[NEWS #Alert] Heather Dewey-Hagborg mixes biotechnology and art! – #Loganspace AI

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[NEWS #Alert] Heather Dewey-Hagborg mixes biotechnology and art! – #Loganspace AI


THE VIALS are minute and crooked, reminiscent of worms or caterpillars; interior them, a liquid glows crimson. It is some distance a “lentivirus vector, hybridised with vesicular stomatitis and a plasmid containing genes for crimson fluorescent protein and oxytocin expression”—in diversified phrases, a love potion. In belief, while you happen to had been to smash start a vial and drink it, it’s doubtless you’ll presumably be contaminated with an epidemic that can boost your physique’s manufacturing of oxytocin, a hormone which plays a job in sexual arousal, recognition, have faith and bonding. But as the elixir is now no longer stable for human consumption it stays at the help of glass in a groovy, darkish room within the Fridman Gallery in downtown Fresh York, where it’s some distance segment of a uncover known as “On the Temperature of My Body”.

The half, “Lovesick”, is no longer any doubt one of Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s fresh experiments in merging science and art work. It change into as soon as made in collaboration with researchers at Integral Molecular, a biotechnology firm which specialises in antibody discovery. After the divisiveness of the Brexit vote and the American presidential election Ms Dewey-Hagborg started to imagine that it’s doubtless you’ll also imagine antidotes to the “alienation and hate of the uncover”; “the work is envisioned as an activist intervention,” shewrites on her site. Next to the vials are photographic prints of the virus at work on kidney cells and T cells moreover to a video installation. Tender singing fills the gallery: it’s some distance the sound of Ms Dewey-Hagborg and her companion singing “CYIQNCPL”, letters which denote oxytocin’s proteins.

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Ms Dewey-Hagborg has long been in biotech. Made between 2012 and 2014, her “Stranger Visions” project alive to collecting strangers’ genetic cloth from public areas—on chewing gum and cigarette butts, or strands of hair—analysing it, after which rising portrait sculptures of them. An exploration into the emerging tactics of natural surveillance and forensic DNA phenotyping, the series proved prophetic. Legislation-enforcement companies now in most cases construct exhaust DNA from crime scenes to construct mugshots.

But Ms Dewey-Hagborg is now no longer didactic, exhibiting the obvious, queer and beautiful chances of newest applied sciences moreover to their dangers. When Chelsea Manning change into as soon as in penal complex, she and Ms Dewey-Hagborg corresponded. Ms Manning despatched clippings of her hair and swabs from her cheek which had been processed as genomic knowledge and analysed by an algorithm. That produced 30 that it’s doubtless you’ll also imagine likenesses of Ms Manning, whose image change into as soon as repressed at the time, which Ms Dewey-Hagborg change into into 3D portraits. “Doubtlessly Chelsea” change into as soon as hopeful about abilities, demonstrating the blueprint it will also illuminate things deliberately hid by the insist.

The work in “On the Temperature of My Body” largely explores intimacy—the blueprint it’s some distance changing, or would possibly per chance exchange, with the advancement of science. In a video half, “T3511”, Ms Dewey-Hagborg plays a biohacker who becomes extra and further alive to about an unknown person, primarily based entirely on knowledge gleaned from a saliva sample bought online. (The video change into as soon as inspired partly by her association with Ms Manning, and the irregular familiarity of working with someone’s genetic cloth.) It is an expression of yearning, projected onto a individual that has no acknowledged bodily manufacture nevertheless exists in a series of doubtlessly knowable characteristics.

Ms Dewey-Hagborg says that “T3511” change into as soon as a arrangement of alive to on the complexities of recount-to-person genetic-checking out products and services corresponding to 23andme and ancestry.com. “They’re extra and further a arrangement other folks are connecting to every diversified,” she says. “That will also be a terrific attempting factor. It is some distance going to also be a provoking factor. It’s and not utilizing a doubt provoking that it creates this mighty bigger police database. there’s a immense doubtless right here for insist misuse of DNA.”

“Spirit Molecule”, the final half in her uncover, is a speculative, ongoing genetic-engineering experiment that also deals with anguish and loss. A collaboration with Phillip Andrew Lewis, a botanist, it makes an attempt to mix psychoactive flora with human DNA. The root is that, if it succeeded, it’s doubtless you’ll also employ the DNA of a dreary relative or buddy like a drug, or preserve the plant as a memorial. On the Fridman Gallery, while a video of a person recounting his memories of a beloved one plays, a scientist is working on the project. “I’ve lost two other folks I’m very finish to this 300 and sixty five days,” Ms Dewey-Hagborg says. “I construct mediate that a memorial like that, whether or now no longer the plant would merely develop and be cared for on my private, or consumed…is something I would for my fragment prefer.”

Ms Dewey-Hagborg’s uncover feels urgent precisely since it uses the applied sciences that the art work opinions. She is now no longer standing at a distance from biotechnology; she is engaged with its processes and mechanisms. This presents her work a particular realism, even as it imagines that it’s doubtless you’ll also imagine futures and worlds that obtained’t ever come to pass.

“On the Temperature of My Body” is exhibiting at the Fridman Gallery in Fresh York till August ninth

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