Moving from the studio into the laboratory provided the fine arts in recent years with a variety of new materials like bacteria, cells, tissue cultures, or transgenic organisms as a means of artistic expression, but made it also necessary for artists to get acquainted with new epistemologies and the logic of the techno-scientific regime, which governs experimental bench work through protocols, techniques and methods, instruments and equipment, as well as a complex set of human and non-human agents and most notably with patents and the flow of global capital.

With the emergence of BioArt, biotechnology became part of the art world and provoked a wider reflection about the epistemological status of biofacts and the ethics of turning biology into technology. Whereas in the early days BioArt primarily tried to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology, current practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist. Traditional distinctions between the natural and the artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted with the enormous ecological challenges that exist today, provoking new narratives about speculative biology, which is becoming a major issue in art and design. The lecture series will discuss a number of current approaches of bringing art, design and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison and offer insights into the fact that the way biotechnology is perceived and utilised today is deeply rooted in current forms of capitalism and mass consumer culture. Speculating about how “life” could be in the near future is an apposite cross-disciplinary approach to collectively rethink how we want our future to be and what kind of aspirations will be possible or even probable under the auspices of turbo capitalism and mass consumerism.

This semester we are instructed to put all of our teaching online. Therefore we all have to be ready to learn online. The topics for the lecture series I presented in our first meeting in class on March 3, 2020 you find on BASE Angewandte, where I have put for you the Syllabus online, the slides I was showing in class and some literature that I find very useful. The virtual lectures that I gave on March 17 and on March 24 are both available on BASE Angewandte. 

Students are required to use concepts and themes from the reading assignments in their final exam. Each student will take a final oral exam (20 minutes) at the end of semester. This semester we will not meet in person to talk about your learning outcomes, but via ZOOM meeting. So far, we have two possible dates for the final exams, June 8 and June 9, from 9 am till 1 pm. If you are interested to take the exam at the end of this term, please contact Regina Koroschetz <regina.koroschetz@uni-ak.ac.at>, she will be the one, who will organise the examination date with and for you.

BASE Angewandte is an important source of information for the lecture series. Useful resources such as digital documents for further readings are be available there. Check also our website medientheorie.ac.at regularly for subject announcements and updates.

This semester it will be possible to sing in for this lecture series till April 15, 2020. This semester you can to join in later and catch up on the content and learning material, because all lectures will be well documented and put online on BASE Angewandte for you. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me at any time.