BioArt

Revolution Bioengineering has received an incredibly enthusiastic welcome from the bioart community. But, when we started this campaign, we messed up. We said that this was the first science and art collaborative, but that’s totally not true - it’s just *our* first science and art collaborative.

We want to introduce you to the people who have been doing bioart for decades. These are folks who are interested in exploring biology from a whole new perspective - biology as artistic medium, biology as creative process, and maybe most importantly, biology as forum for questions about nature and how we relate to it, and the type of society we are going to build going into the future.

Here are some of the artists we’ve been honored to meet. Professor Helen Storey is the fashion designer turning our flowers into a living dress to discuss the way nature, technology, and society continue to intersect. Here, she speaks with Faculti film about her recent work, the Dress of Glass and Flame:

We also have interviews with George Gessert, who uses evolution of iris varieties to explore questions of human dominance over nature, and Kerry Lemon, an illustrator enchanted with the intricacies of the natural world. We have a guest post from David Martinez Moreno, a member of the bioart community who focuses on bonsai, incorporating concepts of tradition and age into the bioart movement.

The aesthetics of evolution, documented by George Gessert through iris breeding

David Martinez Moreno looks at nature, culture, and time through bonsai

We’re building a list of laboratories and artists who are making art with biology. These groups use cells, bacterial pigments, fungal filaments, and individual colonies both on their own and in combination with traditional artistic techniques. We will also include projects which may not have used biological materials in the art process but explore the way disciplines like synthetic biology will impact our future. This is an ongoing collection, and we’re new to the bioart world so please share your favorite artists (or your own work!) with us.