Panel Statement

Chair Per­son: Nell Ten­haaf & Mónica Bello Bugallo
Pre­sen­ters: Sally Jane Nor­man, Paul Vanouse, Sonia Cil­lari & Jose-Car­los Mari­ategui

For this panel, we will an­a­lyze new dis­courses and modes in art and ar­ti­fi­cial life re­search. This will be placed in re­la­tion to re­cent out­comes of the com­pu­ta­tional sci­ences to­gether with the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ments and dis­courses of the life sci­ences. The focus will be specif­i­cally on: cre­ative modes en­gaged with dy­namic liv­ing processes that have been af­fected by sim­u­la­tion, ex­plo­rations in syn­thetic life sys­tems, en­vi­ron­men­tal vi­su­al­iza­tions, hy­brid spaces, aug­mented and mixed re­al­ity land­scapes and prospec­tive meth­ods and de­vices.

• Nell Ten­haaf is an elec­tronic media artist and writer. She has ex­hib­ited across Canada, the US and in Eu­rope. A sur­vey ex­hi­bi­tion of fif­teen years of her work en­ti­tled Fit/Unfit opened in April 2003 at the Robert McLaugh­lin Gallery in Os­hawa and then trav­eled to four other venues. Ten­haaf’s works cre­ated be­tween 1989 and the mid-1990s were aimed at de­con­struct­ing the dom­i­nance in main­stream bi­o­log­i­cal and biotech­nol­ogy dis­course of DNA as the mas­ter mol­e­cule. The dis­courses them­selves have evolved since then. Later works at­tempt to rep­re­sent some of the com­plex dy­nam­ics of life and in­volve the viewer as one el­e­ment in a con­tin­u­ous flux, for ex­am­ple in Push/Pull (2009), Flo’nGlo (2005), Swell (2003) and the touch-ac­ti­vated video in­stal­la­tion UCBM (You Could Be Me, 1999). Ten­haaf has re­cently been col­lab­o­rat­ing with sound artist John Kamevaar and com­puter sci­ence re­searcher Melanie Baljko. Ten­haaf has pub­lished nu­mer­ous re­views and ar­ti­cles that ad­dress the cul­tural im­pli­ca­tions of biotech­nolo­gies and ar­ti­fi­cial life. She has been a jury mem­ber for the Vida/Life art and ar­ti­fi­cial life com­pe­ti­tion based in Madrid since its in­cep­tion. Ten­haaf is an As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor in the Vi­sual Arts de­part­ment of York Uni­ver­sity in Toronto, Canada and is rep­re­sented by Paul Petro Con­tem­po­rary Art.
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• Mon­ica Bello Bugallo is a cu­ra­tor with a spe­cial in­ter­est in the area of art and sci­ence. She is cur­rently artis­tic di­rec­tor of VIDA, the art and ar­ti­fi­cial life in­ter­na­tional awards founded in 1999 by Fun­da­cion Tele­fon­ica, Madrid, Spain, hav­ing been a board mem­ber since 2006. She has cu­rated sev­eral ex­hi­bi­tions, sem­i­nars and work­shops on art, sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy in so­ci­ety. In 2005 she co-founded  Cap­sula, a plat­form for re­search into, and pro­duc­tion of, cul­tural events in­volv­ing art, sci­ence and na­ture. From 2005 to 2007 she cu­rated Res-qualia, a web pro­ject pro­mot­ing re­search in art-sci­ence and evo­lu­tion of con­scious­ness. From 2007 to 2008 she col­lab­o­rated with the Dig­i­tal Re­search Unit (DRU) of Hud­der­s­field Uni­ver­sity to cu­rate the Bio­rama event, or­ga­niz­ing field­work ex­plo­rations and de­bate plat­forms on dig­i­tal cul­ture and nat­ural phe­nom­ena. Be­tween 2008 and 2010, she held the po­si­tion of head of ed­u­ca­tional pro­grams of LAB­o­ral Cen­tro de Arte y Crea­cion In­dus­trial in Gijon, Spain, in which she lead ex­per­i­men­tal pro­grams in dig­i­tal media and ed­u­ca­tion, re­search on new for­mats which fa­cil­i­tate artis­tic pro­duc­tion, as well as pro­moted the col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween art and acad­e­mia with the ini­ti­a­tion of the post­grad­u­ate stud­ies In­no­va­tion in Cul­ture: Art, Dig­i­tal Media and Pop­u­lar Cul­ture with the Uni­ver­si­tat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She par­tic­i­pates in dif­fer­ent ad­vi­sory boards and she has pub­lished ar­ti­cles on art, sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and new ed­u­ca­tion modes on arts. In the aca­d­e­mic area, she has lec­tured in Art and Tech­nol­ogy sem­i­nars and has given talks on the merg­ing of art and life sci­ences na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally.