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Markus Schmidt of BIOFACTION will be in Irvine beginning of February as part of the symposium panel below.

Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

presented by
The Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the Beall Center for Art + Technology and the
Center for Complex Biological Systems
taking place at the Newkirk Alumni Center, Conference Rooms A&B 450 Alumni Court Irvine, Ca 92617
February 5, 2016 3:00 pm– 5:00 p.m.

Startling new developments in “gene editing” have raised profound issues regarding changing and enhancing existing life, creating new life forms, and the origin of life. At the same time, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of synthetic biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.

These issues will be explored at the Newkirk Center for Science and Society’s Gene Editing, Artificial Life and Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Symposium being held in conjunction with the opening of the Wetware: Art/Agency/Animation exhibit at the Beall Center for Art + Technolo- gy, with the cooperation of the Center for Complex Biological Systems.

The symposium will explore issues surrounding the emerging field of synthetic biology in an era in which so-called “limit biologies,” as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich puts it, “come with the promise to reboot the life sciences.”

Featured symposium panelists to date:

Lori Andrews (Chicago-Kent School of Law)
Adam Brown (Artist)
John Chaput (Pharmaceutical Sciences, UC Irvine)
Carl Cranor (Philosophy, UC Riverside)
Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (Artists)
Peter Donovan (Biological Chemistry, UC Irvine)
Anna Dumitriu (Artist)
Gilberto Esparza (Artist)
Chang Liu (Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine)
Markus Schmidt (Biofaction, Austria)
Lucie Strecker & Klaus Spiess (Artists)
Simon Penny (Studio Art, UC Irvine)
Orkan Telhan (Artist)

Moderated by Jens Hauser (Curator, University of Copenhagen). For more information on the symposium, click HERE.

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The symposium is accompanied by:

WETWARE: art | agency | animation

between February 6 – May 7, 2016 at the Beall Center for Art + Technology
Opening Reception:  Saturday, February 6, 2pm – 5pm,
Family Day:  Saturday, April 9, 11am – 4pm

WETWARE features art in the light of today’s convergent living technologies: While artists have previously staged “Artificial life” through the hardware and software of computers and robotics to simulate living systems, increasingly it emerges from wetware itself. Whether touching upon the brain’s position between spiritualism and metabolism, the synthesis of luminescent protocells from scratch, or microbes that possess the technical ability to make gold and clean water, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of Synthetic Biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.

WETWARE presents beaded necklaces containing synthetic amino acids, protocells to simulate movements of phytoplankton, bacteria that produce energy to run a musical synthesizer, a desktop gene machine, A-Life parasites fed with electro trash, as well as an artificially grown brain-in-a-vat nourished with Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit. The exhibition juxtaposes art projects that creatively and critically investigate the anthropocentric mindset in engineered moist “Artificial life,” and the responsibility that arises with it. In WETWARE, the concepts of art, agency, and animation acquire new meanings, while aliveness is questioned in terms of components, circuits, and systems.

The exhibition features international artists who have increasingly extended their work towards wetware practices: Adam Brown, Gilberto Esparza, Thomas Feuerstein, Lucie Strecker & Klaus Spiess and Orkan Telhan. In addition Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand and Anna Dumitriu present new works developed during their three-week residencies at the Beall in collaboration with the UCI Center for Complex Biological Systems and the UCI Newkirk Center for Science & Society.

WETWARE is curated by Beall Center Artistic Director David Familian and Jens Hauser, a Paris and Copenhagen based art curator, writer and media studies scholar who focuses on the interactions between art and technology. He holds a dual research position at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and at the Medical Museion/Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, and is distinguished affiliated faculty of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University. His recent exhibitions include L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003), Still, Living (Perth, 2007), sk-interfaces (Liverpool, 2008/Luxembourg, 2009),the Article Biennale (Stavanger, 2008), Transbiotics (Riga 2010), Fingerprints…(Berlin, 2011/Munich/2012), synth-ethic (Vienna, 2011), and assemble | standard | minimal (Berlin, 2015).

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Free admission.  Open to the Public.
Closed:  Mar 22 – 29

Visit the Beall Center for Art + Technology website.

The Beall Center’s 2015-16 exhibitions are supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Beall Family Foundation.  The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corporation in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan, the core idea being to merge their lifelong passions – technology, business and the arts – in one place.

HOURS:
Tues – Sat, 12 – 6pm
Closed Sundays & Mondays

ADDRESS:
Beall Center for Art + Technology
University of California, Irvine
Claire Trevor School of the Arts
712 Arts Plaza
Irvine, CA 92697-2775
www.beallcenter.uci.edu  

CONTACT:
Adrienne Lipscomb
Interim Programs Director
(949) 824-6206
email: ajlipsco@uci.edu

READ MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS AND EXHIBITION