Populations of insect pollinators such as bees, butterflies and moths and the plants on which they depend, are declining at alarming rates due to deleterious human activity. These symbiotic relationships must be protected. Through interdisciplinary collaboration with entomologists, botanists, microscopists, surface pattern technologists and print and coating engineers, artist Karen Ingham is creating a prototype range of clothing that will, through public engagement with art and science, raise greater awareness of these important issues.

The Pollinator Frocks Project is a limited edition collection of clothing based on scanning electron microscopy images of plant pollen grains linked to endangered pollinators. These digitally enhanced images form the basis for a range of striking and unusual printed fabrics, which act as ‘wearable gardens’. The fabrics will be treated with pollinator food sources that replicate nectar, which will be specially coated onto the fabric prior to cut and assemble as ‘pollinator frocks’ (loose fitting unisex clothing). Continue reading

Certified Copy :: November 20, 2010 – April 10, 2011 :: Opening: November 20; 6:00 pm :: Verbeke Foundation, Westakker, B-9190 Kemzeke (Stekene), Belgium.

1989. The American Fluxus artist Larry Miller distributes certificates to allow anyone to decide on the use, or not, of their DNA. The action, which relates the art scene to contemporary biotechnological problems, would precede the birth of Dolly, the first cloned mammal in the world, by a decade.

In a world where numerous multinationals multiply data banks destined to the patented reproduction of genetic information, the Verbeke Foundation organises an exhibition on the notions of copying and cloning. Certified Copy unites the works of over twenty international contemporary artists who are concerned in the question of the reproduction of living and lifeless materials. Continue reading

Form Follows Evolution, Function, or Fashion? — A Seminar Exploring Collaborations Between Synthetic Biology, Art & Design :: November 5, 2010; 4:00 – 7:00 pm :: MIT Media Lab (E14‐633), Cambridge, MA.

How would you design nature? What does it mean to design with nature? How should we design with nature?

Synthetic Biology is a new approach to engineering biology. By applying engineering principles to the complexity of living systems, scientists and engineers are making biology a new material for design. Synthetic Aesthetics is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project exploring what this kind of design means, looks like, and intimates. Continue reading

Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

[…] “Take, for instance, Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented City. Matsuda (whose previous video, Domestic Robocop, we noted at beginning of the year) produced the short for his Masters Thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Continue reading

mez breeze wrote: In 2008, several articles here at Augmentology examined the concepts of Synthetic Presencing and Synthapticism. Both concepts are part of a theoretical framework that attempts to explain developing cultural > augmentological patterns. Presencing embodies a rethink of conventional entertainment modes:

Fiction and non-fiction classifications are designed to map to boundaries of known forms [think: cinema, literature, television and music]. They are so designed to provoke audience responses introspectively and externally. Current synthetic practices are refashioning this entertainment base via the perpetuation of types of unintentional and deliberately augmented recreation. These recreation types are reliant on immediacy of response, play, and Pranksterism. Continue reading

[Image: Bleu Remix by Yann Marussich] [Plastik Art & Science] — In Vivo: L’artiste en l’œuvre ? (The Artist on Display?) :: Call for Contributions — Deadline: September 15, 2010.

Art that is created out of the living world (bio-art, body-art, environmental art…) is today commonly directed by a desire that one could define using the prefix: “trans-“. One is of course immediately reminded of the transgenic, and Eduardo KAC’s research, for example, on the genetic marker Lucifrase which he transmits to mice, or his creation, Edunia, a petunia carrying fragments of his own DNA. One is also reminded of transmutation, and the doll’s clothes made out of animal skin cultures by the SymbioticA group. Or of transgression in relation to contemporary ethics, which could apply to the two preceding examples, but also to more performative experiments, such as Blue by Yann Marussich, a performance in which, installed in an airtight box, he sweats blue methylene from every pore of his skin, when the substance is declared dangerous if ingested even by the manufacturer. Continue reading

A team of scientists is working to grow limestone foundations under the city of Venice.

11th Consciousness International Reframed Conference 2010: Making Reality Really Real :: November 4-6, 2010 :: TEKS, PB 2227, 7412 Trondheim, Norway :: Call for Abstracts (no more than 500 words) — Deadline: May 9, 2010.

Making Reality Really Real: The status of our reality is uncertain. We know that the material world experienced through our senses is a representation of quantum phenomena that can be observed at another level of resolution. But are sub-atomic particles in turn representations of something beyond, something that approaches the really Real? Continue reading

The Australian Centre of Virtual Art (ACVA) is pleased to announce the launch of ACVA Lab 2010.ACVA Lab is a forward thinking initiative to promote the pioneering work of Australian artists and technologists using virtual world platforms. ACVA Lab advances the development of artistic networks, prototypes and exchange with its central question: “What could a virtual art lab be if it was imagined by artists for artists?”

ACVA was established in 2007 to help promote the work of selected artists working in digital, hybrid and virtual mediums. ACVA’s first exhibition, Babelswarm, won the Australia Council’s inaugural Second Life Artists in Residence award. Continue reading

Part 2. Mez Breeze wrote:

e) Information Deformation: akin to process centering, this Social Tesseraction involves a shift in the very definition of information:

Information may be defined as the characteristics of the output of a process, these being informative about the process and the input. This discipline independent definition may be applied to all domains, from physics to epistemology.”

These deformed systems of data are constantly in flux and available for perpetual revision. Examples include:

• cloud-based applications
• constantly transliterated google waves.

Users are able to simultaneously modify, update and adapt their input in real time: Continue reading