Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi Nell, This is very helpful thank you, I will investigate and through my reading maybe can think in a more informed way on what you are discussing here and understand better the depths of what might be explored / is being explored. As a designer who works in performance contexts, I'm particularly interested in the notions of subject/object and also the idea of the semi-living as fashion designers such as Suzanne Lee explore biomaterials and Bio Couture: http://biocouture.co.uk/ where the bacterial sheets are grown to create fabric for garments. The emphasis is more in this instance on the sustainable aspects of design but there is still the living / semi-living aspect and the subject/object I think coming into play. Best Regards Michele From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Nell Tenhaaf [tenh...@yorku.ca] Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 4:31 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Michele, there are a lot of ways to approach the expansion of aesthetics, some examples I like: Brian Massumi on event-based lived abstraction; Jennifer Fisher on the non-visual senses; Margaret Morse on viewer-turned-participant going back to 1970s interactivity. I've just been looking at the material Oron referred to, found the really interesting Introspective Self-Rapports: Shaping Ethical and Aesthetic Concepts 1850-2006, by Katrin Solhdju that includes Neal White's work and some bottom-up aesthetics basics. -Nell On 2013-09-12, at 3:21 PM, Michele Danjoux wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Oron and Nell, Just enjoying reading your posts. I am finding the discussion fascinating thank you and was wondering what kinds of references might be ones to look at on aesthetics aside of the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy? Thank you Michele From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Oron Catts [oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au] Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:35 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Nell, Interestingly enough- in 2002 we organised a conference titled the Aesthetics of Care, there also was very little reference to the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy. What we had instead was lots of discussion about the non-human on display and references to performance/live art as point of departure for biological art practices. Later, Neal White talked about invasive aesthetics, an idea we liked very much as it yet again disrupt the ocular centric bias of the field. The most intimate relationship one can have with an art work is by digesting, incorporating it into one's body- you can't really do it with a-life... and it is a very different aesthetic experience than just watching But as Samuel Butler wrote in Erehwon, 1872 '...for an art is like a living organism - better dead than dying.' No cascade there... Oron -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Nell Tenhaaf Sent: Wednesday, 11 September 2013 7:30 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone, Oddly, aesthetics has become one of my favourite topics even though I come out of the 70s postmodern and otherwise busted-open art moment. when it was the last thing anyone wanted to invoke. My feeling is that we will get hamstrung in seeking an aesthetic for bioart (or a-life art, or any of the marvellous outlier practices of the past decades) if we drop back to, say Kant - as comforting as that might sound. This came up in the context of a TOCHI (computer-human interaction) special issue I was part of a few years ago, on aesthetics of interaction, which had a lot of good thinking about Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics that keeps real world deployment in view, and in general focused on ways of designing experience or interfaces to engage multiple kinds of embodiments and types of events. One commentator lamented than in the whole issue, the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy were nearly invisible. It was a bit of a shock - although if the concern is to legitimate some k in d of practice or set of practices, then yes, not such a surprising comment. Can't we legitimate at this point if we need to, via practices that we feel have a kinship in their kind of renegade approach to asking questions? - this reminds me of Rob Mitchell's comments about performance art as a key precursor to bioart, linking it with human/non-human
[-empyre-] Redistributing the material world¹s diverse accents
--empyre- soft-skinned space--This is a response to Chris Robbins:
I am answering a request for more definitive notion of art goals.¹ Beyond
what I had said about bioart offering a reading of science and art in the
difficult land of luxurious, useless, process based, conceptual, secular
catechism. This former listing of art goals¹ is naïve modernism
described. I think we are still there in the arts and the sciences,
perpetuating the myth of the Avant Garde or as Laibach and NSK calls it: the
Retro Garde.
http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/258-synthesis-retro-avant-garde-
or-mapping-post-socialism-in-ex-yugoslavia-
http://www.reanimator.8m.com/NSK/zizek.html
Is the goal Tactical bioMedia?
The showcasing or making public of techniques for scientific control over
organismic development has a tactical design. This is a more popular way of
explaining why we do public labs. To bring a hands-on experience to the
untrained crowd-sources demystification and takes relational knowledge to
the sites of contention. It sounds benevolent.
Accused of lowering the bar on a slippery slope.
