Symposium - Thursday 22nd November - 9.00-4.30
The Art and Science of Synthetic Biology: Critical and Creative Perspectives on 'New Life'
“Living fragments of biological bodies, forms of lab-grown life . . .
require a different epistemological and ontological understanding and, by extension, a different taxonomy of life. The liminality of this kind of technological approach to life can lead to a
form of fetishism, which we call Neolifism.” (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Partial Life)
Recent rapid advances in the biosciences have had a transformative
impact not only on the biosciences themselves, but also on the wider cultural imaginary, reshaping research and cultural production in very different fields. The emergence of synthetic
biology has played a key role in this. Developments in this field, such as Charles and Joseph Vacanti’s “earmouse”—in which an artificially-grown ear was transplanted under the skin of a
hairless mouse—have been widely reported in the popular press, and said to herald a new era of biological engineering and manufactured body parts. Contemporary artists like Oron Catts and
Ionat Zurr draw on techniques in synthetic biology to produce artworks that are both aesthetic provocations and critical interrogations of the new existence of “lab-grown
life.” Disciplines across the humanities, particularly affect theory and new materialism, have also urged a critical turn towards the biological. As Elizabeth Wilson argues:
“In most projects on ‘the body,’ the body is pursued in its
socially, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted form” (Neural Geographies). In recent years, such work
has been pursued with increasing vigour. Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Nik Rose, amongst others, have drawn on foundational works by Darwin, Bergson, Canguilhem and Deleuze to
theorise changing understanding of “life itself” over the course of the 20thcentury.
This symposium has two aims. The first is philosophical and
historical: to examine the impact of synthetic biology on existing concepts of the biological through consideration of the historical emergence and philosophical implications. The second
is to consider how artistic production and cultural expressions informed by work in the biosciences are able to feed back into debates in the biosciences themselves, or to cast new light on the
way knowledge in these fields is developed and circulated. Our purpose is to bring these different perspectives to bear on two central questions: whether synthetic biology and the
development of technologically-mediated life represent the emergence of a new kind of biology, in which the line between the artificial and organic has become increasingly uncertain; and,
secondly, whether the invocation of these questions in both the biosciences and humanities represent the emergence of new forms of knowledge, in which the clear delineation of disciplinary
boundaries has become increasingly irrelevant.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
9.00am -4.30pm,
Reception to follow
Room 228
Molecular Biosciences Building (76)
University of Queensland
St Lucia
This symposium is funded by a UQ-UWA Bilateral Research Collaboration
Award. It is free and all are welcome to attend.
Map:
Speakers
Elizabeth Wilson, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University and author
of Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke University Press, 2004) and Affect and Artificial Intelligence (University of Washington Press, 2010).
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Directors of SymbioticA, centre of Excellence in the Biological Arts at the
University of Western Australia and founders of the Tissue Culture and Art Project.
Elizabeth Stephens, Deputy Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the
University of Queensland, author of Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body From 1700 to the
Present (Liverpool and Chicago University Presses, 2011), and editor of Anatomical Imag(inari)es: The Cultural Impact of Medical Imaging
Technologies (Somatechnics Journal 2.2
[2012])
Greg Hainge, Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
at the University of Queensland, and author of Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology
of Noise (Continuum, 2012)
Alison Moore, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Western Sydney and co-author
of Frigidity: An
Intellectual History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Peter Cryle, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Centre for the History of European
Discourses at the University of Queensland, and co-author, most recently of Frigidity: An Intellectual History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Provisional programme
9.00-9.30
Welcome and Introduction
9.30-11.00
Keynote Address
Elizabeth Wilson: “Co-adaptations of Gender: Mutuality, Darwin, Lamarckianism”
11.00-11.30
Morning tea
11.30-1.00
Panel session
Alison Moore: “Culture as an Organism? The
History of Biology in the Humanities”
Peter Cryle: “Philosophical and Historical
Perspectives on the Normal in French Bio-Medical Thinking: Canguilhem and Foucault”
1.00-2.00
Lunch
2.00-3.30
Panel session
Elizabeth Stephens: “The Biological
Imaginary: Aesthetics as Critique inSynthetic Biological
Art”
Greg Hainge: “P(art)ial Life: Situating the Art in Bioart”
3.30-4.00
Afternoon tea
4.00-5.30
Keynote Address
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr: “Neolifism: Life With No
Context”
5.30-6.30
Wine reception
