Other Biological Futures: Between Living and Nonliving

Ionat Zurr is an artist, Head of the Fine Arts Discipline at University of Western Australia (UWA), and co-founder of the pioneering art/science laboratory SymbioticA at UWA and the art practice Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A), with partner Oron Catts. Their work investigates the disembodied cellular cultures used in technoscience, which they call the “semi-living”, and often references the Golem myth, the Jewish story of a being created from mud. Maholo Uchida is a curator at the Miraikan, Japan’s National Museum for Science and Innovation, in Tokyo. Uchida has curated several exhibitions which bridge art and science. An expert on robots, she is now co-curating a major new show on artificial intelligence, AI: More than Human, at London’s Barbican Centre, opening in 2019.

In this conversation, Zurr and Uchida explore the boundaries of the nonliving and living from their own cultural perspectives. As Uchida explains, in Japan, Shinto animist beliefs draw different boundaries between these categories, providing other ways to think about our relationships with “nature” and design. How might non-Western (or non-monotheistic) technological and cultural approaches affect the way humans around the world think about, and potentially design, the living?

For full article go to Other Biological Futures.