The Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research course series (AWAPTR) examines artistic practice as a form of critical inquiry and knowledge production. It offers opportunities to develop art as a means for addressing the social, cultural, and ecological underpinnings and consequences of technology, building bridges between industry and culture, and challenging the boundaries between public and private and human and non-human. It provides instruction in evaluating models of experimentation, individual research, and collaboration with other disciplines in the arts, culture, science, and technology.
In the spring 2024 semester, the AWAPTR series focused on exploring the main concepts in bioart as a form of cultural inquiry into biotechnology. Bioart is uniquely positioned to build the foundations for such inquiry because it is an interdisciplinary field that has been exploring the intersection of art and biology for over forty years, bridging the gap between science, technology, and artistic expression.
The ethics of automation in biotechnology turns out to be the most relevant topic for bioart today because we live in the age of a biotechnological revolution where biology is turning from science into technology, like what happened with computers in the early 70s to the 80s. Moreover, biology and computation are becoming ever more closely intertwined. Biological life is becoming technology-like, and vice versa; technology is becoming life-like. Society needs to develop cultural concepts and language to talk about it. Bioart can contribute greatly to this effort because it has proven over the decades that it is well-equipped to analyze biotechnology’s ethical and cultural consequences.
The class curriculum teaches the relevant conceptual tools to explore the ethics of automation in biotechnology through bioart. It uses the concepts of social sculpture, multispecies, emergence, and abstraction to analyze the cultural underpinnings of the technology that enables simulation and generates data, as well as how these cultural underpinnings reflect in biotechnology design. It asks three fundamental questions through bioart practice in microbiology, synthetic biology, and 3D tissue engineering: How does the concept of multispecies relate to ethics through art? How does data abstraction influence the DNA design? What are the cultural underpinnings of the technology that enables body simulation, and how do they impact the ethics of design in biotechnology?
This MIT ACT course was made possible with support from Huang-Hobbs Biomaker Space at MIT and IDT Technologies.
Thanks to Eyal Perry, Olivia Verdugo, and Ashley Bell Clark.
