Monday, 3 December 2007
SymbioticA’s highly acclaimed research group the Tissue Culture & Art Project, received second prize in the prestigious international competition VIDA 10.0, rewarding excellence in artistic creativity utilising new technologies and artificial life.
On behalf of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts received the prize at the VIDA 10.0 Awards Ceremony and Gala Anniversary, held in Barcelona on the 29th of November, surrounded by artists, critics and experts in the relations between art, technology and biology.
A pioneering award in this field, this is the first time VIDA awarded a prize to a work based on biotechnology rather than electronics. Artistic director of the VIDA awards, Daniel Canogar, explained that the work met with much discussion inside the jury. NoArk was awarded second place as it dealt with the concept of life, in a broader sense.
NoArk will be exhibited in 2008 at ARCO, the international contemporary art fair in Madrid, as part of VIDA’s 10th anniversary.
SymbioticA co-founder and artistic director, Oron Catts with Tissue Culture & Art Project collaborator Ionat Zurr’s work, NoArk, is an updated version of a Wunderkammer, the cabinets of curiosity that preceded the natural history museum’s refined taxonomy of organisms, objects, and other physical wonders. Their collection includes a living mass of growing cells, taking the form of tissue in a state-of-the-art biotech incubator.
NoArk’s protective vessel is a new type of body in the world, brought together as the assembled parts of different organisms, merged with technological support systems.
The Tissue Culture and Art Project has explored the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression since 1996, and in 2000 became one of the core research projects at SymbioticA, The Art and Science Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. SymbioticA are the recent winners of the inaugural Golden Nica for Hybrid Art as part of the international Prix Ars Electronica 2007.
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