| dc.description | Laura Beloff (FI / DK) has an unusual background in navigating between artistic and academic work. She is an internationally acclaimed artist and a researcher with a research focus and core expertise is in the arts and in artistic methods. She has been actively producing art works and exhibiting worldwide in museums, galleries and art events since the 1990’s. Her interests that are located in the cross section of art – technology – science include practice-based investigations into a combination of technology, biology, IT, biotechnology, and philosophical questions concerning technological manipulation of living matter. The research engages with the fields of: art & science, biotechnologies, biosemiotics, and information technology in connection to art, humans, non-humans, and society. Additionally, to research articles and book-chapters, the outcome of the research is in a form of art works.
Beloff has been a recipient of various grants, art residencies and awards throughout the years. She is a frequently invited lecturer in universities, various conferences and events, and she has engaged in numerous international activities including: participation in international research and art projects, in organizing committees of international conferences and art events, editing an international publication, evaluator and opponent of PhD dissertations, research visits and positions abroad, invited keynote speaker abroad, an expert evaluator for research funding for European Commission, and for Austrian, Norwegian, French and Finnish art & science funding bodies.
2002-06 she was Professor for media arts at the Art Academy in Oslo, Norway. 2007-11 she was awarded a five-year artist grant by the Finnish state. 2009-2010, 2011 she has been a visiting Professor at The University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 2012 she has been Associate Professor and the Head of PhD School at IT University in Copenhagen - where she is part of the REAL-research group. | |
| dc.description.abstract | Title: Techno-Organic Practices in the Nordic Art.
The paper presents recent artistic works from Nordic countries that exemplify a technology-infused mindset that is dominating our (humans) relationship towards natural environment. There is a visible shift from solely hardware- and software-focused new media art works towards practices that include biological matter and natural environment. Roy Ascott has claimed already in 2000: ‘MOISTWARE erodes the boundary between hardware and wetware’ (Ascott 2000). Biotechnology is an engineering discipline that has, in recent decades, entered the realm of the arts. A growing number of artists utilizing technological and biotechnological methods are also inextricably pairing art practices with living matter. Historical antecedents for this type of art can be traced to art that deals with biological or technological matter, for example land art, art that included animals, and digital art works.
The art works presented in this paper (including one from the author) are primarily by artists from the Nordic countries and they are concerned of natural environment. The author has named techno-organic practices the type of artistic practices, which include both biological and technological agencies. The exemplary works present the merger of hardware, software and wetware, as well as they point towards a technology-infused mindset that is impacting the emergence of these works. These artists present new types of understandings of nature/natural environment where it is embedded into a dominant technoscientific logic of today's world. | |
