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Porneia features a selection of works by Eduardo Kac realized in
the context of the Porn Art Movement, a vanguard that emerged in
1980 under a military dictatorship in Brazil and which, for two
intense years, straddled the line between relentless formal
experimentation and the outlying demimonde where boundary-busting
gender reinvention took place. Through performances, poetry and
visual works, as well as through interventions in daily life,
between 1980 and 1982 Kac carried out a radical body-based program
that upturned the semiotics of normative pornography at the service
of activism and imagination.
Humankind has imagined and depicted fantastical creatures since the
formation of the first societies. Beasts such as the Chimera, the
Golem, the Minotaur and Galatea could be said to be culturally
symptomatic. Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the
emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first
imagined and then--through the agency of biotechnologies--brought
to life. What once was myth is today a medium. In "Eduardo Kac:
Life Extreme," Kac, the pioneer of "bio art" who is internationally
recognized for celebrated works such as "Genesis" and the
fluorescent green "GFP Bunny," has selected 36 new organisms and
invited the prominent philosopher Avital Ronell to discover these
new beings. The book, published in Dis Voir's new "Encounters"
series, is prefaced by Kac's "Anthroduction" and includes a
whimsical taxonomy of taxonomies, offering a unique classification
method for future species.
The theory and practice of bio art, a new art form that uses the
materials and processes of biotechnology, with examples of work by
such prominent artists as Eduardo Kac and Marc Quinn. Bio art is a
new art form that has emerged from the cultural impact and
increasing accessibility of contemporary biotechnology. Signs of
Life is the first book to focus exclusively on art that uses
biotechnology as its medium, defining and discussing the
theoretical and historical implications of bio art and offering
examples of work by prominent artists. Bio art manipulates the
processes of life; in its most radical form, it invents or
transforms living organisms. It is not representational; bio art is
in vivo. (A celebrated example is Eduardo Kac's own GFP Bunny,
centered on "Alba," the transgenic fluorescent green rabbit.) The
creations of bio art become a part of evolution and, provided they
are capable of reproduction, can last as long as life exists on
earth. Thus, bio art raises unprecedented questions about the
future of life, evolution, society, and art. The contributors to
Signs of Life articulate the critical theory of bio art and
document its fundamental works. The writers-who include such
prominent scholars as Barbara Stafford, Eugene Thacker, and Dorothy
Nelkin-consider the culture and aesthetics of biotechnology, the
ethical and philosophical aspects of bio art, and biology in art
history. The section devoted to artworks and artists includes
George Gessert's Why I Breed Plants, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr's
Semi-Living Art, Marc Quinn's Genomic Portrait, and Heather Ackroyd
and Dan Harvey's Chlorophyll.
Scholars from science, art, and humanities explore the meaning of
our new image worlds and offer new strategies for visual analysis.
We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook,
and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games
and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts
to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's
information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image
represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of
changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers
systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image
worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the
21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with
researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to
achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the
image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new
critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to
the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neuroscience
to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in
the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of
visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and
visual analysis.
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