The arts and technology are coming together in exciting ways in contemporary society. New experimental media such as biology, data, and technology are leading artists, scientists, and other individuals to new realms of knowledge discovery and creative expression. Philosophy, concerned with aesthetics and epistemology (the study of knowledge), provides an interesting lens for understanding current activity in a range of contexts where art, technology, and biology are linked. These contexts include GenerativeArt, BioArt, Biomimicry, Synthetic Biology, and CrowdArt.

1. Natural Aesthetics:
Digital Art and Philosophy in
the Era of Technologized
Biomimicry
Melanie Swan
Philosopher in Residence
MS Futures Group
+1-650-681-9482
m@MelanieSwan.com
June 6, 2013 - Stanford University
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

2. What is Digital Art?
2
Probably not what comes to mind!

3. Digital Art is anything involving
computers and art
3

4. Digital Artist: Jeffrey Shaw
4
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/the-legible-city/
Video: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/the-legible-city/video/1/
The Legible City by Jeffrey Shaw (1988-1991)

5. Digital Artist: Scott Snibbe
Boundary Functions by Scott Snibbe (1998)
http://www.snibbe.com/projects/interactive/boundaryfunctions/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ax4pgtHQDg
5

6. What is Digital Art?
6
Interactivity, Co-Creation, Ephemerality

7. What is Digital Art?
7

8. What is Digital Art?
8

9. What is Digital Art?
9

10. What is Digital Art?
10

11. 11
What is Digital Art?
Tactical Media, Hactivism, Electronic Civil Disobedience
Graffiti Research Lab and Stiktu
augmented reality social graffiti
app from Layar

12. What is (early) Digital Art?
12
Hypertext, hypermedia, net.art, web art

13. What is [regular] Art?
13
Art is whatever the ‘artworld’ (e.g.; art schools, museums,
critics, artists) considers to be art – Danto 1964

14. 14
Why Digital Art and Philosophy?
Philosophy
Concerned with: Understanding
Art, economics, politics
Concerned with: Experience
Concepts
Qualitative
Quantitative
Science and technology
Concerned with:
Characterization and Innovation
Abstraction
Figuration
Enumeration
Concepts: rhizome, body without organs, molar, molecular, smooth, striated,
figural, machinic, faciality, deterritorialization, haecceity, nomadology, diagram
Three disciplines for analyzing reality, "separate melodic lines in constant
interplay with one another” – Deleuze, Negotiations 1997

15. Concepts in Natural Aesthetics
15
• Digital Art and Natural
Aesthetics: anything involving
technology and art and biology
• Concepts
– What is real? Authentic?
– Discipline portability
– Form and function
– De Novo creation
– Individuality and Sociality

16. Distinguishability of Computer Art and
the Uncanny Valley
16
• Is it “art” or “not art” if we can
tell it was computer-made?
• Continuum: real to artificial?

17. 17
Is this image of something real? What kind of real?
Real life? Artificial Life? Synthetic Biology?
Computer-generated image?
Distinguishing ‘What is Real’
Proliferation in the categories of realism

18. Concepts in Natural Aesthetics
18
• Digital Art and Natural
Aesthetics: anything involving
technology and art and biology
• Concepts
– What is real? Authentic?
– Discipline portability
– Form and function
– De Novo creation
– Individuality and Sociality

19. What is BioArt?
19
• Artwork created using live
tissue, bacteria, or other
living organisms together
with scientific processes
• Collaboration of artists and
biologists
• Artists experimenting with
biology as an artistic
medium
• Bio Art was first coined by
Eduardo Kac, an American
artist born in Brazil

20. Notable BioArtworks
20
• Earmouse (1997)
– Human ear grown on the back of a
mouse (science turned into art)
• GFP (green-fluorescent protein) Art
– Bunny (2000)
– GlowCats (2011)
• Lawn Chair sculpture (2002)
– Denise King, Carnivorous
Contraptions, Chlorophilia show