The other half of Chris¹ question asks for delineation of what I mean by
cruel and unusual arts. Examples:
Tissue Culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOVEf7tVm0
Synthetic Biology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_2uNKGxlzw
Embryology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mve5b8RW6_8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBKgimtgWuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZ6o8FIeiE
Mutant Environmental testing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g1XIpbI_rk
Human Germline Alteration
http://itp.nyu.edu/classes/germline-spring2013/
http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=7002
Firstly, do these Bioart exposures merely normalize our novel ways of toying
with life? Wet-lab bioart has recently been read as a form of DIY Fukushima.
(Loose quote from a rescent public debate about a GMO permit filed with the
Ministry in the Hague to exhibit modified organisms (Solar Zeebrafish and
Bipolar Flower) in the Errorarium at the Ja Natuurlijk exhibition with
representatives: Rob Zwijnenberg, Per Staugaard, Lucas Evers De Waag,,
Herman Bekken Greenpeace, Dirk de Jong Ministery of Economic Affairs and
Miep Bos Gentechvrij {GMO Free EU}).
http://www.biosolarcells.nl/onderzoek/maatschappelijke-aspecten/artist-in-la
b-making-a-field-of-interpretation-for-biosolar-cells.html
It is keen to ask, is citizen science merely a practice of assuaging the
public¹s reactive disgust to new life science? This would be advertising,
the use of fine¹ art as propaganda for the biotechnical bubble we fund.
Actually, many DIY-BIO centres have no problem with the idea that these
hands-on labs would be staged to promote acceptance of the inherent safety
and casual usury that research entails. In fact, often being science led,
they fear the good name of science being help in dissonant hands.
http://genspace.org/event/20131007/1800/Biohacker%20Boot%20Camp
Lust for life
So art can pose prettily for public relations propping up science in a
redundant campaign and art can also chide the public for not being more
active in contestational debate:
http://www.critical-art.net/MolecularInvasion.html
If we uncover the root desire to inflict change, to breed or grow
imagination in lineage form, this is the culturing of lust, the incubating
of desire. Want is inbred and an excess of greed is more than likely a
genetic aberration (potentially curable with gene therapy), but lust for
life just is. What kind of transcendence leaves it¹s chthonic mark in the
brains and germcells of the ones it has come to know? What is life without
lust? Biotech is muddy parasitism.
³The urge to scope and poke, force evolution and morphologically sculpt is a
bridge that joins the Arts and the Sciences. But, I will say this once
because it is quite clear and concise, I think this process is cruel.
Physical Manipulation DevBio Arts as a way towards knowing or sculpting
Development is non-intuitive, intriguing, curious and lovely but there is no
doubt that the process is meddlesome, violent, surgical and often
gratuitously so.²
AZ from THE MUTAGENIC ARTS
magazine.ciac.ca/archives/no_23/en/dossier.htm
More on lust in Bioart:
Viva Vivo! Living Art Is Dead
http://www.emutagen.com/downloads/leonardoZaretsky.pdf
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Another useful source for aesthetics and bioart, in my opinion, is Whitehead. Instead of a judgement, as with Kant, Whitehead considers aesthetics as lures for feeling. Such a position opens up a range of aesthetic consideration of human and nonhuman aesthetics in bioart. (I'm pulling from Steven Shaviro's book _Without Criteria_ for this reading of Whitehead: http://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/WithoutCriteria.pdf). Best- Tyler On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 8:31 AM, Nell Tenhaaf tenh...@yorku.ca wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Michele, there are a lot of ways to approach the expansion of aesthetics, some examples I like: Brian Massumi on event-based lived abstraction; Jennifer Fisher on the non-visual senses; Margaret Morse on viewer-turned-participant going back to 1970s interactivity. I've just been looking at the material Oron referred to, found the really interesting Introspective Self-Rapports: Shaping Ethical and Aesthetic Concepts 1850-2006, by Katrin Solhdju that includes Neal White's work and some bottom-up aesthetics basics. -Nell On 2013-09-12, at 3:21 PM, Michele Danjoux wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Oron and Nell, Just enjoying reading your posts. I am finding the discussion fascinating thank you and was wondering what kinds of references might be ones to look at on aesthetics aside of the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy? Thank you Michele From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [ empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Oron Catts [ oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au] Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:35 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Nell, Interestingly enough- in 2002 we organised a conference titled the Aesthetics of Care, there also was