Debunking Naturalness: Wetware Art and Greenness Studies

Dr. Jens Hauser
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and
Medical Museion/Faculty of Health Sciences
University of Copenhagen

In their technical nature, humans tend to culturally hyper- compensate for what they feel they have lost.
This media archaeological talk discusses two case studies. The first concerns contemporary art forms that employ biotechnologies in actual practice. Paradoxically, they emphasize both their ‘aliveness’ and authenticity on the one hand, and their explicit technicity and artificiality on the other. Therefore, the terms ‘life’ and ‘nature’ – both terms only putatively non-technological, need to be disentangled. We encounter a similar problem with the culturally pervasive greenness trope: aliveness and greenness are linked through ‘biofacticity’, the idea of biological artifacts that at the same time grow and indeed are technically constructed from the beginning – the concepts ‘green’ and ‘nature’ need to be uncoupled as well. ‘Green’, symbolically often associated with the ‘natural’, will be addressed as the most anthropocentric of all colors, crucial in human self-understanding beyond color, as percept, medium, material biological agency, semantic construct, and ideology.

Jens Hauser is a Copenhagen- and Paris-based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He holds a dual research position at both the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and directs the (OU)VERT research center for Greenness Studies.

http://ou-vert.ku.dk

The talk will be held in English language.