25th May 2007
Abstract
Bio-Arte: o Encontro da Datatech com a Biotech
As society becomes aware of biotechnology, with all its hopes and fears, artists have started to include references to biotechnology in their works. Furthermore, modern biology and biotechnology offer the opportunity to create art using biology as new media. My work has been focused on the possibilities that modern biology offers to artists. I have been trying not only to portrait the recent advances of biological sciences, but to incorporate biological material as new art media: DNA, proteins and cells offer an opportunity to explore novel ways of representation and communication.
Due to the extent of areas in modern Biology and due to the unimaginable number of biological techniques in use throughout the world I can only show a small example of one or two bio-techniques that I’m using. Therefore I will perform a protocol from the laboratory where I’m developing my most recent project Decon. This is a regular Microbiology Laboratory, and the technique will show how the use of a specific strand of a common bacteria, called Pseudomonas Putida, can degrade and make disappear very quickly the textile colourings used in industry nowadays.