Where’s the Art in Bio Art?
What is Bio Art? Does it go beyond working with living or once living materials? This talk divides Bio Art into a tri-part system to include molecular metaphors, computational data and wet lab procedures. Bio Art by necessity is an interdisciplinary practice since it is embedded in both scientific and cultural contexts. Questions concerning aesthetic practice and how it drifts into discourses concerning the alteration of life forms constitute the basis of this practice.
Chair, Fine Arts Department
School of Visual Arts
Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist who works at the nexus of art and the biological sciences. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, MoMA PSI, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Japan, and the Mediznhistoriches Museum der Charite in Berlin. Her seminal text, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (coauthored with the late Dorothy Nelkin), was published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. She has hosted 20 episodes of The Bio Blurb Show, an internet radio program, in collaboration with MoMA. Since 2005 she has served as the chair of the Fine Arts Department at the School of the Visual Arts. In this role, she continues to interweave traditional and experimental media into her department’s initiatives including a digital sculpture facility and a bio-art lab.
