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The Futures of Humanities Publishing Workshop

https://chcinetwork.org/news/c21-publishing

The Consortium for Humanities Institutes (CHCI), UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies, UWM Libraries

Universities and their affiliated publishing landscapes continue to change rapidly. In the arts and humanities, presses, libraries, and humanities centers have all played different roles in publishing and dissemination. Open access and community-engaged efforts continue to redefine our work.

How might we reimagine these roles in this space of change? How do we attend to the mission of the university for humanities research generation and sharing? Join us for a two-day conversation about publishing in the humanities as we map out current roles and imagine new processes at the center, library, university, press, and regional university system levels.



Dear Nature, April – Oct 2023

https://www.sculpturemilwaukee.com/dear-nature

Sculpture Milwaukee presents, Dear Nature, an exhibition curated by Whitney Moon and Jennifer Johung, featuring works from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Milwaukee School of Engineering, UW-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts, and UW-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Students and faculty developed artwork in response to Sculpture Milwaukee’s 2022/23 exhibition Nature Doesn’t Know About Us, guest curated by Ugo Rondinone, that explores multiple dimensions of our human intersections with nature.

Dear Nature will be on view from April 21st, 2023 through October 2023 at The Avenue, 275 W Wisconsin Ave Milwaukee, WI 53203

We told our stories, we brought the bright lights and the loud voices, we sat by the fountain hand in hand. We’re thinking back to the good old times, or are we forgetting something? Our lines of communication have been crisscrossed, and we think we have time to spare. Carving riverbanks and measuring tides, shielding ourselves from the sun, we are hidden in bedrock, under green canopies and forest floors muddied by storms. We lay our bones down alone and lose track of where we have been. Traces of the past linger in these halls, whispers echoing familiarity in our ears: “What now, what next?” Enveloping our limbs, the uncertainty of tomorrow casts an electric glow. Beckoning us to slow down, the future leans in, rendering us visible, if only for a moment. Nature, ever present, you are all around us. We’ve been taught to waste not and want not, to make water from air and cities portioned out of dirt. Do you know about us? We are listening for signs and catching signals, reaching towards each other across the vast expanses of human form and planetary time. Tell us: what can we do now? What should we do next?

Sincerely,

Life on Earth


Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life

October 2019Johung_covercomps_030419.indd

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vital-forms

In recent years, the convergence of art, architecture, and biology has yielded a range of experiments that seek to generate and reconfigure living forms on cellular and sub-cellular levels. Biological life is becoming raw material, to be manipulated, engineered, sculpted, and transformed from the bottom up; this living matter, in turn, is discretely isolated and instrumentalized to take on particular and programmed functions. Nonetheless a certain amount of indeterminacy remains in any process that seeks to harness the complexity of life and the living. As biological matter and biotechnological alterations more viably become the tools and trade of both artistic and architectural practices, newly malleable yet unpredictable formations of life are visualized, conceptualized and performed beyond the confines of the laboratory, drawing attention to what we can do with and to life.

This book is concerned with the ways in which contemporary biological art and architecture, with their overlapping disciplinary trajectories, actively engage in the forming of life, and even more endemically, the ways in which art and architecture are vitally necessary to current and changing formulations of life. Processes of generating, sustaining, and renewing living matter and forms have never been only biological, chemical or engineering techniques or technologies, but have always instigated visual and spatial, philosophical and political platforms of dialogue. And we, in the arts and humanities, are already entangled in the conversation; our various systems of imaging, imagining, situating, building and experiencing things and beings in the world are tested and revised, challenged and expanded by twenty-first century modifications of living matter.

Attending to recent developments across synthetic biology, tissue engineering, extra-cellular matrices, systems biology and stem cell science, I suggest that biological art and architecture participate in the forming of life by positioning vulnerable encounters and performing unequal exchanges across a range and scale of materials, from organic to synthetic, micro to macro. As a result, the unfolding dependencies between and amongst all manner and scope of matter become vital to biological life in our age of biotechnological manipulations. Offering intertwined yet uneven correlations of matter, these encounters and exchanges are responsible for synthesizing, maintaining, contextualizing, systematizing and regenerating new and existing formations of life, as well as biological, technological and philosophical qualifications of life and the living.


Articles/Chapters on Biological Art

“Pluripotent Selves and the Performance of Stem Cells”: Interspecies Communication, Meredith Tromble and Patricia Olynyk, eds., PUBLIC Journal #59, (Spring 2019).

“Demonstrable Plasticity”: The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architectureedited by Charissa Terranova and Meredith Tromble, Routledge (2017)

“BioArt”: Gender: Nature: Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender (2016)

“Speculative Life: Art, Synthetic Biology and Blueprints for the Unknown”
Theory, Culture and Society
December 2015 (online)/in print 2016

“Choreographic Arrhythmias”
Leonardo 48:2 and 3, April/June 2015

See also: “Disciplines collide: Art History professor unpacks BioArt”


Talks: Biological Art, Architecture, and Life