For our 10th Anniversary Festival, Subtle Technologies presents practitioners of arts, sciences and medicines, and those who study their context, historians, ethicists, and other critical thinkers to contemplate how these disciplines can work together and reshape perspectives on the body.
Main theme of this year is in situ: art | body | medicine.
Subtle Technologies festival, a multidisciplinary event where artists and scientists come together to discuss, demonstrate and exhibit their work. Subtle Technologies challenges specialists, including physicists, geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, film-makers, architects, dancers, painters and musicians to contemplate the ways art and science act upon one another and reshape our perspectives.
As scientific and technological breakthroughs prominently occupy our culture, we ask where the boundaries are. We are interested in investigating how we relate bodies in situ: as parts, as a whole, as systems; how we identify, map, modify, protect, violate, and heal.
Exhibitions
Whose Body is it, Anyway?
Subjects of Hybridization
Children and Youth Picture SickKids Hospital Photo Exhibition
Performances
Biography Becomes Biology – Terrill Maguire and Carol Anderson
Grace State Machines: Flesh Bodies – Bill Vorn and Emma Howes
Bubble – Claudia Wittmann e Paul Couillard
Panel discussion & online forum on art, science, and the emotional response
Bioart, an emerging art form that uses the biological as its medium, explores the vast possibilities of biotechnology. Due to its controversial nature – artists working with life forms – bioart tends to generate an array of emotions. If art is a way to express the indescribable and science is a way to explain it, we would like to investigate and contrast the responses and results drawn from artistic and scientific practices. What is behind the process of discovery – how does it manifest itself? How does society’s perceived role of the artist or scientist influence their work? As the work is released into the public domain, how does it translate as a societal response?
MODERATOR: Sally McKay
KEYNOTES: Oron Catts, Artistic Director of SymbioticA, artist/researcher, curator SymbioticA, University of Western Australia/ Abigail Salyers, Ph.D. Arends Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Department of Microbiology and School of Medicine University of Illinois, Urbana/ Michael G. Schmidt, Ph.D., Director, Office of Special Programs Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Microbiology and Immunology Medical University