Artist Talk: Ingeborg Reichle in conversation with Günter Seyfried (Vienna) and Georg Tremmel (Tokyo)

Cas9 Nuclease
Cas9 Nuclease. Photo credit: Günter Seyfried.

On December 19, 2017, Ingeborg Reichle will talk about Governing Life, Speculative Design and Conceptual BioArt with the Austrian artist Günter Seyfried (Vienna) and the Tokyo-based Austrian artist Georg Tremmel (Tokyo) and about current developments in the emerging field of do-it-yourself biology (DIYBio) and the encounter of non-professionals with genome editing. The Guest Lecture Series of Ingeborg Reichle’s seminar Molecular Aesthetics: Living Systems in Art and Biodesign focuses on the rise of biomedia’s impact on and transformation of media theory. It is an informative and stimulating opportunity to hear from distinguished artists about what’s going on in the emerging fields of bioart and DIY bio and helps our students to build their network of contacts. Our guest lectures are open to all.

Günter Seyfried has a background in medicine and psychology, which he studied at the University of Vienna, and has strong links to the fine arts, digital art, and media art, having graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Digital Art). He works part time at the New Design University in St. Pölten, Department of Manual and Material Culture, teaching philosophy and art theory. He combines science and art education and develops projects as an independent artist, participating in national and international exhibitions and publications and performing various tasks for Biofaction, Vienna. He is a founding member of pavillon_35 — Gesellschaft für wissenschaftsbasierte Kunst, with Kristin Weissenberger, Moya Hoke, and Sonja Bäumel (pavillon35.polycinease.com, polycinease.com).

Georg Tremmel started collaborating with the Japanese artist Shiho Fukuhara in 2001. In 2005 they founded BCL as an artistic research framework to explore the relations, congruences, and différances of biological and cultural codecs through artistic interventions and social research. The projects of BCL oscillate between proto-speculative design and conceptual BioArt; the artistic themes range from the mixed metaphors of biological and computer codes to the legal and ethical frameworks governing life, the uneasy relationship of biohacking/biodesign/biowarfare, and the connections between radiation, mutation, and genomics.

Georg Tremmel studied informatics, biology, and visual media design under Peter Weibel and Karel Dudesek at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. He is currently a project researcher at the Laboratory of DNA Information Analysis at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Medical Science, focusing on the information visualisation of cancer genomic data. He is also a visiting researcher at Hideo Iwasaki’s metaPhorest biological/biomedia art platform at Waseda University. Georg Tremmel is the founder of BioClub, a community bio space in Shibuya, Tokyo, and the programme director of the forthcoming (February 2018) MeCa (Media Culture in Asia) BioCamp workshop (bcl.io).

Please check the website medientheorie.ac.at regularly for further lecture announcements and updates

Date and time: Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 4:15–5:45 pm.
Venue: University of Applied Arts Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, 1010
Vienna, Lecture Hall 7 (first floor).