21. The Algae Opera (2012)
Digital Design Weekend, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
21
• Interactive performance and audience consumption piece
• Deep lung capacity of opera singer produces CO2 to feed algae to
feed the audience
• BioArt as commentary on agricultural futures (produced by Agri)

22. Tissue Engineered BioArt
22
• Semi-Living Worry Dolls (Oron
Catts & Ionat Zurr 2002 SymbioticA
artistic laboratory)
• hymNext Designer Hymen Series
(Julia Reodica 2006)
• BioArt Exhibition Issues
– Maintaining wet bioart in a gallery
– Technique-sharing with local
biologists, bioreactors
– Living-matter transport (e.g.; UK
Human Tissue Authority)
– Artist/Biologist collaboration (e.g;
BioArt Initiative RPI)

23. 23
http://www.siembieda.com/burg.html
Human systems (heart, lungs) representation of commercial
building energy consumption (San Jose, CA 2010)
B.U.R.G. (Building User Response Gizmos)

24. Concepts in Natural Aesthetics
24
• Digital Art and Natural
Aesthetics: anything involving
technology and art and biology
• Concepts
– What is real? Authentic?
– Discipline portability
– Form and function
– De Novo creation
– Individuality and Sociality

25. Best Science Pictures of the Year
25
Neuro-synaptic
Computer Chip
3D CT Scan of Clam and
Whelk Shell
MRI of Human Brain
White Matter
• National Geographic coverage
– 2012 International Science and
Engineering Visualization Challenge
– 2009 BioScapes Microscope Imaging
Contest Water Flea Crown of Thorns

26. Aesthetics in Fluorescent-staining
26

27. 27
Framsticks (2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9WVF6c8E7c
Tentacular - Evolved Virtual Creatures (2007)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm2n_ped-TA
Microscale Biomimicry:
Artificial Life (A-Life)
• A field of study and an
associated art form
• Art or Science? Multiple
practitioners and
intentions
– Science: examines systems
related to life, its
processes and evolution
– Art: for art’s sake
Practitioner Intent: Science

28. Artificial Life (A-Life)
28
Practitioner Intent: Art

29. What is Generative Art?
29
• Art created with the use of an autonomous system
– System independently determines features
– Minimum conditions for a set of marks to function as an
image? Depends on intent
Generative Art - Computers, Data, and Humanity | Off Book | PBS (2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0OK1GiI83s
Condensation Cube
(Hans Haacke 1963)
Evolved Noise
(Karl Sims 2012)
77 Million Paintings
(Brian Eno 2007)
AARON, the AI Painter
(Harold Cohen, 1995)

30. Macroscale
Biomimicry
30

31. Macroscale Biomimicry
31
Himalayas Water Tower
Winner Evolo 2012 Skyscraper Competition
http://www.evolo.us/competition/himalaya-water-tower/

32. Biomimicry for Natural Dwelling
32
Living Treehouses (Fab Tree Hab) – (Mitchell Joachim 2003)
Tree Circus

33. Theory of Place:
“Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (Heidegger
1951)
33
• Feeling at
home, placeness, dwelling
• Central theme of dwelling1
– Not the conventional shelter or
lodging
– As human implacement, being ‘in’
place
• Dwelling makes becoming
possible
– The placeness of place
– Meaningfulness of our being
1Liu F. On Place-ness of Place: ‘Dwelling.’ The Sustainability Collection.
http://ijs.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.41/prod.461

34. Dwelling: The City
34
• Living in cities:
– Over 50% worldwide population in 2008
– 5 billion in 2030 (estimated)
http://www.unfpa.org/pds/urbanization.htm

35. Masdar
Energy City of the Future
35

36. Reconfiguration of Space: Vertical Farms
36http://www.evolo.us/architecture/vertical-farm-in-san-diego/, http://www.verticalfarm.com/

37. 37
Reconfiguration of Space: Transportation

38. 38
Reconfiguration of Space: Seasteading

39. De Novo Production of Space
39
• ‘Home’ trope in technology
• Organizing physical and virtual space
– Physical-world: co-working, co-housing
– Online-world: social networks,
Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram
– Virtual-world: video games, ARGs
• Virtual placeness
– How can we build virtual places for
dwelling meaningfully?
Dwelling Virtually

