7/31: An evening of BioArt (USF)

When: July 31, 2012, at 7pm

Where: University of San Francisco - Fromm Hall - Maier Room 110

Free and open to the public

Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia, a center of excellence in Biological Arts, will be passing by San Francisco, and we invited him to give a presentation of Symbiotica, an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and critique of life sciences. SymbioticA, established in 2000 by cell biologist Professor Miranda Grounds, neuroscientist Professor Stuart Bunt and artist Oron Catts, was the first research laboratory of its kind, enabling artists to engage in "wet biology", with access to scientific laboratories and staff in a university biological science department.

Oron's presentation will be followed by a panel on BioArt with Chemistry and art specialist Tami Spector (USF), Art historian and artist Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute), Bioartist Phil Ross, Cultural historian Piero Scaruffi (www.scaruffi.com), Plant scientist Anna Davidson (UC Davis).

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project (which he founded in 1996 with Ionat Zurr) is part of the NY MoMA design collection and has been exhibited and presented internationally. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research laboratory housed within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under Oron's leadership, SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008. In 2009 Oron was recognised by Thames & Hudson's "60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future" book in the category "Beyond Design", and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, "making the future and transforming the way we work". More about Oron Catts: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/residents/catts

The panelists (in no particular order):

Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies specializing in the intersection of art, science and technology. In addition to fifteen years of broadcasting, she has authored hundreds of interviews, essays and commentaries, and she was a founding editor of Art Contemporaries. http://meredithtromble.net
Tami Spector is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of San Francisco and serves on the Board of Leonardo the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. She has written on the intersections of chemistry and art as well as nanoscience and art. http://www.usfca.edu/facultydetails.aspx?id=4294969795
Phil Ross is a practicing bioartist whose living artworks are grown into being over the course of several years, integrating traditional manufacturing techniques with practices and technologies from disparate fields. His recent work includes the growing of a building composed of living fungus. http://philross.org/
Anna Davidson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis studying plant ecophysiology. She teaches found object and sculpture for the Art Science Fusion program at UC Davis. She is also an active bioartist, currently working on sculptures using fungus.
Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian, blogger, poet and cognitive scientist who has published several books on music, science and history. He organizes the Leonardo Art Science Evenings (LASERs) at USF and Stanford, and the SMMMASH at Stanford (Stanford Multidisciplinary Multimedia Meetings of the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) http://www.scaruffi.com