art and biomed

It’s been an interesting week for ‘Heirloom‘ – the artwork we’re currently exhibiting that grows cell portraits of the artist’s daughters in bioreactor tanks, and then preserves them for display. The cells have grown so successfully that last week the tubes became blocked, causing increased pressure and a leak. Then on Monday we discovered a […]

We’ve been delighted by the response to our call for collaborators on Mind the Gut, thanks to all who applied! Please excuse us if we haven’t acknowledged receipt of your application yet, we’ll be in touch in the next few days, and if you’ve let us know about technical issues preventing you meeting the deadline we will […]

On Thursday 22nd October at 12.30, artist Gina Czarnecki will present an informal lunch seminar at Medical Museion. All are welcome, but please register with Louise Whiteley (lowh@sund.ku.dk). Medical Museion’s new exhibition The Body Collected explores the collection and preservation of the human body for medical research. Specimens from the museum’s historical collections are on display alongside materials […]

On May 28th 2014, artist-scientist François-Joseph Lapointe set out with a team of assistants to conduct a unique performance/experiment. He shook hands with over 1000 people at the University of Copenhagen’s Panum Institute. Every 50 handshakes, the microbes on his palm were sampled, and the data is being processed to reveal how his hand microbiome […]

Visions of mimicking, synthesising, or designing life forms have an ancient pedigree, bouncing back and forth between the occult, the philosophical, and the scientific. Artists working with the tools of science and technology have also played a key role in shaping and interrogating imaginations of creation – and in revealing the way that tools shape the […]

On April 5th, I will take part in an exciting one-day seminar at Sorø Kunstmuseum. The occasion for the seminar is the third exhibition in a three-part series on materiality curated by Birgitte Kirkhoff Eriksen. The series is intellectually spurred by new materialism in philosophy, such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and features artworks […]

After a hectic few days preparation – from surveying artists who’ve worked at Medical Museion to cutting out 150 playing card sized images of art-science collaborations – I’m very much looking forward to the kick-off of The Future of Art Science Collaborations workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden tomorrow. You can read a workshop […]

How do you create a larger-than-life dress out of pills? This short film shows artist Susie Freeman of Pharmacopoeia doing just that. Knitting on her old industrial machine, comparing pill fabrics, and putting them on the dress base. Together with Dr. Liz Lee she has weaved a dress made of ten years of prescription pills […]

However outré, none of the brands at this month’s fashion fair have what we will have soon: A dress made entirely out of pills woven into fine, black fabric. Spectacular and (thought) provoking, the art work tries to visualize the cluster of metabolic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular conditions (often referred to as ‘metabolic […]

The Waag Society, Amsterdam, Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, and University of Amsterdam, have released a call for applications for a 10 month project exploring the use of Bio-Art as a science communication strategy, potentially leading to a PhD project. The relation between art-science and strategies for public engagement raises some fascinating and underexplored questions about how […]