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Press Release

8th Annual International Exhibition
10-03-06

September 30, 2006 – January 15, 2007
Organized by Art & Science Collaborations, Inc.(ASCI)

Queens, N. Y. – The aim of Digital’06: Bio/Med SciART is to explore how the health, medical, biosciences and biotechnologies are influencing the content of contemporary art through the lense of the digital print medium.

Most often, topics such as bio-warfare, bird flu, designer babies and cloning grab mainstream media attention. However, for many, the thrill is in learning about the amazing medical science/technology breakthroughs occurring in the diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and cures of illnesses. Today, more and more artists are mining these fields for information, inspiration and even new venues for their art.

Throughout history, artists have demonstrated a curiosity for knowledge about how the human body [and mind] work. For some, the childhood influences of having doctor or health professional parents or visits to natural history and science museums surface in their artwork. Today we even find individuals who have degrees in both art and the medical / biological sciences. Unfortunately for others, their newfound interest is foisted upon them because of a personal medical diagnosis, from the loss of a loved-one, or a fascination with the macabre and their own mortality. It is also just as easy to understand how artists’ imaginations are captivated by today’s amazing medical breakthroughs and exciting [frightening to some] experimental research. Additionally, getting a large grant for furthering one's scientific research today can depend on the scientist's visualization skills and/or their collaboration with artists. And many scientists grew up in families that stressed the importance of the arts and have always been around creatives, scientists and artists alike!

In this exhibition, artists, art-science teams, and scientist-artist individuals were among those selected from an international open competition of 223 images. The digital prints include cover a broad range of Bio/Med issues and aesthetic styles, but all have a highly graphic sensibility related to this year’s theme: Brad Smith's “Totem & Embryo Series” is inspired by how the human embryo has become a nexus for deliberating what it means to be an organism, human, a person, and a citizen; Rob O’Neill’s 3-D, graffiti-style DataProjections are the result of a biological anthropologist’s research through the eyes of a high-tech artist; Debora Bork’s sensitive, photomontage illustrations combine human anatomy with nature and printed words to touch on the mortality and connection of all living things; Deborah Cornell’s “Species Bounday: Wind Map” looks at the geoanalysis of wind currents affecting the migration of physical matter (including genetic escapes) worldwide; Andrew Reach [an x-architect] turns his own physical challenges into visual meditations; the selected digital painting from Chris Twomey’s “Madonna Series” recontexualizes classical religious painting and iconography via contemporary mother and child images superimposed onto a background of phylogenetic maps showing the child’s haplogroup, as traced by the mother's mitochondria DNA; and Mara Haseltine’s “Stem Cell Mandala” provides an micro, almost sci-fi view of the inner cell mass of a blastocyst, reflecting on the potential of these yet undifferentiated cells. Click on the link to Artworks & Artists Info, because this is just a small glimpse!

Jurors
This year’s competition selections will be made in an art-science collaborative process between ASCI Director, Cynthia Pannucci, and Ramunas (Ray) Kondratas, Curator of the Medical Collections in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Juror Bios: http://www.asci.org/artikel797.html

Exhibition History
ASCI was one of the first organizations in the world to recognize the digital print as a valid fine art product in 1998 by organizing an afternoon panel discussion, “Collectibility & the Digital Print.” It was held in Great Hall at Cooper Union, New York City, in conjunction with our first international digital print competition/exhibition.

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