex to be designed and constructed like electronic circuits.

Joe Davis is an artist and researcher in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. His research and art include work in the fields of molecular biology, bioinformatics, lasers, space science and sculpture, using media reaching from centrifuges, radios, glass, prosthetics and magnetic fields to genetic material.

Semi-living Worry Dolls

The Semi-Living Worry Dolls are tissue-engineered sculptures cultured live under micro-gravitational conditions in an “artificial womb” – a bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. They are grown from McCoy cells over hand-crafted degradable polymers and stitched together with surgical sutures. The polymers degrade as the tissue grows and the Worry Dolls become “partially alive.” They represent modern versions of the legendary Guatemalan worry dolls: at bedtime children are told to take one doll for each worry and to share their worry with that doll – overnight, the dolls will solve their problems. The Semi-Living Worry Dolls thematize the anxieties brought about by corporate biotechnology and eugenics. This work invites viewers to whisper their worries to the dolls-in-growth – will they take your troubles away?

The genderless figures represent the current stage of cultural limbo: a stage characterized by childlike innocence and a mixture of wonder and fear of technology. But in light of the current trend toward synthetic biology, the dolls also address the fascination with the precarious border between life and non-life, as well as with its artificial synthesis. The artists investigate our relationships with the different gradients of life through the construction/growth of a new class of object/being – that of the semi-living. From an historical perspective, the Semi-Living Worry Dolls can be seen as a contemporary, symbolic incarnation of the Homunculus in alchemist tradition, based on the idea that “living beings” could be constructed out of organic raw material and that the microscopic “building blocks” already contain the structures of a fully-formed being. Culturally related myths and narratives such as the Golem, Pygmalion, Faust or Frankenstein, which act as a warning against human fantasies of technological omnipotence, also resonate in Semi-Living Worry Dolls.

The Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr) is an artists’ group hosted by and closely involved in SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia. Since 1996, the group has explored the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression and has specialized in cell-and-tissue-cultured miniature sculptures described as “semi-living”.

photo credit: The Tissue Culture & Art (Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr)

Autoinducer_Ph-1

Autoinducer_Ph-1 is a semi-synthetic ecosystem that explores the question of how the evolutionary adaptation of natural organisms to artificially-created living entities might happen, and vice versa. It consists of biological, electro-robotic and computing processes, thus staging a permanent interaction between an artificial bacteria, a techno-organism based on software and a robotic system, and three organic protagonists: rice, Azolla fern, and the cyanobacteria Anabaena. The installation takes traditional rice cultivation techniques from Asia, where the water fern Azolla is used as an organic, nitrogen rich fertilizer in rice paddies, as its starting point. Andy Gracie turns them into a complex networked laboratory mirroring contemporary agricultural techniques and the increasingly machinic nature of ecosystems.

Autoinducer_Ph-1 probes into and interferes with the symbiosis between the water fern Azolla and the cyanobacteria Anabaena, which helps grow the oval Oryza sativa rice field in the gallery. An information system with gas sensors captures data about the relationships between the organic protagonists of the installation, and sends them to an artificial, software-based bacteria that then interacts with them either symbiotically or parasitically. Through this interface, the synthetic bacteria is fully integrated into the ecosystem and exerts an equal influence on the system’s equilibrium as the real organisms. If the core of the system “understands” the relationship as symbiotic, it will instruct its robotic arms to begin to scoop out Azolla and deliver it to the rice. If the relationship is interpreted as being more parasitic, the arms will withhold the delivery. The robotic arms are also capable of evolving new expressive movements, based on the ecological data they receive – ballet-like movements which express the state of the system as a whole. Artist Andy Gracie expects that, if maintained for several generations, the natural proponents of this semi-synthetic ecosystem will evolutionarily adapt to the artificial bacteria.

Andy Gracie works across various disciplines including installation art, robotics, sound, video and biological practice. His works create situations of exchange between natural and artificial systems which allow new emergent behaviours to develop.

synth-ethic

Art and Synthetic Biology

Art has always involved synthesis. Uniting disparate elements, putting them into a collage to create new works, metaphors, sensory experiences, or aesthetic genres, however, is also inherent to a curiosity, present in every epoch, for finding new ways of creating with new expressive media. Those contemporary artists, who in recent years have begun to employ laboratory methods and biotechnology for their own purposes in new contexts and to modify living systems, are particularly “close to life”. Here, it would seem, the newly declared discipline of synthetic biology is well-suited to the task, seeking, as it does, not only to modify existing organisms but to design “life” anew, from the ground up. Yet, this biological science is not concerned with living beings but rather with components, circuits, and systems. The language of engineering has been shifted to biology. These new dimensions to our technical ability to act, however, call for a new ethical engagement concerning the question of how and whether we should act simply because we can. The exhibition synth-ethic offers perspectives on human intervention in biotechnology and the responsibility that arises with it. Artists appropriate these technologies for their own purposes, see through the mania of novelty and beyond the constraints of economics to examine the areas of tension between molecular biology and ecology, architecture and biochemistry, technology and nature, cybernetics and alchemy.

