Biofaction’s Markus Schmidt will be holding a talk in Copenhagen on the 15th of May 2015;
Bacteria, Art and other Incommodities: Bacteria in Art, Sciences and Humanities
An interdisciplinary conference in cooperation with Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Medical Museion and Goethe-Institut Dänemark, Copenhagen: 15.05.15
Arranged by: The Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Medical Museion and Goethe-Institut Dänemark
Time: May 15th 2015, 09:00
Place: Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, 1260 Copenhagen
Program and backgrounds: http://
The event is free and open to all.
“We live in the age of bacteria” – thus, puts the paleontologist and evolution biologist Stephen Jay Gould an apparent paradox to a point: For it precisely these – the oldest, smallest, most ubiquitous and abundant as well as structurally simplest, diverse and variant organisms – that become increasingly the focus of attention when we pose the question, today, of the nature of life itself. All of this goes to the heart of the human self-image, bringing bacteria both as matter and as a metaphor squarely into the center focus for philosophy, art and the natural sciences. The conference explores why, how and when bacteria broke the boundaries of specialized disciplines and began to serve as materials, motives, models and metaphors in new contexts of knowledge production. The spotlight, however, will be focused on bacteria, ‘booster’ of the emergent research fields at the intersections of medicine, natural sciences, humanities and the arts.
The event is the second co-production within the Strategic Partnership in Arts and Culture between the Goethe-Institut Dänemark and the Department for Art and Cultural Studies of the Copenhagen University. It is realized in collaboration with Medical Museion (Copenhagen) and Micro Human (Berlin). Invited experts from Denmark and Germany will discuss the potential of the emerging network to intertwine social, philosophical and industrially relevant perspectives and ways of thinking, between art-based research and research-based art, architecture and art history as well as media- and literature studies through to epistemology, medicine and synthetic biology.
In addition to the multi-perspective academic exchange of ideas, there will be an art performance open to the broader public.
Take a look at the event and day schedule HERE.
