Hylozoic Ground Collaboration
BioART: Collaborating with Life, Karsh-Masson Gallery
Ottawa, Ontario, CAN 2015
PBAI presented a breathing pore and protocell from the Hylozoic Ground Collaboration as part of BioART: Collaborating with Life. Featuring seven Ontario artists, whose artistic practice embrace biological techniques found in laboratories, nature, urban centers, microbes, plants and bodies, BioArt prompts viewers to evaluate bioethical outcomes resulting from the manipulation of life for human and cultural ends.
PBAI’s exhibit includes embedded machine intelligence that allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions as fronds reach for viewers in a layer of undulating motions. Housed inside these fronds, a flask containing protocells trigger hybrid metabolic exchanges. ‘Living’ chemical exchanges are conceived as the first stages of self-renewing functions that might take root within these installations.
The exhibit was curated by Jennifer Willet and presented by the Karsh-Masson Gallery in Ottawa, Ontario. BioArt was on view from April 28 to May 31, 2015.