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WPS1 Art Radio is the Internet station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, featuring an MP3 stream of music, talk, and historical recordings and a free on-demand archive of over 1200 programs.
From "wetware" practices to "live" art, from reproductive technologies to cloning, from plastic surgery to brain chips, the "Bio-Blurb" show explores the futuristic aspects of the "sci-art" conjunction in the US, the UK, Germany and Australia. The show is host to artists, scientists, curators, critics and philosophers who explore the intersections of
the visual arts and the genetic sciences in contemporary art.
Edition #20: Partial Life and the Semi-Living: The Aesthetics of Care listen |
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First broadcast September 4, 2006
This segment with Oron Catts, explores the philosophical underpinnings of tissue culturing as a medium for artistic expression. Oron Catts is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA - The Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at The School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia. His pioneering research is in wet biology art practices and in particular the use of living tissue from complex organisms. He co-founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) in 1996 and was a Research Fellow at The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2000-2001). Catts has exhibited and published internationally. He curated the Biofeel exhibition and The Aesthetics of Care Symposium, BEAP 2002 and co-curated the BioDifferences exhibition and conference, BEAP 2004. He is trained in product design (BA Hon), and Visual Art (MA).
This episode examines the dialectical and/or reciprocal relations between science and myth, as explored by an artist, a curator, and a molecular biologist. Guests include Bryan Crockett, a sculptor represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery in NYC; Xandra Eden, curator of Uneasy Nature at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; and Myles Axton, editor of (Nature Genetics magazine. (28.5 minutes)
Does the growing interest of scientific themes in the literary, performing and visual arts contribute to the public understanding of science? Can works of fiction be critical tools to critique the sciences? Or, on the other hand do they operate on hyperbole and confuse the public's engagement with science? Host Suzanne Anker's guests were:
Ciarin Bennett, writer/curator and President of AICA Ireland.
Beryl Korot, a pioneering video artist in multiple channel video and collaborator with composer Steve Reich on multimedia pieces that interrogate the benefits and perils of science.
Adrienne Klein, Co-Director of Science & the Arts, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
From neural networks to the World Wide Web, connectivity abounds. Branching patterns of complex configurations transmit and store impulses of information in the brain's living data bank. From random memories, both true and false, to rational problem solving, to aesthetic choice, consciousness differentiates sentience from its silicon other. This episode explores "psycho-physical space", altered states of consciousness and psychopharmacology as it interfaces with visual art practices.
Guests include:
Andrew Carnie, a London based artist who collaborates with neuroscientists at Kings College, London.
Alice Aycock, a sculptor who works in large scale semi-architectural forms. Her work is the subject of a new book by Robert Hobbs, published by M.I.T Press.
Dr. David Salvage, a practicing psychiatrist in New York City. His novel, The Dolphin Smiles will be published by The Dragon Press in June 2006. (28 minutes)
Edition #16: Fictional Naturalism: Biofacts, Artifacts, and Aesthetics listen |
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First broadcast April 3, 2006
Imagery currently abounds in scientific journals and presentations.
What roles do images play in each domain? Has the concept of beauty been banished by art and resuscitated by science? Suzanne Anker and her guests discuss authenticity and information as embedded narratives in pictures.
Frank Gillette is a video pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena.
Special Edition: Invoking physics and mathematics as scientific influences for the revolution in visual art that took place in the early 20th century, our guests discuss realities hidden behind appearances, the fourth dimension in time and space, and the nature of simultaneity.
Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College in London. His book Einstein and Picasso: Space and the Beauty that Causes Havoc was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Tony Robbin, is an artist whose work crosses the boundaries of painting, sculpture, architecture and computer art. His book Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism and Modern Thought was published by Yale University this year.
Connie Beckley is a performance artist and composer who originally appeared in the seminal production of Einstein on the Beach, by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Her recent production entitled From: A Masque in Seven Inventions is about an inventor who gets trapped inside one of his own inventions and must think his way out.
Edition #14: The Missing Link - Transitional Forms in Art and Biomedicine listen |
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First broadcast February 27, 2006
This edition tackles the interactions of art and science as mechanisms
embedded in knowledge systems. The discussion centers around an
exhibition at Pratt Institute where the work of both artists and
scientists were exhibited anonymously across disciplines.
Guests include:
Kaethe Wenzel, a Berlin based
artist and art historian whose work deals with visual art and
biomaterials.
Lisa Glauer (with baby Leah Fifer) is an artist and art historian . She
is curator at the Art Transponder in Berlin, a project space focusing on participatory art
projects.
In an age of bio-technology and bio-engineering, the divide between nature and
culture is becoming increasingly osmotic. Archeology meets DNA analysis, genes are bought and sold and urbanization is looked at as an aspect of manipulating nature. Art, too, records this "fall from paradise". Guests include Dr. Helen Chandler, a population geneticist and scientific manager for the Arts and Genomics Center in Amsterdam, Ellen Levy, a visual artist working with complexity theory and currently President of the College Art Association and Peggy Cyphers, a painter whose work has iconographically moved from the garden to the city .
Exploring the changing relationship of humans towards animals brought about by novel bio-technologies, this edition focuses on animals as scientific research models and their incorporation in works of art. The discussion addresses some of the bio-ethical considerations concerning transgenic animals, nature's "food chain" and the lowly cockroach.
Guests include:
Valentina Greco, a molecular biologist whose research involves stem-cells garnered from the skin of laboratory mice;
Catherine Chalmers, a photographer and installation artist whose visceral photographs employ the controversial use of animals in art; and
Richard Twine, a bio-ethicist and Research Associate for the Center for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) at Lancaster University in England.
