Artworks
Crude Matter, 2012
The Tissue Culture & Art Project:
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
Australia
Installation (local mud, ceramics, synthetic grass, cells over PDMS, micro-channels printed on Pyrex)
The Tissue Culture & Art Project: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (AU). Crude Matter, 2012. Mixed media installation, image courtesy the artists. 2012 Photo by Krzysztof Miekus
Crude Matter is an artistic meditation into the notion of the substrate as the main context for life. Loosely based on the story of the Golem we explore the “alchemical” transformation of materials into substrates that support and act on life. The piece destabilises the engineering logic of the transformation of life into raw material; to question the logic that seems to privilege the information embedded in DNA over the context in which life operates. Crude Matter is touching upon the creation of life from crude matter and human knowledge; when human hubris and life should not mixed.
The Tissue Culture & Art Project is hosted in SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia.
Credits: Laboratory center of the University of Maribor and KZ Rače
Biography
Oron Catts (b. 1967, Helsinki, Finland) is director of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. Catts is an artist, researcher and a curator at the forefront of the emerging field of biological arts. He was a Research Fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, and has worked with numerous other bio-medical laboratories around the world. In 1996, he founded (together with Ionat Zurr) the TC&A Project to explore the use of tissue technologies as an art medium. In 2000, he co-founded SymbioticA; an artistic research laboratory within a biological science department. SymbioticA become a Centre of Excellence in 2008 and has a thriving residency, academic and workshops programme. His work has been exhibited and presented internationally.
Ionat Zurr (b. 1970, London, UK) is an artist, researcher and a curator as well as the Academic Coordinator of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, the University of Western Australia. Ionat is considered a pioneer in the field of biological arts and her work has been exhibited internationally. Ionat has been a fellow in the InStem Institute, NCBS, Bangalore (2010) and a visiting scholar at The Experimental Art Centre, Stanford University (2007) and The Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (2000–2001). She has exhibited in places such as the MoMA NY, Mori Museum Tokyo, Ars Electronica, Linz, GOMA Brisbane and more.
