BioArt Challenge

ACDC Bioart challenge
Between frontiers in biology and artistic imagination

MUSE – the science museum of Trento, partner of the ACDC project launched in February 2021 a challenge directed towards artists and designers to start a collaboration on an artistic research project in the field of BioArt.

The theme of the call is "The art of living: taking inspiration from biological architectures and functions to design a different future".

The aim of the challenge was to investigate and explore the connections between art and life sciences, with particular attention to the field of synthetic biology and the scientific progress along the borderline between the prebiotic (inorganic or organic chemistry in the natural environment before the advent of life on Earth) and the biotic life.

For further information on the call, please consult the announcement on the MUSE website

The artist Giuseppe Lo Schiavo has been selected among the applications received. He started his project in September 2021 and got in contact with the scientific community of ACDC, by participating in online meeting with the project partners and by visiting the Prof. Martin Hanczyc lab in Trento. 
During his research project he will constantly be supported by the ACDC MUSE team and by Lorenzo Facchinelli, a member of the Italian artist collective Mali Weil as tutor.

The goal of his research is to investigate and explore the connections between artificial intelligence and artificial life, with particular attention to the field of synthetic biology and the scientific progress along the borderline between the prebiotic and the biotic life.

The idea behind his project is to explore the main concepts of artificial life and go a step further. Can life be found in the web of data? In digital form? Can technology and data be considered a new form of a living organism?

He developed an opera called SIntetica..

“Sintetica is a digital art experiment. The digital art entity will be able to reproduce, interact with the viewers, die or even get infected by a virus. The artwork will grow in size according to the viewer’s number. If gets to 100 views in a day it will reproduce asexually. The main artwork changes according to the hedonometer API, able to capture real-time data on the happiness level of users on social networks.”

More info about SIntetica here https://www.giuseppeloschiavo.com/sintetica/

Giuseppe and Lorenzo discussed about BioArt and the interactions between humanities and life sciences during an ACDC Open Talk.