Transient Creatures, Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2008, Hong Kong, aims to bring creative collisions of art and technology to the city. In its 12th year running, the festival looks at biotechnological art from the point of view of new media art. The curators’ focus on questions relating to translations between biological systems and computer code and can biotechnology produce life that creates art. It explores what it means to be a human being with boundaries being pushed further each day.
As part of the experimental Project Room, c-lab showed in-depth background material to their work, The Martian Rose.
Featuring both experiment footage of the rose during exposure to Martian parameters as well as historical and current aspects of this research.
The project room offers a unique insight to both processes and thinking around works previously not accessible to the audience.
Together with four other artists, the Project Room provides a place revealing the creative processes behind their works. (Adam Brandejs' Genpets below)
The board members describe the importance of the festival as a focal of future direction in art making.
The title allures to a new way of seeing ourselves in the universe from a worldview where humans have situated themselves in the centre, to a place of becoming transient creatures in the branch of a shrub by the replicating genetic code.
The festival exhibition also features a series of works aimed at destabilizing conceptions around new media arts by inviting artists working with biological related technologies that relates to own perceptual framework and unusual use of perception.
Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer's Life Writer (above) used genetic algorithms producing new life, allowing audience to become life writers.
Tissue Art & Culture Project's The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine's lab-grown toad steak questions the future of food. Critical ideas of technology and future nutritional sources (ironically, the serum used is produced from calf blood and the ratio is 1 calf to produce 100g of victimless meat).