Edition #11: Matter Matters: From Tissue Engineering to Teratomas listen |
listen with RealPlayer First broadcast June 27, 2005
The teratoma--a monstrous form of cells--has resurfaced as an entity which could bridge the philosophical gap between religion and science. Artist/researchers Jennifer Willet and Shawn Bailey discuss their work which centers around "live" tissue engineering, meat sculpture and digital media. Both artists are members of the Hexagram Institute in Canada, a funding organization that supports creative practices in the media arts. Their bio-tech company can be accessed through www.bioteknica.org. Jens Hauser is a curator and writer whose exhibition "L'Art Biotech" was hosted by the National Arts and Culture Center Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France. Hauser is currently involved in two long-term film projects about bioart.
Edition #10: The Holy Grail (Religion, Art and DNA) listen
First broadcast May 2, 2005
This episode examines religious references such as the relic, "incarnational consciousness" and immortality with regard to the genetic decoding of the "book of life" and art's magico-religious roots. The reknowned French artist Orlan discusses her Carnal Art Manifesto and her fight against the stereotype of a woman's body as a site of sacrifice and vulnerability. Raphael Cuir, art historian and J.P.Getty Scholar expands the current dialogue on the use of religious metaphor in art and science. Eleanor Heartney, art critic and writer talks about the reception of her book Postmodern Heretics: Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art in both the religious and art communities.
How do museum collections, like the mind, generate dreams? This episode explores the materialist self through neurocultural enhancements, information storage and "the seven sins of memory." Panelists include Justine Cooper, an interdisciplinary artist working with large-format photography and new media; Kathy Brew, a documentary filmmaker and video artist. She is former Director of Thundergulch and co-Director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History; and Dr. Giovanni Frazzetto, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist who writes about aspects of consciousness and the changing identity of the scientist.
Host Suzanne Anker and guests reconsider the virus as both a biological and cultural phenomenon. In its mutating form, new strains have been able to cross species boundaries, just as globalization has created permeable boundaries in geopolitics. The panelists discuss new media art and politics in terms of a living code. With Joseph Nechvatal,
an innovator in robotic painting and digital art, Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum and Director of
Intelligent Agent, and
McKenzie Wark, cultural critic and author of "A Hacker Manifesto" (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Genetic profiling can be as troubling as it can be helpful - but helpful to whom, exactly, and in what ways? Here Suzanne Anker and her guests examine the legal and social effects of expanding DNA databases - and ways that new technologies expose attitudes toward race in such commercial products as Bidil - the first "ethnic drug."
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who is an Associate Professor In the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts in NYC.
Troy Duster, an advisor to many national policy-making boards (including the Advisory Council for Human Genome Research in Washington D.C.) on genetic profiling, is Professor of Sociology at New York University.
Tania Simoncelli is a cellist who is currently a Science and Technology Fellow for the
American Civil Liberties Union in New York.
Should artists be allowed in the lab? These three are not stopping to ask
permission! Besides, can't artists bring a new perspective to bio-practice?
Adam Zaretsky
is an artist/researcher who has worked at both MIT's Arnold Demain Laboratory for Microbiology and at Symbiotica, the first lab to invite artists to engage in wet biology.
Julia Reodica, a former staff technician at San Francisco's Exploratorium, is quickly becoming expert in "tissue engineering."
Kathy High is a media artist and curator whose films and videos are feminist
inquiries into bio-science and interspecies telepathic communication. She is
editor of FELIX: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication.
Plastic surgery has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. and Suzanne Anker gathers a crew of insiders to examine some of the aesthetic and social issues raised by transforming the body through augmentations, reductions and cosmetic procedures that are rooted in the practice of artists from Warhol to Orlan and Sherman.
Laura Lindgren, Allan Ludwig and Pete Mauro join host Suzanne Anker for this discussion of representations of the mortal coil among the "formaldehyde photography set," on gravestones, and elsewhere.
Laura Lindgren is co-publisher, editor and designer for Blast Books, including The Mutter Museum and Daniel's Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore. Allan Ludwig is the author of Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815. Art historian Pete Mauro has written about the intersect of science and technology in the post-Civil war era to the present, sometimes focusing on pseudo-science, criminology and biometric surveillance.
In this most important program, host Suzanne Anker asks her guests, former Whitney Museum director David Ross, Steven Henry Madoff (art journalist and onetime editor of ARTNews), and filmmaker Virgil Wong about the federal government's against the activist artist Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble. How much of this is fact, how much fiction? Why have no politicians come forward with a response? This many years after the Culture Wars, has the government succeeded in criminalizing artists? Should artists be making work with life-forms? The answers are just as provocative as the questions!
Another hair-raising episode in this exclusive series on art and biology, as the "Cowboy Science" - eugenics - comes under fire during Suzanne Anker's roundtable on reproduction (human and mechanical) and the beauty ideal. Her guests: science writer Robin Marantz Henig, photographer (and M.D.), Mark Kessell, and activist art critic,
Kirby Gookin.
In the first of this stimulating new series considering a new definition of "nature," Suzanne Anker, author of The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, hosts a discussion of the quickly falling boundaries between art and science, especially in regard to genetics -- think the Matthews (Barney and Richie) and Andy Goldsworthy -- with forceful contributions from artist Steve Miller and writers Thyrza Nichols Goodeve and Mark Dery.
