Oron Catts: Metabolic Rift Technologies and other Monsters

Artist, researcher and director Oron Catts is giving a talk at Kunsthal Aarhus

• Time: Wednesday August 14 2024, at 15:30-17:00
• Location: Kunsthal Aarhus, J. M. Mørks Gade 13, 8000 Aarhus C

The Environmental Media and Aesthetics research programme and Kunsthal Aarhus are hosting this artist talk by Oron Catts. The talk is open to all.

Oron Catts is a pioneer in the field of biological arts. He founded the Tissue Culture & Art Project in collaboration with Ionat Zurr in 1996. He is also co-founder and Director of SymbioticA: The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, the University of Western Australia. His art projects has been featured in venues such as NY MoMA, Centre Georges Pompidou, Ars Electronica, and more.

For more info, contact researcher Pernille Leth-Espensen (ple@cc.au.dk) or professor Jussi Parikka (parikka@cc.au.dk).

Oron Catts’ visit to Aarhus is co-sponsored by the Artificial Biology (ArtBio) conference, iNANO, where he is also giving a keynote lecture.

Oron Catts
Metabolic Rift Technologies and other Monsters

In the year 2000, Ionat Zurr and I grow our first piece of cultured meat as an artistic intervention. In 2003, we eat lab grown meat as part of our Disembodied Cuisine installation/performance, with other projects to follow. Our interest was always to do with the profound questions that the idea of growing meat from no bodies raise. This talk will explore and unpack our artistic projects that deals with the ways current applications of biological knowledge confuses our cultural understanding and relationships with the concepts of life, nature and land. It will present the ideas of Metabolic Rift Technologies, and highlight the urgent need to culturally scrutinise Prometheanism; extractive approaches that considers Earth as a resource for human needs and wants where human innovation and technology will solve environmental problems. Metabolic rift technologies call for separation from nature following a similar mindset that leads tech companies to promote the Metaverse as a nature free site for human habitation, obscuring the environmental costs of such existence.

The talk will conclude with another Promethean story, covering the discovery, at the Orkney Islands, of material evidence relating to the story of Frankenstein.  

Bio
Oron Catts is Director/Academic Lead of University of Western Australias’s Institute of Advanced Studies. He is Co-Founder and Director of SymbioticA: The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Human Sciences at the University of Western Australia (UWA). SymbioticA was awarded the inaugural Golden Nica for Hybrid Arts in the Prix Ars Electronica in 2007, and the WA Premier’s Award in 2008. In 1996 he founded the Tissue Culture & Art Project with Ionat Zurr. As part of this project they were the first to grow (2000) and eat (2003) cultured meat, and in 2004 a tissue engineered lab grown “Victimless Leather”. Catts was a Professor at Large in Contestable Design at the Royal College for the Arts UK, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University and a Visiting Professor at the School of Art, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Helsinki. Catts curated thirteen exhibitions, published several books and more than a hundred book chapters, journal articles. His art projects featured in venues such NY MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Mori art Museum, Science Gallery London and Dublin, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China, and more.

Read more about Oron Catts on the homepage: https://tcaproject.net/about/