very little reference to the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy. What we had instead was lots of discussion about the non-human on display and references to performance/live art as point of departure for biological art practices. Later, Neal White talked about invasive aesthetics, an idea we liked very much as it yet again disrupt the ocular centric bias of the field. The most intimate relationship one can have with an art work is by digesting, incorporating it into one's body- you can't really do it with a-life... and it is a very different aesthetic experience than just watching But as Samuel Butler wrote in Erehwon, 1872 '...for an art is like a living organism - better dead than dying.' No cascade there... Oron -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Nell Tenhaaf Sent: Wednesday, 11 September 2013 7:30 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone, Oddly, aesthetics has become one of my favourite topics even though I come out of the 70s postmodern and otherwise busted-open art moment. when it was the last thing anyone wanted to invoke. My feeling is that we will get hamstrung in seeking an aesthetic for bioart (or a-life art, or any of the marvellous outlier practices of the past decades) if we drop back to, say Kant - as comforting as that might sound. This came up in the context of a TOCHI (computer-human interaction) special issue I was part of a few years ago, on aesthetics of interaction, which had a lot of good thinking about Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics that keeps real world deployment in view, and in general focused on ways of designing experience or interfaces to engage multiple kinds of embodiments and types of events. One commentator lamented than in the whole issue, the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy were nearly invisible. It was a bit of a shock - although if the concern is to legitimate some k in d of practice or set of practices, then yes, not such a surprising comment. Can't we legitimate at this point if we need to, via practices that we feel have a kinship in their kind of renegade approach to asking questions? - this reminds me of Rob Mitchell's comments about performance art as a key precursor to bioart, linking it with human/non-human population interactions - and it also links up to often physical risk and lots of good subject/object permeability. all best, -n ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[-empyre-] Redistributing the material world¹s diverse accents
--empyre- soft-skinned space--This is a response to Chris Robbins:
I am answering a request for more definitive notion of art goals.¹ Beyond
what I had said about bioart offering a reading of science and art in the
difficult land of luxurious, useless, process based, conceptual, secular
catechism. This former listing of art goals¹ is naïve modernism
described. I think we are still there in the arts and the sciences,
perpetuating the myth of the Avant Garde or as Laibach and NSK calls it: the
Retro Garde.
http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/258-synthesis-retro-avant-garde-
or-mapping-post-socialism-in-ex-yugoslavia-
http://www.reanimator.8m.com/NSK/zizek.html
Is the goal Tactical bioMedia?
The showcasing or making public of techniques for scientific control over
organismic development has a tactical design. This is a more popular way of
explaining why we do public labs. To bring a hands-on experience to the
untrained crowd-sources demystification and takes relational knowledge to
the sites of contention. It sounds benevolent.
Accused of lowering the bar on a slippery slope.
The other half of Chris¹ question asks for delineation of what I mean by
cruel and unusual arts. Examples:
Tissue Culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOVEf7tVm0
Synthetic Biology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_2uNKGxlzw
Embryology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mve5b8RW6_8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBKgimtgWuM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZ6o8FIeiE
Mutant Environmental testing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g1XIpbI_rk
Human Germline Alteration
http://itp.nyu.edu/classes/germline-spring2013/
http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=7002
Firstly, do these Bioart exposures merely normalize our novel ways of toying
with life? Wet-lab bioart has recently been read as a form of DIY Fukushima.
(Loose quote from a rescent public debate about a GMO permit filed with the
Ministry in the Hague to exhibit modified organisms (Solar Zeebrafish and
Bipolar Flower) in the Errorarium at the Ja Natuurlijk exhibition with
representatives: Rob Zwijnenberg, Per Staugaard, Lucas Evers De Waag,,
Herman Bekken Greenpeace, Dirk de Jong Ministery of Economic Affairs and
Miep Bos Gentechvrij {GMO Free EU}).
http://www.biosolarcells.nl/onderzoek/maatschappelijke-aspecten/artist-in-la
b-making-a-field-of-interpretation-for-biosolar-cells.html
It is keen to ask, is citizen science merely a practice of assuaging the
public¹s reactive disgust to new life science? This would be advertising,
the use of fine¹ art as propaganda for the biotechnical bubble we fund.
