Event Blog #2

Event Blog #2
 I attended the LASER presentation and discussion this week and was very pleased to see how much the artists and their work connected with all of the material we have been covering these past four weeks. I was very intrigued by the discussions of Roberta Raffaeta and Maru Garcia.
Roberta’s work coincides perfectly with exactly the kind of concepts I’m interested in as a Human Biology and Society major. Her background as a medical Anthropologist is relevant to her analysis of culture interacting with human health. Her main topic is something that has interested me for a while and the basis for my midterm presentation, the microbiome. Her insight on this field mirrored my exact sentiments. I resonated with imagery of the human body as an ecosystem between our own genome and that of our microbes, which make up 90% of the cells in our body. Roberta discussed the complexity of this relationship, and brought in a new idea of how the computational approach of understanding all of the genes of microbes may not be the best in appreciating the complexity of the microbiome. Computers cannot always encompass the interactions of this community through sequencing methods. This approach underestimates the importance of the environment underlying this system.
Roberta explaining the microbiome


I was also very interested in the work of Maru García, whose background in science precluded her work in biotechnology that translates into the world of art. She discussed how her lab tracks genomes of plants and bacteria, then develops bio art in various mediums. The bacteria was used as the paint to create a beautiful image in a petri dish, where it grew around a center of corn, explained to be very emblematic in her culture in Mexico. I loved how involved this piece was from the use of life to create art to the symbolic nature of the work. The romanticization of nature and humans interaction has been discussed multiple times throughout this course, especially in this weeks examples of biotechnology and art with many similarities.

Maru Garcia discussing her work
The work of Artist Kelly Nipper was also very cool, I have no experience with photography but I’ve always wanted to try. Her experience and background with media arts and technology informed her work with foundations in the study of the moving body and space. One of her photography projects, The Black Forest Exhibition that showed in the hammer Museum in 2013, was very interesting to me in the use of dancers to portray the concept of moving through space in relation to objects. She had no formal dance language to communicate with her subjects with, but she was able to work with platonic solids, imagining them in the torsos of the dancers. The movements of the dancers reflect positioning of the object in relation to the body. I really liked the novel approach showed in these pieces of art.


Artwork from Kelly Nipper Black Forest Exhibition

This event exposed me to fascinating work and was worth the attendance, I would highly recommend this to other students who would like to draw connections between our course and real world projects.
me at the LASER talk

 SOURCES
Cascone, Sarah. “Can Rapid 3-D Printing Boost Performance Art? Performa Teamed Up With MIT Scientists to Find Out.” Artnet News, Artnet News, 3 Aug. 2017, news.artnet.com/art-world/kelly-nipper-mit-brown-performa-1037840.

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