Corpus
to
New Media Gallery 777 Columbia Street (3rd flr, Anvil Centre), New Westminster, British Columbia V3M 1B6
Corpus opens on January 25 at New Media Gallery with an enigmatic presentation of works that question our understandings of the human body, the processes and the boundaries. Seven artists from Canada/Mexico, US/Brazil, UK, Germany, Israel and Belgium explore ideas connected with becoming more or less human in a world increasingly transformed by new technologies.
Featured Artists are: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Canada), Catherine Richards (Canada), Eduardo Kac (USA), Agi Haines (UK), Revital Cohen (Israel) + Tuur Van Balen (Belgium), Verena Friedrich (Germany)
The works are poetic, disturbing, playful and profound. Like us they breathe, shuffle, beat and hum. Some are very small; a petunia seed that has been infused with the genetic DNA of its creator Eduardo Kac; or the human-scale neural network by Agatha Haines that wanders around the floor, bumping and learning as it goes. There is the profundity of a single human breath reprised 10,000 times a day, collected from a Cuban singer by multi-talented Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer; or the glass heart that excites, phosphoresces and beats by another multi-talented, award-winning Canadian artist, Catherine Richards. There are the 5 suspended hairs under tension that intone and hum by way of a Transducer, from German artist Verena Friedrich, or the transformed human body that produces dependable electricity for everyday tasks by Revital Cohen + Tuur Van Balen.
These seven are extraordinary, innovative practitioners ; exploring the boundaries of the human body and then questioning those very boundaries + ethics. Each conducts research with scientists, engineers, researchers and specialists in biogenetics. These emergent, art-science- technology interactions have been described as biogenetic, transgenic, biotech, bioart. They point toward future creative practices