Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In his introductory essay to TCR 2-50, Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies, guest-editor Andrew Klobucar outlines the major themes covered in the issue. An annotated version of the “In this issue…” section of his essay functions as a reading tour through Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams:
Klobucar: Kate Armstrong tells us more about the […]

Since the industrial revolution we have struggled to reconcile the now twined notions of progress and obsolescence. Consider Rilke’s 18th Sonnet to Orpheus, written in 1922:
Do you hear the New, Master,
droning and throbbing?
Its prophesying promoters
are advancing.
No hearing’s truly keen
in all this noise;
still, now each machine
part wills its praise.
See, the Machine:
how it spins and […]

“… learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be …” Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseâ„¢
“Let us be transformed!” Artist Jean Tinguely
We are sometimes told that “the future is now,” or informed that there is nothing we can do about our information-driven economy and inevitable technological transformation. I am profoundly skeptical of […]

Artists not only comment on the communicative metaphors of genetics, they also comment on how genes can be combined to create life forms that are simultaneously innovative, fascinating, and disturbing. There is a long historical tradition of public fascination with freaks, chimeras, monsters and the grotesque. Artists tap into this history, from the literary tradition […]

This portion of Sandra Seekins’s essay on the The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art also bring us many promises and perils of translation, a thorny topic that recurs again and again in this issue of The Capilano Review. As Seekins tells us, Eduardo Kac’s controversial and ongoing work Genesis begins with the imperialist […]

“It is a new era and we need a new kind of art.” Eduardo Kac
Sandra Seekins writes in her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, The language of DNA, the metaphors used to describe it, and how this information is “translated” is also a concern for biotech artists. Brazilian-born […]

“… it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified …” William Gibson, Johnny Mneumonic
Other artists have begun to alter (even interrogate) notions of portraiture and self-portraiture by constructing identity in relation to, and often critical of, […]

One group that has been involved for several years with biotech issues is the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Founded in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida by Steve Barnes and Steve Kurtz, CAE is a collective whose members have recently staged their responses to the paucity of public debate on the biotech industry. [For more on CAE, […]

In her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, Sandra Seekins writes: “Biotechnologies reveal that bodies are composites of replaceable parts, open to reorganization, surveillance, and psychological and physical modification or augmentation. This can be an unsettling proposition, but one that is faced by artists concerned with the metaphors and […]

Contemporary art practice is being transformed (as art has always been) by technological imperatives, and art has a contribution to make in terms of raising the level of public awareness about the technical, economic, political, and social discourses surrounding biotechnologies. Artists working with biological materials or genetic engineering inhabit what is arguably the most controversial […]