Episode 3 with Joe Davis: Live from the lower Troposphere
Lena and Bonnie travel to Jena, East Germany to meet up with Joe Davis, the legendary pioneer in BioArt. Joe, who is working and living in Boston, United states, was visiting Germany to prepare an exhibition in Berlin that featured his House of Angels project. Apart from preparations for his Berlin exhibition, he was also working on a new project, where he encoded the word ‘Truth’ in water. Joe is an artist-scientist, working in the laboratories of Harvard and MIT, where he holds an official position after years of working there unpaid. He uses synthetic and molecular biology and bioinformatics, to create mind-blowing “space art”, and sculpture, using media including centrifuges, radios, prosthetics, magnetic fields, and genetic material. Topics such as communication with other life forms, extraterrestrial life and encoding/decoding information are present in his artworks.
In Symbiotopics, Lena and Bonnie invite you to the Symbiocene, the hypothetical era after the Anthropocene. The transition to the Symbiocene requires a different mindset, and to achieve this, it is important to find new approaches to interactions between arts and sciences, as the future of both art and science depends on fluency in multiple fields and multidisciplinary mindsets. There must be a collapse of separation between science, technology, and the humanities if we want to de-center humanist anthropocentrism, and rethink subjectivity and our relationship with nature, in other words: enter the Symbiocene. Joe’s art and philosophy is a great example of this, as he is bridging the gap (if there was ever any) between art and science.
Joe invited us to spend some time with him, and we even got to get up in the air. In this podcast episode of Symbiotopics, we recorded from a hot air balloon! After our balloon flight, we got to sit down with Joe to talk about BioArt, space art, genetic engineering and the unification of knowledge, so we got a glimpse of some projects he was working on, and he shared some of his imaginative ideas… Curious to hear about them? Listen to the podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/show/4adySCJXOMOLMzrPiYSJMM
Photographer: Tina Peissker, Daan Winter
