The Provost's Office and the Stanford Humanities Center as part of the Stanford Humanities Research Network are pleased to welcome Bio-artist Oron Catts to the Stanford campus on Wednesday, May 3rd.
Please join us for Oron Catts's lecture "The Performative Aspects of the Semi-Living: The Work of the Tissue Culture & Art Project," on May 3rd, at 7pm in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center. A public reception will follow the lecture. This event is free and open to the public.
Oron Catts is an artist and researcher at the forefront of the emerging field of Bio-art. Ten years ago he co-founded of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, a research laboratory based in the University of Western Australia and devoted to exploring the possibilities of tissue culture manipulation and engineering as a form of artistic inquiry. His work addresses the ethical and social implications of the rapidly-expanding field of genetic engineering and its associated rubrics, including cloning, organ transplants and harvesting. His work provocatively investigates the threshold between the living and the non-living. Among other things, he constructs three-dimensional sculpture and installation composed of live tissue. Past projects include Semi-Living Food, in which the lab "grew" steaks of sheep in a laboratory setting to interrogate the possibility of victim-less meat-eating, the Pig Wings Project, in which the laboratory grew several pairs of wings made from the cells of a pig, and Extra Ear-1/4 Scale, in which Australian performance artist Stelarc's ear was cloned in a smaller replica composed of human skin cells. Oron Catts has been a fellow at the Harvard Medical School and has published and exhibited work internationally. He is also the founder of the Art & Science collaborative lab SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia, the first laboratory of its kind in the world.
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/index.html