George Gessert is one of the best-known artists in the contemporary art movement known as bio-art a/k/a BioArt. Gessert began his career as a painter and printmaker, and began breeding plants as an art form in the late 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, Gessert's work focused on the overlap between art and genetics, and he has exhibited a series of installations of hybrids and documentation of breeding projects.
George Gessert was born in 1944 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley 1966 and an MA in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969.
Gessert creates his artistic irises by hybridizing wild varieties and discarding undesirable results. He is especially interested in plant aesthetics and ways that human aesthetic preferences affect evolution. Gessert calls his practice "genetic folk art," and his work points to the way nature is interpreted—even authored—by humans. Gessert's work mainly focuses on irises and other ornamental flowers.
Gessert's awards include the Leonardo Award for Excellence [1] and the Pushcart prize for his essay, "Notes on Uranium Weapons and Kitsch." His article, "An Orgy of Power" was included in Best American Essays 2007. [2] Gessert is also an Editorial Board Member of Leonardo Journal published by MIT Press for Leonardo/ISAST, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. [3]
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Information art, which is also known as informatism or data art, is an art form that is inspired by and principally incorporates data, computer science, information technology, artificial intelligence, and related data-driven fields. The information revolution has resulted in over-abundant data that are critical in a wide range of areas, from the Internet to healthcare systems. Related to conceptual art, electronic art and new media art, informatism considers this new technological, economical, and cultural paradigm shift, such that artworks may provide social commentaries, synthesize multiple disciplines, and develop new aesthetics. Realization of information art often take, although not necessarily, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches incorporating visual, audio, data analysis, performance, and others. Furthermore, physical and virtual installations involving informatism often provide human-computer interaction that generate artistic contents based on the processing of large amounts of data.
Eduardo Kac is a Brazilian and American contemporary artist whose portfolio encompasses various forms of art including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital and online art, and BioArt. Recognized for his space art and transgenic works, Kac works with biotechnology to create organisms with new genetic attributes. His interdisciplinary approach has seen the use of diverse mediums, from fax and photocopying to fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, virtual reality and DNA synthesis.
Gregory Stock is an American biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine. His interests lie in the scientific and evolutionary as well as ethical, social and political implications of today's revolutions in the life sciences and in information technology and computers.
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.
Frank Joseph Malina was an American aeronautical engineer and painter, known for his pioneering work in early rocketry.
New media art journals are academic journals covering the topic of new media art. They can be published in physical or online format and typically include original research, interviews, and information about books, events and exhibitions that incorporate technology in the arts.
Paul Hartal is a Canadian painter and poet, born in Szeged, Hungary. He has created the term "Lyrical Conceptualism" to characterize his style in both painting and poetry, attempting to unite the scientific with the creative, or intuitive.
Bioart is an art practice where artists work with biology, live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, and life processes. Using scientific processes and practices such as biology and life science practices, microscopy, and biotechnology the artworks are produced in laboratories, galleries, or artists' studios. The scope of bioart is a range considered by some artists to be strictly limited to "living forms", while other artists include art that uses the imagery of contemporary medicine and biological research, or require that it address a controversy or blind spot posed by the very character of the life sciences.
Leonardo is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press covering the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts and music.
Hybrid art is a contemporary art movement in which artists work with frontier areas of science and emerging technologies. Artists work with fields such as biology, robotics, physical sciences, experimental interface technologies, artificial intelligence, and information visualization. They address the research in many ways such as undertaking new research agendas, visualizing results in new ways, or critiquing the social implications of the research. The worldwide community has developed new kinds of art festivals, information sources, organizations, and university programs to explore these new arts.
Ryszard Slomski is a Polish professor and lecturer at the Poznań University of Life Sciences.
Arthur John "A.J." Bliss (1862–1931) was a British iris breeder who is credited with greatly improving the genetics of many modern strains, especially those descending from his Dominion cultivar.
Sonia Landy Sheridan, known as Sonia Sheridan, was an American artist, academic and researcher, who in 1969 founded the Generative Systems research program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was honorary editor of Leonardo, the Journal of the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). Sheridan had received awards from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation in 1973 for Photography and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nina Czegledy is a Canadian artist, new media art curator and writer.
Sushil Kumar Charak was an Indian geneticist and academic, known for his Plant and microbial genetical genomics, especially the studies on Escherichia coli and Lambda phage as well as on the mutants of Rhizobium. He was a former director of the Central Institute of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, India, and Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1981, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Suzanne Anker is an American visual artist and theorist. Considered a pioneer in bioart, she has been working on the relationship of art and the biological sciences for more than twenty five years. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about nature's 'tangled bank'." Anker frequently assembles with "pre-defined and found materials" botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens.
Daniel Gianola is a geneticist based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (US), reputed for his contributions in quantitative genetics to the fields of animal and plant breeding. In the early 1980s, Gianola extended best linear unbiased prediction to the non-linear domain for analysis of categorical traits, using the classical threshold model of Sewall Wright. Subsequently, he pioneered the use of Bayesian methodologies and Monte Carlo Markov chain methods in quantitative genetics. He also revived early work by Sewall Wright on structural equation models and cast their application in the context of modern quantitative genetics and statistical methodology. His group in Wisconsin was the first in the world applying non-parametric methods, such as reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces regression and Bayesian neural networks, to genome-enabled selection in animal breeding, agriculture and whole-genome prediction of complex traits or diseases. Gianola published extensively on thresholds models, Bayesian theory, prediction of complex traits using mixed model methodology, hierarchical Bayesian regression procedures and machine learning techniques. Gianola has been also involved in whole-genome prediction of skin and bladder cancer in humans. He has taught extensively in more than twenty countries including recurrent visiting professorships at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia (Spain), the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (Norway), Aarhus University (Denmark), Georg-August University (Germany) and the Technical University of Munich (Germany). He has been an Honorary Researcher at the Pasteur Institut de Montevideo since 2016. In an Editorial contained in a volume published in Gianola's honor in the Journal of Animal Breeding and Genetics (2017), it was stated that "He is probably the one lecturer in animal breeding and genetics, who has the biggest impact on the largest number of followers in the numerous classes and courses he has taught with never-ending energy all across the world."
Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed in 1982 as an umbrella organization for the journals Leonardo and the Leonardo Music Journal. In 2018, Leonardo/ISAST was awarded the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica as Visionary Pioneers of New Media Art.
Ellen K. Levy is an American multimedia artist and scholar known for exploring art, science and technology interrelationships since the early 1980s. Levy works to highlight their importance through exhibitions, educational programs, publications and curatorial opportunities; often through collaborations with scientists including NASA, some in conjunction with Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. She is a past president of the College Art Association and has published widely on art and complex systems.
Patricia Olynyk is a Canadian-born American multimedia artist, scholar and educator whose work explores art, science, and technology-related themes. Known for collaborating across disciplines and projects that explore the mind-brain relationship, interspecies communication and the phenomenology of perception, her work examines "the way that experiences and biases toward scientific subjects affect interpretations in specific contexts."