On the one hand, synthetic biology promises useful applications for the future. Biological systems, for example, may enable the storage of information, the fabrication of new materials, the production of environmentally-friendly energy, or the design of medications better tolerated by the body. The discipline merges the interests of numerous fields of research: In DNA synthesis, genetic information is chemically produced and transplanted into foreign cells; with DNA-based biological circuits receptor-organisms can be equipped with new functions; research on minimal organisms attempts to find uses for biological units reduced to their minimal functions necessary for survival; protocells, early stages of cellular life forms, can be produced out of lifeless chemical substances; and xenobiology constructs functional biological systems not-yet-existent in nature and not intended to interact with it.

On the other hand, at least since the American scientist-entrepreneur Craig Venter’s effective press campaign making public his synthesis of a completely functional bacteria genome in 2010, such scientific development is accompanied by headlines such as, “Artificial Life Created!”, “Second Creation in Laboratory!”, or “Scientist plays God!”  In contrast to “dead” chemistry and physics, apparently the idea of synthesis in biology, which primarily deals with the analysis of the laws of life, makes us feel uncomfortable. Synthetic biology seeks to take the knowledge gained from analyzing and use it to synthesize for the sake of practical, useful applications. Some even see synthesis as the ultimate achievement of knowledge, citing the engineer-mantra of American physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot create, I do not understand” (1988). But is the reconstruction or creation of something new really evidence that we have completely understood something? Do we truly understand what we have created? Is it even possible to act ethically? If Kant formulated his categorical imperative for every individual, “So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world,” as a universal law of nature, can we today even in the social collective really foresee the consequences of our technological behavior?

This is where art comes in, as in synth-ethic. It stages, performs and provokes us to reflect on how humans themselves come to feel the ecological consequences of the natural laws they have pushed to the limit, perhaps to the point even of becoming superfluous in the biosphere, given the new creatures they create; how animals may help to cure diseases caused by human technology; how the value we place on animals and plants is in the end dependent upon their usefulness to us, rather than on a view of ecology as a whole; how in the context of our fantasies of technological omnipotence, creation myths and narratives, such as the Golem and Pygmalion, now literally grow as “half-living” concerns; how genetically-programmed bacterial radios revert the bioengineering paradigm; how protocells enable the growth of architectural structures; how humans ascribe their need to anthropomorphize even to the smallest of spheres of organized matter they can manipulate; how cybernetics already sought to achieve the ideal balance between constructed systems and their self-regulation; how talk of synthetic biology is not a recent U.S. American invention but dates back, instead, as early as 1910 to “Biologie Synthétique,” shaped by the French natural scientist Stéphane Leduc. He compared the growth of crystal formations with the creation of organic life forms and sought to achieve the synthesis of living phenomena in the grey area between the inorganic and organic by combining the most basic components. Is synthesis actually “unnatural”? Doesn’t the silk worm synthesize too?

“What should I do?” is Kant’s question regarding correct moral behavior. This question has lost none of its timeliness for us. Between art and techno-science, the exhibition synth-ethic poses questions reaching far beyond the dilemma of our acceptance or rejection of an emerging field of research which has quickly become fashionable.

Jens Hauser und Markus Schmidt

Production company: Biofaction KG

Producer and scientific curator: Dr. Markus Schmidt (Biofaction KG)

Art Curator: Jens Hauser

1st Production assistance: Sonja Schachinger

2nd Production assistance: Camillo Meinhart

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Main Cooperation Partner and Host:

Naturhistorisches Museum Wien

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Supporters:

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Life Technologies (Geneart AG)

Chair for Systems and Synthetic Biology, Wageningen University

Philipps-Universität Marburg, LOEWE Zentrum für Synthetische Mikrobiologie

European Science Foundation- EUROCORES- EUROSYNBIO

Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

Institute of Nanobiotechnology, University of Natural Ressources and Life Sciences, Vienna

Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology

Aculab

Institut für Allgemeine und Experimentelle Pathologie, Medizinische Universität Wien

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CV of producer and curator:

Dr. MARKUS SCHMIDT has an educational background in electronic engineering, biology and environmental risk assessment. For almost 10 years now he has carried out environmental risk assessment, safety and public perception studies in a number of science and technology fields (GM-crops, gene therapy, nanotechnology, converging technologies, and synthetic biology). He served as an advisor to the European Group on Ethics (EGE) of the European Commission, the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (as only one of two Europeans), the Bioethics Council of the German Parliament and to several thematically related national and international projects. In addition tp his research work, Schmidt contributes to a better interaction between sceince and society as part of Biofaction KG, though public talks, production of scientific documentary films and the organisation of the Synthetic Biology – Science, Art and Film Festival Bio:Fiction. More…

JENS HAUSER is a Paris-based curator, author and arts and culture critic. With a background in Media Studies and Science Journalism, he focuses on the interactions between art and technology, as well as on trans-genre and contextual aesthetics. He has curated exhibitions such as L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003), Still,Living (Perth, 2007), sk-interfaces (Liverpool, 2008/Luxembourg, 2009), theArticle Biennale (Stavanger, 2008), Transbiotics (Riga 2010) and Fingerprints…(Berlin, 2011). Hauser organizes interdisciplinary conferences and guest lectures at universities and international art academies. In his current research at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, he investigates the biomediality paradigm. Hauser is also a founding collaborator of the European culture channel ARTE and has produced numerous radio features.