Page 7 - 11 - 2014

RICARDO DOMINGUEZ + SILK AND HONEY: INSECTS AS BIOLOGICAL FACTORIES

DIANE LUDIN 15 MAY 2014
BROAD ART CENTER, RM 5240
DIRT
Director Victoria Vesna opened her
01 MAY 2014 honors class, Biotech & Art to visitors
CNSI ART|SCI GALLERY for a workshop led by visiting artist
Jason Fahrion, who presented his art
DIRT was an exploration of California’s projects with insects as biological
microbial biogeography, tracing the factories.
diversity of bacterial life underfoot
on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was a Students and visiting scholars examined
collaborative project between Christina the silkworm life cycle and look
Agapakis and Ellie Harmon, with support at potential medical and artistic
from the University of California applications of the substances that
Institute for Research in the Arts. silkworms produce along with the silk.
They also learned about Fahrion’s work
Anthropologist Mary Douglas once defined with honeybees and the local production
dirt as “matter out of place”—that stuff of honey.
which a culture deems impure or unclean.
New microscopic scientific practices
are transforming our ideas about dirt
as well our ideas about what is “out
of place” in a contemporary globalized
world.

Just a single gram of rich soil
can contain up to two billion
bacterial cells and 18,000 unique
genomes. Contemporary scientists are
investigating and mapping this wild,
poorly understood world of microbial
ecosystems through metagenomic
sequencing - a technique for analyzing
and representing the complete DNA
content of an environment. In mapping
the microbial wilderness of our bodies,
our built environment, and the wild
ecology of the soil, these “dirty”
layers are transformed into a bio-info-
technological resource.

ARTIST ART+ACTIVISM COLLABORATION COMMUNITY EDUCATION LECTURE PUBLICATION RESEARCH RESIDENCY ROBOTICS MIXER SYMPOSIUM |||| ARTIST ART+ACTIVISM COLLABORATION COMMUNITY EDUCATION LECTURE PUBLICATION RESEARCH RESIDENCY ROBOTICS MIXER SYMPOSIUM ||||
|| SPRING SUMMER FALL WINTER ||||| 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 ||||| UCLA CNSI DMA BEYOND ||||| ||||| SPRING SUMMER FALL WINTER ||||| 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 ||||| UCLA CNSI DMA BEYOND |