Actually, many DIY-BIO centres have no problem with the idea that these
hands-on labs would be staged to promote acceptance of the inherent safety
and casual usury that research entails. In fact, often being science led,
they fear the good name of science being help in dissonant hands.
http://genspace.org/event/20131007/1800/Biohacker%20Boot%20Camp
Lust for life
So art can pose prettily for public relations propping up science in a
redundant campaign and art can also chide the public for not being more
active in contestational debate:
http://www.critical-art.net/MolecularInvasion.html
If we uncover the root desire to inflict change, to breed or grow
imagination in lineage form, this is the culturing of lust, the incubating
of desire. Want is inbred and an excess of greed is more than likely a
genetic aberration (potentially curable with gene therapy), but lust for
life just is. What kind of transcendence leaves it¹s chthonic mark in the
brains and germcells of the ones it has come to know? What is life without
lust? Biotech is muddy parasitism.
³The urge to scope and poke, force evolution and morphologically sculpt is a
bridge that joins the Arts and the Sciences. But, I will say this once
because it is quite clear and concise, I think this process is cruel.
Physical Manipulation DevBio Arts as a way towards knowing or sculpting
Development is non-intuitive, intriguing, curious and lovely but there is no
doubt that the process is meddlesome, violent, surgical and often
gratuitously so.²
AZ from THE MUTAGENIC ARTS
magazine.ciac.ca/archives/no_23/en/dossier.htm
More on lust in Bioart:
Viva Vivo! Living Art Is Dead
http://www.emutagen.com/downloads/leonardoZaretsky.pdf
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Also take a look at Claudia Gianetti's book/writings on digital aesthetics (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/). Matt Fuller, Alex McLean, Adrian Ward, Geoff Cox, Florian Cramer (http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/concepts_notations_software_art.html) have witten on aesthetics of software art, in particular. Also see Max Bense's work on computational aesthetics (and Vilem Flusser) I'm editing a book right now (Blackwell Companion on Digital Art that will have a whole section on aesthetics). C. From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Nell Tenhaaf [tenh...@yorku.ca] Sent: Friday, September 13, 2013 11:31 AM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Michele, there are a lot of ways to approach the expansion of aesthetics, some examples I like: Brian Massumi on event-based lived abstraction; Jennifer Fisher on the non-visual senses; Margaret Morse on viewer-turned-participant going back to 1970s interactivity. I've just been looking at the material Oron referred to, found the really interesting Introspective Self-Rapports: Shaping Ethical and Aesthetic Concepts 1850-2006, by Katrin Solhdju that includes Neal White's work and some bottom-up aesthetics basics. -Nell On 2013-09-12, at 3:21 PM, Michele Danjoux wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello Oron and Nell, Just enjoying reading your posts. I am finding the discussion fascinating thank you and was wondering what kinds of references might be ones to look at on aesthetics aside of the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy? Thank you Michele From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Oron Catts [oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au] Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:35 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Nell, Interestingly enough- in 2002 we organised a conference titled the Aesthetics of Care, there also was very little reference to the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy. What we had instead was lots of discussion about the non-human on display and references to performance/live art as point of departure for biological art practices. Later, Neal White talked about invasive aesthetics, an idea we liked very much as it yet again disrupt the ocular centric bias of the field. The most intimate relationship one can have with an art work is by digesting, incorporating it into one's body- you can't really do it with a-life... and it is a very different aesthetic experience than just watching But as Samuel Butler wrote in Erehwon, 1872 '...for an art is like a living organism - better dead than dying.' No cascade there... Oron -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Nell Tenhaaf Sent: Wednesday, 11 September 2013 7:30 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] ah, aesthetics --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone, Oddly, aesthetics has become one of my favourite topics even though I come out of the 70s postmodern and otherwise busted-open art moment. when it was the last thing anyone wanted to invoke. My feeling is that we will get hamstrung in seeking an aesthetic for bioart (or a-life art, or any of the marvellous outlier practices of the past decades) if we drop back to, say Kant - as comforting as that might sound. This came up in the context of a TOCHI (computer-human interaction) special issue I was part of a few years ago, on aesthetics of interaction, which had a lot of good thinking about Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics that keeps real world