Presentation on Bio Art with main focus on Eduardo Kac.

1. BIO ART
Eduardo Kac

2. Bio art is an art practice
where humans work with
live tissues, bacteria, living
organisms and life
processes. Using scientific
processes such as
biotechnology (including
technologies such as
genetic
engineering, tissue
culture, and cloning) the
artworks are produced in
laboratories, galleries or
artists’ studio.
Bio art requires the artists
to work in
laboratories, which is
often foreign to the artists.
?
Much of the art involves
tissue-culturing and
transgenics.
An example of Bio art, made with
bacteria expressing 8 different colors of
fluorescent proteins.
Transgenesis is a term for
a variety of genetic
engineering processes
through which genetic
material from one
organism is altered by the
addition of synthesized or
transplanted genetic
material from another
organism.

3. STELARC –
is a Cypriot-Australian performance artist whose
works focuses heavily on extending the
capabilities of the human body.
In 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear
surgically attached to his left arm.
JOE DAVIS –
is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at
MIT and in the George Church Laboratory.
a microscope that translates light information into
sound allowing you to "hear" living cells, each with its
own "acoustic signature."
LAURA CINTI –
The Cactus Project is a collaborative
bio-art project resulting in cactus’s expressing human
hair.

4. A whiff of sweet-smelling rain in a science lab
Artist-in-residence at Centre for Experimental Media and
Arts at the Srishti School of Art and Design, Yashas Shetty
got 10 art students, who knew nothing about working in a
science lab, excited in a project to learn synthetic
biology, the art of cobbling up different parts of DNA to
create new creatures.
For three months, the students learnt how to isolate the
DNA that made streptococci bacteria in soil give out the
smell that we identify as the smell of rain. It’s an enzyme
called geosmin that gives out the smell. The task was to
articificially synthesise geosmin and run it in E Coli bacteria
which is the commonly used vehicle

5. EDUARDO KAC
Lagoglyphs are a series of 12 bichrome silkscreens created
by Kac in 2007 in which the artist develops a leporimorph or
rabbitographic form of writing.

6. Eduardo Kac is a contemporary American artist of
Brazilian descent and professor of Art and Technology
Studies at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Kac was born in 1962 in Rio de
Janerio, Brazil. Kac has worked in numerous and
diverse artistic media since he began practicing in
the early 1980s
Kac considers himself a "transgenic artist," or "bio artist," using
technology and genetics to create provocative works that
concomitantly explore scientific techniques and critique them.

7. Natural History of the Enigma
The new flower is a Petunia strain that
has been invented and produced
through molecular biology by Eduardo
Kac. It is not found in nature.
The Edunia has red veins on light pink
petals and a gene of Kac is expressed
on every cell of its red veins, i.e. his gene
produces a protein in the veins only.

8. GFP Bunny
"GFP Bunny" is a transgenic artwork
that comprises the creation of a
green fluorescent rabbit ("Alba"), the
public dialogue generated by the
project, and the social integration of
the rabbit.

9. Genesis
Genesis was commissioned by Ars Electronica 99
and presented online and at the O.K. Center for
Contemporary Art, Linz, from September 4 to
19, 1999.
Genesis is a transgenic artwork that explores the
intricate relationship between biology, belief
systems, information technology, dialogical
interaction, ethics, and the Internet

11. Specimen of Secrecy About Marvelous
Discoveries
Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous
Discoveries" is a series of works comprised of
what I call "biotopes", i.e., living pieces that
change during the exhibition in response to
internal metabolism and environmental
conditions.

12. The artist orchestrates the metabolism of these
organisms in order to produce his constantly
evolving living works.

13. THANK YOU