BIOTECH + ART: UCIRA
LAST DAY TO REGISTER IS MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2010!
The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts is pleased to announce a new system wide course offered in conjunction with the UCIRA Integrative Methodologies Initiative.
Open to students from throughout the UC system. Students may register by Simultaneous Enrollment for undergraduate credit or via the Intercampus Exchange Program for graduate credit.
Please see www.registrar.ucsb.edu/Intercampus.htm#sim-enroll or contact your home campus registrar for additional information. Students may attend this course online.
Please contact Professor Victoria Vesna for further information: vv@ucla.edu.
Course Description
Seminar, six hours. Bioartists use cells, DNA molecules, proteins, and living tissues to bring to life ethical, social, and aesthetic issues of sciences. Study of how bioart blurs distinctions between science and art through combination of artistic and scientific processes, creating wide public debate. Exploration of history of biotechnology as well as social implications of this science.
Please click here for full course syllabus (PDF-format).
About the UCIRA Integrative Methodologies Initiative
Re-negotiating the art/science paradigm. Artists generate unconventional and imaginative knowledge systems that emerge from aesthetic reflection and risk-taking processes. Their creative energies and skills can be used to catalyze, visualize and recontextualize the work of scientists, encouraging alternative investigative methods and oblique approaches to problem solving. UCIRA will support art/science and artist/scientist collaborative configurations designed to facilitate new, hybrid, and fusion models of exchange, co-creation and research practice. This will take place through targeted partnerships and program funding via UC science centers and focus on the public presentation of collaborative research results. Outreach to a public understanding of science through the arts, and a public understanding of the arts through science, has been a missing link in public education in the U.S. for a very long time. UCIRA will support the investigation of new collaborative models through partnerships including the UCLA Art/Sci Center, a premier hub for the presentation, aggregation and reflection of Art/Science based work. Integral to this particular initiative is the fact that UC faculty appointments in digital and media arts over the past fifteen years have created unparalleled strengths in connecting the arts to science research. UC has created a premier, international program in art and technology with a network of faculty drawn from across the globe that now constitutes the most important center for new media research in the world.