The PLUME Crossing Wires Laboratory : Science, Art and Technology Collaboration
This is the blog from the PLUME collaboration between Dr Richard Newcomb. molecular scientist and Raewyn Turner artist. Together we set up the CROSSING WIRES art+ science laboratory pop-up in Karangahape Rd, Auckland for 3 weeks where we conducted our discussion and experiments.
Last week Raewyn and Richard returned from SuperHuman:Revolution of the Species Symposium 23-24 November 2009 http://superhuman.anat.org.au/
and ReLive Third International conference on the Histories of Media Art Science and Technology 26-29 November 2009 http://www.mediaarthistory.org
The focus of both SuperHuman symposium and ReLive conference were around art+science+technology, and perfectly timed after the last week of the Crossing Wires lab and its dismantling the day before the opening of the SuperHuman exhibition in Melbourne. Both conferences provided us with loads of info about what’s happening in art and science collaborations internationally.
Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary ofThe Origin of Species, Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turns the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future.
The Superhuman symposium by ANAT (The Australian Network of Art and Technology ) presented “an invigorating and inspiring mix of keynote speakers and collaborative research projects engaging with one or more of the symposium themes: Augmentation, Cognition and Nanoscale Interventions”
Barbara Maria Stafford, in her keynote address in SuperHuman spoke of pondering, selective attention, and small moments… the way in which attention is pulled somewhere, to an inner migration. Barbara suggested a re-introduction of formalism in art…form, formalism, format…works that would ‘bring a crazy quilt of physical phenomena to our notice by constraining, compressing design, and help the viewer coalesce large amounts of novel and taxing information’.
Such works may 'reveal the significant morphological homologies and dissonances within and between ordered compositions that allows us to deduce significant correspondences between our internal biological mechanisms and the external configurational practices’.