Guest Lecture Series - Medientheorie: Anna Dumitriu

The second Zoom guest lecture of the Department of Media Theory will be held in this term by British artist Anna Dumitriu. The lecture will be hosted as a synchronous (real time) online lecture and is scheduled on May 19, 2020 at 2pm.

uesday May 19, 2020
02:00 PM Vienna
Zoom Meeting ID: 282 857 249
Please register with [email protected]

This guest lecture series is organized and hosted by Professor Ingeborg Reichle within her summer term lecture series on Speculative Biologies: New Directions in Art & Biotechnology. The series is an informative and stimulating opportunity to hear from distinguished artists and experts about what’s going on in the emerging fields of bioart, biodesign and speculative biology and also helps our students to build their network of contacts.
Anna Dumitriu will give a talk on Threads Across Time: Combining and Fermenting Two Cultures and discuss the ideas and processes behind her artworks, which are created deeply embedded in bioscience settings. Anna Dumitriu will also describe her extensive collaborations with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford and her residency with the National Collection of Type Cultures, the oldest collection of pathogenic bacteria in the world. She will also introduce her current collaboration Fermenting Futures with the Department of Biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) and the 15th International Yeast World Congress - YEAST 2020 (ICY15), which will take place in Vienna in August 2021.

Additionally Anna Dumitriu will refer to in her presentation how she is able to incorporate relics of some of the most sublime bacteria to have ever existed in her artworks. She will consider the health and safety challenges that she and her collaborators face in producing and exhibiting these artworks, which take the form of sculptural objects or installations and incorporate diverse materials such as altered historical objects or textiles combined with bacteria and DNA.

In her artworks she make links between the history of science or medicine and cutting-edge research in synthetic biology and genomics. She aims for the objects I make to become affecting relics of the sublime processes she undertakes in the lab, as she works deeply embedded in biomedical research settings using new and emerging technologies. She is inspired by historic stories of infection and contagion as well as contemporary research and aim to make objects that enable me question our relationship to scientific knowledge, exploring how beliefs and ideas evolve, drawing threads across time.

Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and technology. She has an extensive international exhibition profile including ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, The V & A Museum, Philadelphia Science Center, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and The Museum of the History of Science Oxford. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts section of the British Science Association and holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, and with the National Collection of Type Cultures at Public Health England. Her work has featured in many significant publications including Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Nature and The Lancet.