[ISEA2011] Panel: Trish Adams – Shiv­er­ing Bound­aries

Panel Statement

Panel: Testing New Ground: An Interdisciplinary Discussion on Hybrid Habitats

My re­search ex­plores the na­ture of cor­po­re­al­ity in the bio­med­ical sci­ences and queries the sta­tus of our “hu­man­ness” at the be­gin­ning of the twenty-first cen­tury. In this panel I will pre­sent the in­ter­sec­tions be­tween art and bio-med­ical prac­tices that are il­lus­trated through my re­search. I will give an overview of the ground­break­ing bio­med­ical ex­per­i­ments I car­ried out to ‘change the fates’ of adult stem cells from my blood into beat­ing car­diac cells ‘in vitro’ and link this cor­po­real mal­leabil­ity with my on-go­ing ex­plo­rations. My re­cent in­ves­ti­ga­tions into the small brains of the Eu­ro­pean honey bee and their com­mu­nal ‘hive con­scious­ness’ will also be ad­dressed through the vir­tual and real-time in­ter­ac­tive art­works that have re­sulted from this re­search. I will demon­strate how my over­all em­pha­sis on hy­bri­dis­ing vir­tual and real-time ex­pe­ri­ences cre­ate al­ter­na­tive habi­tats that place the viewer in the role of a par­tic­i­pant who can ex­am­ine the ‘shiv­er­ing bound­aries’ be­tween mind-body-self at first hand.

  • Patricia Adams is cur­rently a Post­doc­toral Re­search Fel­low, RMIT Uni­ver­sity School of Art, Mel­bourne and a vis­it­ing artist at the Vi­sual & Sen­sory Neu­ro­science Group, Queens­land Brain In­sti­tute, The Uni­ver­sity of Queens­land. She has worked at the art/sci­ence nexus for over ten years and her doc­toral re­search pro­ject in­volved a cross-dis­ci­pli­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion with a bio­med­ical sci­en­tist dur­ing which she ex­plored the im­pact of ex­per­i­men­tal tech­niques in bio­med­ical en­gi­neer­ing on ex­pres­sions of cor­po­re­al­ity. In ad­di­tion to her art­works Trish has pre­sented her re­search out­comes through pub­li­ca­tions and at con­fer­ences such as: New Con­stel­la­tions: Art, Sci­ence & So­ci­ety, Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Syd­ney, 2006; Perth Dig­i­tal Art & Cul­ture Con­fer­ence, 2007; ISEA2008 Singapore,  Eye of the Storm, Tate Britain, 2009 and ISEA2011.

Full text (PDF) p. 23-25