Panel Statement
Panel: BioARTCAMP: Laboratory Ecologies in the Wild West
Chair person: Jennifer Willet Presenters: Marie Pier Boucher, Paul Vanouse & Tagny Duff
Dr. Jennifer Willet Presents BioARTCAMP research at ISEA in Istanbul. Dr. Jennifer Willet will travel to Turkey present her BioARTCAMP project to The International Symposium on Electronic Art . On a panel co-chaired with Marie Pier Boucher (Duke University), Paul Vanouse (UBuffalo) and Tagny Duff (Concordia University), Willet will report their experiences while camping and building a portable bioART Laboratory in Banff National Park in July 2011. BioARTCAMP is a large collaborative art/science project hosted in July 2011 by Jennifer Willet from INCUBATOR: Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science and Ecology at The University of Windsor and The Banff Centre for the Arts, in Canada. With BioARTCAMP a variety of artists, scientists and students will build a portable bioart lab in Banff National Park, Canada. At this site they will conduct a variety of bioart protocols, and host an open house ‘art/science fair’ for the general public. In this presentation Willet will chart the practical and theoretical underpinnings of the BioARTCAMP project with emphasis on ecological metaphors for describing biotechnology, and a desire to complicate the ‘Great Divide’ between lab and field based research methodologies in the hard sciences. She will also take this opportunity to address the inevitable complication of her own theoretical presuppositions about BioARTCAMP – with the unruly happenstance of what actually occurred when she brought a variety of artists, and scientists, and specimens, and lab equipment together under a big tent in the Canadian Rocky Mountains! BioARTCAMP was directed by Willet as a co-production between INCUBATOR lab and The Banff Centre, and sponsored by The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Ontario Arts Council, University of Windsor, Hosteling International, the Glenbow Museum, and The Art and Genomics Centre, at The University of Leiden, and Fonds BKVB.
- Jennifer Willet is an internationally successful artist in the emerging field of bioart. From 2000-2007 Willet and Shawn Bailey collaborated on an project called BIOTEKNICA. She taught in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University from 2000-2007, and completed her PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at the same institution. She now works as an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at The University of Windsor in Canada. In 2009 she opened a bioart research and teaching lab called INCUBATOR: Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Ecology at the UofW. jenniferwillet.com