The last TechnoScience Salon of the 2011-2012 year will feature Hannah Landecker (UCLA), a leading scholar of the histories of legacies of cell science and technologies, in conversation with artists Jack Butler, Heidi McKenzie, Nadine Valcin, and Jennifer Willet of the Immortal Body Project.
Monday, March 19, 4-6 p.m. :: MILIEU
This is a joint Technoscience Salon/ Subtle Technologies event
For more information on this event, please click here.
Theme: Milieu
Title: Metabolism and Milieu: Eating as Inter-Kingdom Communication
Date: Monday, March 19, 2012
Time: 4-6p.m.
Location: Centre for Social Innovation (CSI), 215 Spadina Ave, Rm 120
Sponsors: Technoscience Salon, USA Mission in Canada (Community Partnership Grant), Subtle Technologies
Curator: Zulfikar Hirji
HANNAH LANDECKER is an Associate Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, where she has since 2008 held a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology, and the Institute for Society and Genetics. She is the author of Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard University Press, 2007), and numerous other engagements with cell biology, biotechnology, and the role of the moving image in life science. Her current research interests are centered on the historical and social study of metabolism. Her book-in-progress, American Metabolism, looks at what metabolism was and is becoming, in science, philosophy, political theory, and culture.
JACK BUTLER currently lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario. His hybrid practice uses the means and methods of visual art to produce research in two domains – medical science and collaborations with Inuit artists (the current project, Art & Cold Cash). With degrees in visual art and philosophy, Butler exhibits internationally with work in public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada.
“I draw. Observing my art career over the last forty-five years of drawing, I have come to recognize that I am developing a core trajectory that focuses on sex and sexuality, the aesthetic, sensuous and even scientific experience of being sexual. My work ranges from my current interest in Somatechnics (theories and practices of alternative sex-gender embodiment) to early and on-going trans-disciplinary art/bio-medical research projects in genital embryogenesis (sexual differentiation in the human embryo) which art-based research is bringing me into collaborative work in trans-gender and intersex communities.”
HEIDI MCKENZIE is a Toronto-based ceramic artist completing her final year in Ceramics at Sheridan School of Craft and Design. Heidi has been a manager and creative producer with over twenty years’ experience in the not-for-profit arts sector. She has worked in the music industry, architecture, broadcasting, museum development, festival management, and radio and film production. In 2009, Heidi was the first in six generations to return to her father’s ancestral home of India, where she embarked on a three-month ceramic residency at the foothills of the Himalayas. In the spring of 2010, Heidi left behind her work in the cultural sector and committed to her new life path as an artist. Heidi is a the recipient of the 2011 Emerging Artist Award for the Toronto Artist Project juried art show and sale as well as the 2011 Metchosin International Summer School Bursary.
“My studio practice engages the relationship and responsibility of community in healing. This is explored through conceptual and material examination of ways in which clay, in its ceramic form, conveys “static motion.” Clay is inherently of the human body – the sediment of millennia. The medium reinforces the physicality of the implicit corporeal themes of ailment and recovery.”
NADINE VALCIN was born in Montreal and is now based in Toronto. She fell in love with cinema after earning a degree in architecture. For the past decade, she has written, directed and produced television programs and magazines.
Intrigued by cultural-identity and mixed-race issues, she took on her first film as an independent producer in 1996. Modulations, an experimental project, was followed by the documentary Black, Bold and Beautiful (1999) which picked up an honourable mention at the prestigious ‘Columbus International Film and Video Festival’ before it was adopted into university programs in Women’s Studies and African-American Studies. In A School Without Borders (2005) delves into Nadine Valcin’s questions about the education system and the process of integrating cultural minorities.
More recently, she directed the short fiction film Fire that recounts the story of a slave accused of burning down half of Montreal in the 18th century. She is presently in the process of writing her first feature film dealing with a former child soldier seeking refugee status in Canada.
DR JENNIFER WILLET is an internationally successful artist in the emerging field of bioart. From 2000-2007 Willet and Shawn Bailey collaborated on a project called BIOTEKNICA. She taught in the Studio Arts Department at Concordia University from 2000-2007, and completed her PhD in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at the same institution. She now works as an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at The University of Windsor in Canada. In 2009 she opened a bioart research and teaching lab called INCUBATOR: Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Ecology at the University of Windsor.
Exhibitions include: the Arnolfini Museum, Bristol UK (2010), Exit Art Gallery, New York, NY (2009), Ars Electronica festival, Linz (2008), FOFA Gallery, Montreal (2007), ISEA San Jose, USA (2006), Biennial Electronic Arts Perth, Australia (2004), The European Media Arts Festival Osnabrück, Germany (2003), La Société des arts et technologiques (SAT) Montreal, Canada (2005), and The Forest City Gallery London, Canada (2004), amongst others.
