Our alumna Lucie Strecker & Klaus Spiess present their project “Hare’s Blood +“ among other artists at the exhibition “Wetware: art | agency | animation” in Irvine, California, USA.

WETWARE features art in the light of today’s convergent living technologies. Whether touching upon the brain’s position between spiritualism and metabolism, or microbes that possess the technical ability to make gold and clean water, contemporary artists who employ laboratory methods in the context of Synthetic Biology are getting particularly “close to life” today.

The core of the biotechnological live performance and installation Hare’s Blood + is a specifically designed artistic biobrick, a standardized genetic sequence, that Spiess and Strecker manufactured in order to allow an audience to speculate on the increasing value of bio-banked parts of ‘artistic animals.’ In order to question the exploding prices of artworks that incorporate animal relics in the light of a counter-economy as envisioned by Joseph Beuys, they opened one of the two hundred multiples in which Beuys himself had shrink-wrapped hare’s blood. The installation consists of the original, opened Beuys multiple, Sublation I, and Sublation II, the cooled transgenic yeast with 67% surviving and 33% apoptotic cells, tracing the actual decomposition of the cells at the moment the winning bid was submitted.

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When?
6th February to 7th May 2016

Where?
Beall Center for Art + Technology
712 Arts Plaza
Irvine, California, USA