COMS 642 Special Topics in Media

Photo: Amit Kehar

Art, Science and Technology:
My body, my wetware?

Course overview:

The role of biotechnology affects our everyday lives from the consumption of genetically modified food to the growth and modification of new life forms. Artists and cultural practitioners now utilize biotechnology and techniques from the life sciences to create, manipulate and engineer “living” artworks from biological media. Such art works often provoke profound philosophical questions around the contemporary status of bodies and the perception of life. What is at stake when artists borrow techniques and technologies from the life sciences towards aesthetic ends?

This seminar course will examine how biological artworks challenge contemporary perceptions of vitality and bodies, and demand contemporary feminist, socio-political and philosophical thought. Students are asked to consider the changing status and representation of bodies in the so-called postbiological era, where the discourse of the Cyborg (the technologically augmented machine-body) is reconsidered in light of contemporary scientific developments from plastination to tissue and genetic engineering. Course material will include contemporary artists’ writings and video documents alongside theoretical texts. In-class and laboratory workshops by visiting guest artists will introduce students to various scientific and artistic media used in their work.

Invited national and international guest artists include: Jennifer Willet, Marta De Menezes, Brandon Ballengee and Kathy High. (Sponsored by Fluxmedia and Concordia University).