Category: Rethinking Science

Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro

Re-Thinking Science, by Alan N. Shapiro Influenced by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s core Critical Theory text Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s epic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, I believe that we have come to the end of the…

February 11, 2013
From the Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Giardino Cablato (Cabled Garden) by Pietro Mussini (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Gianna Maria Gatti: (translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro) The digital images of flowers, fields, and gardens created by Pietro Mussini at the computer do not constitute the work in itself, but rather a moment of passage, useful for re-elaborating nature according to different solutions, studying forms and expressive combinations of nature’s sounds…

June 18, 2011
Eduardo Kac: Living Works, by Claudio Cravero

Eduardo Kac LIVING WORKS June 10th – September 25th, 2011 The first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the controversial figure of Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962; he lives in Chicago). His research explores the frontiers between man, animal and robot, culminating in Transgenic Art, through which living beings become a single entity with the technological.…

June 3, 2011
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Interactive Plant Growing and Trans Plant by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Gianna Maria Gatti: (translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro) An interest in botany forms the basis of the training of Christa Sommerer: she dedicated herself to this after her secondary studies, enrolling in the Faculty of Biology and Botany of Vienna. Her intention was to investigate nature by applying and elaborating methods suitable…

October 4, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Nerve Garden by Bruce Damer (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Gianna Maria Gatti: (translated from the Italian by Alan N. Shapiro) (this chapter of The Techological Herbarium was substantially rewritten for the English edition by Alan N. Shapiro, with the approval of Gianna Maria Gatti) All images © Copyright Bruce Damer, embedded here with the permission of the artist. Nerve Garden is a three-dimensional virtual world…

October 4, 2010
Interview with AVINUS Press about The Technological Herbarium

AVINUS Press (Anabelle Assaf): Worum geht es im Technologischen Herbarium? (Kunst? Technologie? Natur? Informatik?) Welche Art von Kunstwerken hat die Autorin gewählt, und was macht diese so besonders? What is The Technological Herbarium about? (art? technology? nature? computer science?) What kind of artworks did the author choose, and what makes them so special? Alan N.…

September 8, 2010
The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti

Gianna Maria Gatti’s book The Technological Herbarium (subtitled: “Vegetable Nature and New Technologies in Art Between the Second and Third Millennia”) is a study of “interdisciplinary” works of art that exemplify the increasing importance of science and technology in artistic creation. Her analysis, however, goes beyond that of a journalistic or curatorial survey of artworks.…

July 29, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Teleporting an Unknown State, by Eduardo Kac (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Telepresenza, bio arte, arte transgenica: questi saranno i temi al centro del racconto di Eduardo Kac, l’artista che a partire dagli anni ‘80 è stato il pioniere delle nuove declinazioni artistiche del biologico ed è riconosciuto internazionalmente come fondatore della Transgenic Art. PAV – Via G. Bruno 31, 10134 Torino – T/F 011 3182235 –…

June 6, 2010
Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

A discussion that followed the publication of “A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software” at choreograph.net: 1. It would be useful to read Alan Sokal’s “Beyond The Hoax. Science, Philosophy and Culture”, OUP 2008. Also Alan Sokal’s and Jean Bricmont’s “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science”, Picador 1999. by Edgar at 4 August,…

April 15, 2010
Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

At the Experimental Art Foundation of Adelaide, Australia, there took place in 2004 the exhibition “Art of the Biotech Era” organized by Melentie Pandilovski. It involved the principal exponents of the artistic sphere connected to biology, genetics and bio-technologies, showing their projects and realizations.

April 15, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Osmose by Char Davies (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

To enter inside a tree and exit it through the leaves after having participated in its process of chlorophyllous photosynthesis: this is one of the many journeys that Char Davies makes the user of Osmose experience in an immersive, interactive, and multisensorial virtual reality environment that was developed and produced in 1995.

April 15, 2010
Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its ‘interiority’. A fascinating interpretation that, deriving from an unusual vision of the artwork, instills in it a deeper and certainly original value. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed around the time of the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann.

April 15, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Telegarden by Ken Goldberg (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Telegarden is a telerobotic installation that enables users of the World Wide Web to see and cultivate a real garden. Conceived in 1994, it was activated in June 1995 at the University of Southern California and presented, over the course of the summer, at the leading international exhibitions of digital art and technology.

April 15, 2010
Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.

April 15, 2010
Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Man places between himself and nature those signs useful to denote and represent it, sanctioning the beginning of the autonomous differentiation of the phenomenal world. In the Upper Paleolithic, the figurations of wild animals drawn on the walls of caves, between magic and the practice of the satisfaction of vital needs and control over nature.

April 15, 2010