deployment in view, and in general focused on ways of designing experience or interfaces to engage multiple kinds of embodiments and types of events. One commentator lamented than in the whole issue, the heavyweights of aesthetic philosophy were nearly invisible. It was a bit of a shock - although if the concern is to legitimate some k in d of practice or set of practices, then yes, not such a surprising comment. Can't we legitimate at this point if we need to, via practices that we feel have a kinship in their kind of renegade approach to asking questions? - this reminds me of Rob Mitchell's comments about performance art as a key precursor to bioart, linking it with human/non-human population interactions - and it also links up to often physical risk and lots of good subject/object permeability. all best, -n ___ empyre forum
[-empyre-] Living Experiments
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi all, A wonderful discussion this week. I thank you all for participating! I thoroughly enjoyed -- and I am continuing to enjoy -- all your posts on bioart and related fields. I'm especially intrigued by the discussion on aesthetics. I think that bringing together Neal White, Jennifer Fisher, among others, into conversation with Brian Massumi and A.N. Whitehead et al. is challenging and important work. More thoughts later. I'd like to extend a special thanks to Oron Catts and Rich Doyle for their wonderful contributions this week! This week I'd like to welcome four new guests into the fold: Adam Zaretsky (who is no stranger!), Phillip Thurtle, Maja Kuzmanovic, and Nik Gaffney. Here is a bit of bio for each of our guests: Phillip Thurtle is director of the Comparative History of Ideas program and associate professor in History at the University of Washington. Thurtle is the author of The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in American Biology 1870-1920 (University of Washington Press, 2008), the co-author with Robert Mitchell and Helen Burgess of the interactive DVD-ROM BioFutures: Owning Information an Body Parts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and the co-editor with Robert Mitchell of the volumes Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002). His research focuses on the material culture of information processing, the affective-phenomenological domains of media, the role of information processing technologies in biomedical research, and theories of novelty in the life sciences. His most recent work is on the cellular spaces of transformation in evolutionary and developmental biology research and the cultural spaces of transformation in superhero comics. Adam Zaretsky, Ph.D. is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/non-human) and physiology (performance/stress). A former researcher at the MIT department of biology, for the past decade Zaretsky has been teaching an experimental bioart class called VivoArts at: San Francisco State University (SFSU), SymbioticA (UWA), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of Leiden’s The Arts and Genomic Centre (TAGC), and with the Waag Society. In the past two years he has taught DIY-IGM at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and New York University (NYU). He also runs a public life arts school: VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.) His art practice focuses on an array of legal, ethical, social and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods with a focus on transgenic humans. http://www.youtube.com/VASTALschool http://www.youtube.com/VASTALschool Maja Kuzmanovic holds a Master of Arts in Interactive Multimedia and her specialization is interactive film and storytelling. She is currently director of the Brussels-based laboratory, FoAM, where she works with various art and technology collectives and explores novel modes and resources of cultural expression. She was involved in the development of the Design Technology course at the Utrecht School of the Arts. She previously worked as Artist in Residence at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, and the National Center for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin, Germany. In 1999, Kuzmanovic was named by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine as one of the top 100 young innovators of the year. Her current interests span alternate reality storytelling, patabotany, resilience, speculative culture and techno-social aspects of food food systems. Nik Gaffney is a founding member of the Brussels-based laboratory, FoAM, as well as a media-systems researcher. Gaffney has previously worked as a graphic designer and programmer for Razorfish AG in Hamburg and Moniteurs in Berlin. His studies covered the fields of computer science, cognitive science and organic chemistry at Adelaide University. As one of the founders of the artists' collective, mindfluX, he worked on installation pieces, performances and the editing and distribution of the electronic magazine mindvirus. Gaffney has been an active collaborator in the performance group Heliograph, helping shape their vision for hybrid arts performance. He is a member of and prominent contributor to farmersmanual, a pan-european, net-based, multisensory disturbance conglomerate, whose 'ship of fools' filled the canals of Venice with sound during the 2001 Biennale. ___ empyre forum
