Abstract
Guy Ben-Ary is an artist and researcher at SymbioticA: the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, at the University of Western Australia since 2001. The biological laboratory is his studio, and tissue engineering, electrophysiology, and other biological techniques are his artistic mediums. His work explores a number of fundamental themes that underpin the intersection between art and science; namely life and death, cybernetics, and artificial life. This paper examines the methodologies and theories that underpin his artistic practice by using four major projects as examples: MEART, Silent Barrage, In-Potentia, and cellF, with discussion of terminology, ethics and the idea of robotic embodiment as an artistic strategy.
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.
Donna Haraway [1]
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this paper, the word “I” denotes Guy Ben-Ary. However, this paper is a result of a collaborative writing effort between Guy Ben-Ary and Gemma Ben-Ary.
- 2.
The ‘Tissue Culture and Art Project’ are Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, and during the years of 1999–2003 I collaborated with them (http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au).
- 3.
- 4.
Dr. Bunt has a lab in the school of Anatomy & Human Biology, UWA and was back then the scientific Director of SymbioticA.
- 5.
The collective who developed Fish and Chips and MEART was known as the SymbioticA Research Group.
- 6.
Dr. Steve Potter is an Associate Professor in the Laboratory for neuro-engineering at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA. Potter and his then-Ph.D. student, Douglas Bakkum, were our scientific collaborators and played a major part in the development of MEART.
- 7.
When Douglas Bakkum graduated and left the Potter Lab, Riley Zeller-Townson took his place in the Silent Barrage team. Peter Gee, an engineer, also joined the team. Both were instrumental in the development of Silent Barrage. Dr. Nathan Scott, an engineer, and Brett Murray, a programmer, also assisted in the production of the work.
- 8.
Head of the Laboratory for Pluripotency, University of Barcelona.
- 9.
Director of the Spinal Cord Repair Lab, University of Western Australia.
- 10.
Dr. Bakkum is currently a group leader at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, the ETH Zurich.
- 11.
Electrical engineer from Perth, aka nonlinear circuits.
- 12.
Experimental musician and lecturer at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore.
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Ben-Ary, G., Ben-Ary, G. (2016). Bio-engineered Brains and Robotic Bodies: From Embodiment to Self-portraiture. In: Herath, D., Kroos, C., Stelarc (eds) Robots and Art. Cognitive Science and Technology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0321-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0321-9_15
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