To “animate” means, among other things, to give life to inert objects. As contemporary biology moves steadily away from the underlying laws that define life in favor of an open field of generative, dynamic collaborations that enliven organic matter, a new theory of materialism has emerged across the disciplines of political science, philosophy, and geography. New materialism proposes that all matter has agency akin to living humans. According to political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett, this understanding of matter acknowledges “the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” From the components of an electrical grid, to the food that living beings consume and through which they are transformed, to the irregular crystalline structure that allows iron to turn into steel when heated, these often-dissonant assemblages of matter act together to impact our human designs for and situations in the world.
writing
Reimagining the Humanities Center
https://humanitiesforall.org/blog/reimagining-the-humanities-center-a-great-experiment
A Nourishing Trust poster from C21’s 2022–2023 programming is included with other materials on the back panel of the cart. Image courtesy of Yuchen Zhao.
Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life
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 Architecture, edited 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
- “Performing Cerebral Organoids”: SLSA, Aliens, ASU, 2023
- “Pluripotent Selves and the Performance of Stem Cells”: CAA, 2018
- “Pluripotent Temporalities”: SLSA, Out of Time, ASU, 2017
- “On Demonstrable Plasticity”: CAA, 2017
- “Viral Pluripotency”
SLSA, Neolife, University of Western Australia
Oct 2015 - “Regenerating Pluripotency, or the Plastic Life of Stem Cells”
SLSA, After Biopolitics, Rice University, Houston
Nov 2015 - “Non-life Matters”
ICI Berlin, Nov 2014 - “Willing Vitality”
World Picture Conference
University of Toronto, Nov 8-9, 2013 - “Vital Dependencies: Architecture, Performance, Biotechnology”
School of Architecture and Urban Planning (UWM) Lecture Series , Sept 21, 2012 - “Vital Dependencies: Bio-Art, Architecture, and Infrastructures of Care”
University of Vermont, Art History Department, April 4, 2012 - “Readymade Bio-Matter: Art and Synthetic Biology”
College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 22-25, 2012 - “Vital Dependencies: Synthetic Bio-Art and Infrastructures of Care”
University of Pittsburgh, February 20, 2012 - “Molecules to Humans: Scaling Synthetic Life”
World Picture Conference, Toronto, October 21-22, 2011