My background is in electrical engineering and philosophy, I am here with my colleague. We are not a hackerspace. We are an organization who is producing activities in art and natural science, with a focus on biology. We have partners in Finland, Helseinki, which is opening a bioart lab, and their local hackerspace in Heilseinki. Our agenda is a little bit different than most of the organizations we've heard today.
We are very much of the development of emerging related artistic practices. I think this is something that is our main focus. We are currently 55 members, with a variety of backgrounds, both artists and scientists. This is a good member base for diverse activities that we run. I also wanted to show you a little bit about what our members are doing. It's very diverse. Here's paintings from a member, painted by an exhibition artist, no, expedition artist from an expedition to harvest these genes from some pockets in Siberia where it survived.
We have three mainlines, one is the short term project which run a certain amount of time. Then we have a second class, it's a long term project cnosisting of collaboration of us and the biological station in Lotland, and under this, we are doing running a residency program, workshops, conferences, all these kinds of activities. The station is very much tied to the research and environment there. They are doing climate change model simulations.
Our general activities are the networking, us being here, getting informed about other people's activities. Just to give you a little orientation, you see Scandanavia, then you can see Helseinki on the lower end of Finland, and then 1000 km is up north. We travel a lot locally when we want to go up there.
We have our residency program there since 2010. We have about six to seven residents who stay there with different backgrounds. We do some projects with Hackteria. Then we also do student workshops for art students but also for biology students. We also have projects running in the city, this was a european public arts center. We are also running at the moment a collaboration with the Helseinki Environmental Research Institute. Our artists are.. to the research groups for one year, and hopefully there will come some interesting work, then who knows what was just mentioned, one of those people in these laboratories for arts and science doing practice work which was valuing.. five different groups which was related to our interests, like arctic waters. They are doing some materials research. We have a body nature group, which did some lab exercise. We have an environmental computing group that turned to cooking. Another group was one which observed the activities of another group.
Then maybe some works, some works of members of our society. This is the swan by ... It's a sculpture that is essentially growing out of microbes and fungus. It's not a decomposing swan, it's actually growing. He did that in collaboration with .. he did that in collaboration.. so re-questioning in finishtology. This would be the fruit fly farm from an artist. There is a camera pointing to the nest, when you send an SMS you get a closeup picture from the nest with a cute little red fruit flies looking at you. It's quite interesting, this is kind of a sculpture work that can adopt.. so you are invited to carry this nest around with you, you get really attached to these little creatures, no really you should try it out once.
Then the work by Anti .. hackmetz... so it's basically exploring the urban or rural eco microbiology environment and it's combining the storytelling with that. This is a work that by myself and a colleague it's an orchestra where the musici s composed in real time based on the heartbeats of the musicians, so the music evolves as the musicians are playing. This work is entropia, what you see is a video- an installation with several videos, it's a horse which is already dead. She was kind of interested in the question of the process of death, when does death start, it takes several hours until the body is cool, until you can't see anything, yellow or more until this screen is blue. So you can see the body cooling off. Thank you.
Ellen: What is the borderline between different camps? What's the borderline between DIYbio and BioArt to you? If any?
I think that both are driven by very same principles. It's interest in knowledge. The expression and locations that we show stuff off at, might be different to some extent. But also very close. I know you have artists working in your space. I think there is a very fruitful collaboration and a very logical link between these different activities.