Event 2 - Maru Garcia's Vivarium

On late afternoon of Thursday, May 10^th, I decided to visit an art installation titled “Vivarium: A Place of Life” by graduate design media arts student Maru García. I finished working out and playing basketball at Wooden Center when I started jogging over to the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). As I made my way up the three-story stairs to Bomb Shelter, I smiled eagerly at the possibility of walking across those air-cutting walkways that connects the building. I entered the lobby of CNSI and saw a few students coming out of an elevator. Perhaps, they have already seen the exhibit, I thought to myself.

I exited the elevator on the fifth floor and noticed that the exhibit was just down the hall. I headed over there and was greeted by a number of folks, including a mother and child, admiring two biospheres with a variety of plants and fungi growing in them, one of which had an opening from underneath and the other was completely self-contained. I noticed that the glass enclosing the two systems trapped the evaporating water and had a few pill bugs. Besides that, the room had some nice lighting with the whirring of the ventilation system echoing throughout. Two sides of the exhibit were projections from video cameras installed inside the biospheres.

Projection and an opened biosphere 

I never thought that life could be turned into an art form until this week when I learned about BioArt, whose purpose is to develop an “organic relationship” between art and the biological sciences (Redmond). Organisms, cells, and tissues become the media, and the kinds of projects they inspire are virtually limitless in scope, ranging from fascinating to unsettling. An interesting instance is a project called “The Xenotext,” in which the artist Christian Bök used a “chemical alphabet” to translate poetry into DNA sequences for implanting into the genome of bacterium. He shares his motivation, "I am, in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem—one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes..." (Bök).

Maru and a closed biosphere

Whereas the lecture explored much of the provocative side of BioArt, this exhibit showed a softer side in comparison. Here, the scope was macroscopic. What appeared as artificial biospheres containing self-sustaining ecosystems conveyed the special, personal relationship between humans and nature, how we coexist with it, sometimes letting the system develop itself and other times trying to control its development for our own purposes (Klena). When I entered the opened biosphere, I felt an intimate connection with the plants around me, realizing that I breathe the same air and share the same water as they do. Despite having an open hole as a handicap, these plants have adapted nevertheless and continued to flourish.

Me inside an opened biosphere

I appreciate that García’s wanted to use “Vivarium” as a platform to not only encourage us to outside the anthropocentric view of nature in light of anxiety over environmental issues but also promote more dialogue between art and science. I recommend this event to anyone who would like to develop a deeper bond with nature.  

Sources:

Bök, Christian. “The Xenotext Works by Christian Bök.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2 Apr. 2011, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-xenotext-works.

Klena, Deirdri. “Interdisciplinary Art Installation Displays Symbiosis of People, Nature.” Daily Bruin, 10 May 2018, dailybruin.com/2018/05/10/interdisciplinary-art-installation-displays-symbiosis-of-people-nature/.

Redmond, Sean. “How Art and Science Fuse in Bio-Art.” CNN, Cable News Network, 7 Feb. 2017, www.cnn.com/style/article/bio-art-microbes-and-machines/index.html.

Images:

Kim, John. “Me inside an opened biosphere.” 4 May 2018. JPEG file.

Kim, John. “Maru and a closed biosphere.” 4 May 2018. JPEG file.

Kim, John. “Projection and opened biosphere.” 4 May 2018. JPEG file.