40. Concepts in Natural Aesthetics
40
• Digital Art and Natural
Aesthetics: anything involving
technology and art and biology
• Concepts
– What is real? Authentic?
– Discipline portability
– Form and function
– De Novo creation
– Individuality and Sociality

41. 41
• Is it all right to interfere with natural
processes?
– Just a better way of ongoing manipulation
buy humans (e.g.; plant and animal
breeding)?
– What constitutes a qualitative change?
Nodes: crop-breeding, GMO, SynBio
– Order of magnitude issue – how can we think
of change at the new paradigm level or order
of magnitude level (Kuhnian paradigms)
• Different set of concerns in de novo
generation?
Philosophical Issues in Biological
Innovation

42. 42
Synthetic Biology (SynBio)
• Definition: the (re)design and construction of
new biological entities such as enzymes, genetic
circuits, and cells
• Goal: deliver function, safety, and beauty
• Metaphysical issues (nature of reality)
– ‘What is life?’
– DNA change necessary for a ‘different’ organism?
– What are living machines, in themselves?
– Ontological classification and naming
• Ethics
– Practice standards:
safety, accountability, documenting work
– Unintended consequences, dual-use debate
• Epistemology
– Limits on biological knowledge-seeking?
“This century’s transistor”
Source: Swan, M. Synbio Revolution: Biology is the Engineering Medium, 6/26/11
http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2011/06/synbio-revolution-biology-is.html
Artificial ligase enzyme
Mycoplasma laboratorium

43. 43
Current Opinion in Chemical Biology
December 2012
Volume 16
Issues 5–6
Pages 461-622
Mechanisms • Aesthetics • Molecular imaging

44. 44
Synthetic Aesthetics
How would you design nature?
• Connecting synthetic biology, social
science, and art and design1
– Teams: Bioengineers and Synbio
Designers
• Molecular Design Aesthetics
– When we make new molecules should
they be beautiful? Are naturally
occurring molecules beautiful? What is
an ugly protein?
– Is ‘form follows function’ relevant? Can
function be beautiful?
– What aesthetic criteria to apply?
Aesthetics of chirality
1http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/H01912X/1 and
http://www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/media/Synthetic%20Aesthetics.pdf

45. Concepts in Natural Aesthetics
45
• Digital Art and Natural
Aesthetics: anything involving
technology and art and biology
• Concepts
– What is real? Authentic?
– Discipline portability
– Form and function
– De Novo creation
– Individuality and Sociality

46. Quantified Self (QS) Art
46
Quantify Me (Laurie Frick 2013)
Fries by Month (Lauren Manning 2010)
Quantified Creativity (Amy Robinson 2013)

47. CrowdArt
47
Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 3, 'Water Night' (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3rRaL-Czxw

48. 48
Unprecedented Crowd Access to the
Tools of Creative Production
Printing Press Blogger, Twitter, Flickr
Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest
Scribe
Midi Keyboard Garage Band, SoundcloudOrchestra
Computer-generated
Imagery (CGI)
Spore
Creature Creator
Animation

49. Summary: Philosophical Issues
in Natural Aesthetics
49
• Proliferation of realism categories
• Representation accuracy and authenticity
– InfoViz: representing the unrepresented
– Synbio: creating the unrepresented (de novo creation)
• Portability: using another discipline’s medium
– Artists -> biology; Scientists and engineers -> biology
and art; Artists, Scientists, Laypersons -> data
• Multiplicity in practitioners and intentions:
artists, scientists, laypersons
• How to dwell meaningfully in new spaces
• Pervasive inseparability: form and
function, individuality and sociality, technology and
aesthetics

50. Natural Aesthetics:
Digital Art and Philosophy in
the Era of Technologized
Biomimicry
Melanie Swan
Philosopher in Residence
MS Futures Group
+1-650-681-9482
m@MelanieSwan.com
June 6, 2013 - Stanford University
Slides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga
Thank you!