whilst I was browsing through past winners of the lumen prize I came across this work that really spoke to me..
The Rapoport Award for Women in Art & Tech
Resurrecting the Sublime, 2019Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Dr Christina Agapakis/Ginkgo Bioworks & Sissel Tolaas
'Could we ever again smell flowers driven to extinction by humans? Resurrecting the Sublime is an ongoing collaboration between artist Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, a team at biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks led by Creative Director Dr. Christina Agapakis, and smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas, with the support of IFF Inc.
The work allows us a glimpse of two flowers, both lost due to colonial activity. At the Cité du Design in Saint-Étienne in March 2019, our largest installation so far, we displayed two vitrines. One vitrine was filled with the smell of the Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock (Maui hau kuahiwi in Hawaiian), once indigenous to ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakalā, Maui, Hawaii, before its forest habitat was decimated by colonial cattle ranching; the final tree was found dying in 1912. The other vitrine contained the Orbexilum stipulatum, or Falls-of-the-Ohio Scurfpea, last seen in 1881 on Rock Island in the Ohio River, Kentucky, before U.S. Dam No. 41 erased the island in the 1920s.
Using DNA extracted from flower specimens from Harvard University’s Herbaria, the Ginkgo team used synthetic biology to predict and then resynthesize gene sequences that encode for fragrance-producing enzymes. Using Ginkgo’s findings, Tolaas reconstructed the flowers’ smells, using identical or comparative smell molecules. We know which smell molecules the flowers may have produced, but the amounts are also lost. In Ginsberg’s installation design, fragments of each flower’s smell mix: there is no “exact” smell. The lost landscape is reduced to its geology and the flower’s smell: entering the vitrine, the human connects the two and contrary to the natural history museum, becomes the specimen on view.
Resurrecting the smell of extinct flowers so that humans may again experience something we destroyed is awesome and perhaps terrifying; it evokes the “sublime”. But this is not de-extinction. Instead, biotechnology, smell, and digitally reconstructed landscapes reveal the complex interplay of species and places that no longer exist. Resurrecting the Sublime asks us to contemplate our actions, and potentially change them for the future.'
the video on the site gave an insight to the work, I transcribed here some things I found inspiring.. (the style of the video was inspiring too.. and the work speaks to me in the desire to 'resurrect the sublime' and using 'technology' and the idea of the 'technological sublime'...
'we can use technology to reach back into the past, giving us a glimpse of each flower, but we will never know their exact smell. Science can tell us which molecules they made, but the amount of each, is also, lost.'
[on artist/artwork] 'These draw on the idea of the sublime, the sensation of the unknowable, and exposure to nature's immensity that makes us consider our position within it. Using genetic engineering so we can once again experience a nature that we had destroyed, it's both romantic, and perhaps, terrifying. It is, sublime. Artists try to express this state in 19th-century landscape paintings. But like these images, even the most advanced technology can only give an incomplete representation.'
'In a natural history museum, nature's contingency is trapped in time, the clock of creation and destruction stopped for us to look at. In the installations each landscape is similarly reduced to its geology and the flower's smell. The human connects the two and by stepping into this abstract nature, they become the specimen on view. The smells are diffused in fragments, and mixed in each installation, so every inhalation is slightly different. We can never fully experience the flower in the present, without its past context.'
'This is not de-extinction, but a technological sublime, allowing us a glimpse of a lost flower blooming on a hill, on a wild riverbank, or on a volcanic slope. The interplay of a species and a place that no longer exists. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says, the sublime is not so much what we're going back to, as where we're coming from.'
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other inspiring works from 2019..
Gold Award
Melting Memories
Refik Anadol
Efsun Erkilic, Raman Mustafa, Kian Khiaban, Ho Man Leung, Nicholas Boss, Toby Heinemann, Kerim Karaoglu, Kyle McLean, Steffan Klaue, UCSF / Neuroscape Lab Members, Adam Gazzaley
“Melting Memories” is a series of digital artworks that explore the materiality of remembering by offering new insights into the representational possibilities emerging from the intersection of advanced technology and contemporary art. Comprised of data paintings, augmented data sculptures, and light projections, the project as a whole debuts new advances in technology that enable visitors to experience aesthetic interpretations of EEG data collected on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control.
Light is the major element in the experiment, used to blur and interconnect the boundaries between the two realms actual/fictional and physical/virtual. It signifies the threshold between the simulacrum space created by the projection technology, and the physical space where the viewer stands. Through the presented framework, the experiments intends to question the relativity of perception and how it informs the apprehension of our surroundings. Rather than approaching the medium as a means of escape into some disembodied techno-utopian fantasy, the project sees itself as a means of return, i.e. facilitating a temporary release from our habitual perceptions and culturally biased assumptions about being in the world, to enable us, however momentarily, to perceive ourselves and the world around us freshly.
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Moving Image Award
Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds
Cassie McQuater
Original music by Kelly Moran.
“Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds” is a nonlinear fairy tale taking the form of an interactive video game installation, and begins as a re-imagining of the surrealist story “The Debutante” by artist Leonora Carrington, in which a young woman exchanges places with a hyena, masked in a suit of human skin, for her societal debut. Extravagant dresses made of anatomical parts, glass, and pink light swirl in pastoral landscapes populated by undulating fluorescent flowers, strange monsters and deconstructed birds, who paint the sky. As part of an on-going series exploring the mythological idea of women’s bodies as dangerous and poisonous gardens, “Love Birds,” leans on an idea set forth in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” in which a young woman develops an inexplicable immunity to the poisonous plants which her father, a medical researcher, cultivates in medieval Padua. Eventually, she, herself, mimicking the property of the plants, becomes poisonous to others. In modern pop culture, this narrative is reflected heavily in the character of Batman’s Poison Ivy. Taking the form of an interactive video game as well as a multi-channel video installation, “Love Birds,” explores this trope through nonlinear game play, subversive use of and exploding of digital 3D models, and code, while examining the various myths, stories and legends of gardens which double as terrifyingly beautiful prisons for their inhabitants.
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as I was searching through a-n and artquest etc. for some funding proposal advice (as I was writing for that scholarship for international students for MA) I came across some exciting opportunities that are examples of what I might be interested in in the future. The timing for everything right now is just a bit awkward to be thinking about applying to anything major with the reality of settling here in the UK for MA... visas to apply for, English tests to take.. etc. but anyway, I just dropped some links here..
https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/a-qa-with-emergence-bursary-recipient-lauren-saunders/
https://disabilityarts.online/jobs/drawn-poorly-zine-submissions-nature/
https://corridor8.co.uk/opportunities/call-for-proposals-thinking-through-extinction-writing-residency/
https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2020/03/open-call-for-proposals-echigo-tsumari-art-triennale-2021/
https://www.artquest.org.uk/opportunities/
https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/a-qa-with-emergence-bursary-recipient-lauren-saunders/
https://disabilityarts.online/jobs/drawn-poorly-zine-submissions-nature/
https://corridor8.co.uk/opportunities/call-for-proposals-thinking-through-extinction-writing-residency/
https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2020/03/open-call-for-proposals-echigo-tsumari-art-triennale-2021/
https://www.artquest.org.uk/opportunities/