Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?

Speakers

Andrew A. Biewener, PhD

Harvard University
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Andrew Biewener is the CBiewenerharles P. Lyman Professor of Biology and a member of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology of Harvard University. He also serves as director of the Concord Field Station, located in Bedford MA, and oversees the Harvard Estabrook Woods in Concord, MA. His research is on the biomechanics and physiology of animal movement, which includes comparative studies of terrestrial locomotion and avian flight, as well as in the design and implementation of legged robots. In addition to over 80 research papers, he has published a textbook Animal Locomotion. His recent research focuses on the neuromechanics of limb and muscle function and seeks to understand how running animals achieve stability when unexpectedly perturbed.

Michael Joaquin Grey

Artist
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For the past twenty years, Michael Joaquin Grey has been creating work that extends and plays with the boundaries of art, science, and media. His investigations center on the development and the origins of life, language, and form—as related to natural and complex systems. Critical moments in natural phenomenon and culture are objects in his work, as are the prepositional states of change between matter, energy, behavior, and meaning. Grey's creative dialogue engages epistemological and pedagogical creative limitations of the tools and processes we use to observe, learn, and play with our world. His work has been widely recognized in publications internationally and he has exhibited at many museums and galleries. Grey is also the inventor of ZOOB, a modeling system that emulates the building blocks of nature and complex systems. He received a BS from the University of Califonia, Berkeley in genetics and an MFA from Yale. He lives in San Francisco and New York.

Mara Haseltine

Artist
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Mara Haseltine received her undergraduate degree in studio art and art history from Oberlin College, Ohio, and her master's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute with a double degree in new genres and sculpture. She has worked as a sculptor throughout the United States and worldwide. Haseltine's love of the natural sciences and form has been a constant theme throughout her work. Her work is figurative in that even her most abstract forms relate to the internal-external body as well as human psychology.

William A. Haseltine, PhD

Haseltine Foundation for Medical Science and the Arts
publications

William A. Haseltine is a biophysicist, inventor, and entrepreneur who has been a pioneer in the use of the human genome as a tool for identifying and treating diseases. For over 25 years he was a professor at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1992 he founded Human Genome Sciences, Inc. (HGS), based in Rockville, Maryland, which has compiled an encyclopedia of expressed human genes. He has been involved in the use of genetics as a possible way of fighting AIDS, has explored ways to extend human life expectancy, and is president of a foundation dedicated to promoting the public communication of science and its intersections with the arts.

Jens Hauser

Curator
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Jens Hauser is a Paris-based art curator, writer, cultural journalist and video maker focusing on the interactions between art and technology, and on transgenre and contextual aesthetics. His papers have been published in ten languages and he has lectured extensively in many countries. As a curator, Hauser organized a large show on biotechnological art at the National Arts and Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, L'Art Biotech (2003) and published a book with the same title. His forthcoming exhibitions are Bio Stillness (Perth/Australia, 2007), and Sk-Interfaces (Liverpool, 2008), which deals with the paradigm of skin as a technological interface. In 2005, Hauser received the Fund for Arts Research Grant from the American Center Foundation. He has also directed creative radio pieces, sound environments, and documentary films, which have been shown in festivals and as video installations in museums. Since 1992 he has collaborated regularly with the European culture television network Arte as well as with the cultural programs of German broadcasting stations. Hauser has also been engaged in projects helping visually disabled people to access art and cinema, including audio-description of film, and has organized numerous workshops.

Wayne Hendrickson, PhD

Columbia University
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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Wayne Hendrickson is University Professor at Columbia University and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. Hendrickson's research focuses on the structure and function of proteins. He uses x-ray crystallography to study molecular properties in atomic detail. He has made very significant contributions to diffraction methods which have led to the emergence of structural biology as a major force in modern biology and molecular medicine. His colleagues use these technologies themselves in investigations of protein molecules that function at the surfaces of living cells. Hendrickson's honors include the Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Gairdner International Award, and the Harvey Prize of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Theo Jansen

Artist
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Theo Jansen studied science at the University of Delft, the Netherlands. After spending the first seven years of his artistic career painting, he decided to strike out on a new course by making a real flying saucer. It flew over Delft in 1980 to the great consternation of the local population and police. Since then he has been trying to create a new type of nature. But he doesn't use pollen or seeds, but yellow plastic tubes. In his laboratory on a windy roadside, he has continued his work on this pioneering branch of fauna, making skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on beaches to live their own lives. Theo Jensen has written extensively and his work has been exhibited in many places. Additionally, he has written three books about technical art and evolution and several television performances have inspired thousands of people to go to the beach to see him working there. An example of one of his creations is on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art as a part of a group show titled The Believers, which runs through spring 2008.

Jonathan King, PhD

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Jonathan King is professor of molecular biology in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught and led a biomedical research team for over three decades. King studies the properties of proteins, and the interaction of proteins to form complex structures, including viruses which infect bacteria. He is a former president of the Biophysical Society, former Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award.

Gabriel Robles-De-La-Torre, PhD

International Society for Haptics
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Gabriel Robles-De-La-Torre's research interests include touch perception in real and virtual environments and computational methods to create haptic virtual objects which can be touched and manipulated. He is the founder of the International Society for Haptics and advises organizations such as the European Commission. Robles-De-La-Torre received a computer engineering degree from the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM), and his MS and PhD degrees in neuroscience from Brandeis University. He is a former Fulbright scholar. Robles-De-La-Torre's research has been featured in Nature, The Washington Post, Scientific American France (Pour la Science), MIT's Technology Review Online, and The Economist.

Laura Splan

Artist
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Laura Splan is a New York City based artist. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of California, Irvine, where she originally studied biological sciences. She received her Master of Fine Art from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her work was recently featured in Discover magazine and in a solo show at the New York Hall of Science. An exhibition of her work is on view at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago through July 20, 2007.

Alexis Clements

web site

Alexis Clements is a New York City-based writer and Web designer. She is also one of the 2006/2007 fellows of the Dramatists Guild of America and recently completed her Master's degree in philosophy of science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.