Life Forms

At the interface between art and biosciences. Which forms does artificial life take? How do humans today intervene in growth processes through synthetic biology? How does this affect the relationship between nature and culture? And what significance does art have in the age of the anthropocene? For Andreas Greiner (*1979), these questions are at the center of his work, where he questions the relationships between nature/technology/culture/art with regard to ethics as well as social and ecological issues. The volume places Andreas Greiner's work in a dialogue with scientists and experts from various disciplines such as physics, computer science, biology, music and architecture. The emerging interfaces raise the integral questions that the artist examines, which are more urgent than ever after the apparent quantum leaps in the medical-biological field, such as genetic engineering.
About the Author: Gregory Cartelli is a researcher and PhD Candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University and a consultant-at-large for the design firm Studio Ghraowi. He holds a Certificate in the History of Science from Princeton University, a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale School of Architecture, a BA in Photography from Bard College, and is based in Princeton, NJ and New York City. Carson Chan, b. 1980, is an architecture writer and curator, pursuing a PhD in Architecture at Princeton University. After working for Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie's architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, he founded PROGRAM red in 2006, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. He has variously curated and overseen more than 30 international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture. His writing on art, architecture and contemporary culture appears in books and periodicals worldwide, including Kaleidoscope, where he is a Contributing Editor, and 032c (Berlin), where he is Editor-at-Large. Chan has interviewed a broad range of contemporary practitioners, including Thomas Demand, Udo Kittelmann, William T. Vollmann, MVRDV, Ute Meta Bauer, Greg Lynn, Rick Owens, Hans Kollhoff and David Simon. With Nadim Samman, Chan curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale 2012, presenting newly commissioned works by more than 40 artists, architects, writers, musicians and composers at 5 locations throughout the city. Chan was Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas 2013, in Denver, Colorado. Also in 2013, Chan co-organized a conference at Yale School of Architecture with David Andrew Tasman and Prof. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, bringing together leading and emerging scholars researching both historical and contemporary practices of architecture exhibition making. Andreas Greiner, b. 1979, initially studied medicine and, after his Physikum, he switched to the field of art. He concluded his studies in 2013 as a master student of Olafur Eliasson. In 2016 he was awarded with the GASAG Art Prize, after he got 2015 the IBB Prize for Photography. Andreas Greiner examines certain characteristics of living beings and transfers them into the context of art. Nature as the point of departure for his work and the scientific methodology as his artistic approach are combined in his works with a clear aesthetic position that does actually suggest the notion of a living sculpture. As might be expected, there is in his work a concern for the living being itself, for the animal as part of our world. In addition to his own work, he is a member of the artist collective "Das Numen". Ryan Roark is an architectural designer and writer and Fellow of Georgia Tech fro 2019-2021. He taught as assistant instructor at Princeton and had worked in design practices in Loa Angeles and New York. Ursula Ströbele is head of the department Theory of Sculpture at the Zentralinstiut für Kunstgeschichte Munich. Her scientific focus is on the expanding of the theory of sculpture in respect of time based and immaterial aspects. J. (John) Craig Venter, b. 1946, is an American biotechnologist and entrepreneur. He was one of the first to sequence the human genome, and led the team which made the first cell with a synthetic genome (2010). Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research and the J. Craig Venter Institute. He now works at his Institute to create synthetic (artificial) biological organisms, and to record genetic diversity in the world's oceans. He was listed on Time magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of »The World's 50 Most Influential Figures 2010«. Venter himself recognized his own ADHD behavior in his adolescence, and later found ADHD-linked genes in his own DNA.[5] In media interviews, Venter has seve