< All Programmes
Art And Science 2018
The Art + Science programme at KHOJ was initiated to advance projects that explored artistic applications of emerging thoughts and technologies with the help of partners from the scientific industry and academia. The programme fostered a dialogue between artists and scientific concepts, phenomena and technology through practice.
About this edition
OPEN DAY: 29 March 2018
at KHOJ Studios
6pm onwards: Open Day and exhibition walkthroughs with artists.
KHOJ’s interest in Art and Science is in promoting a dialogue between artists and scientific concepts, phenomena and technology through practice. It fosters the creation of new expert knowledge in the arts by extending artists’ practice in connection with fundamental research.
Instituted by KHOJ and supported by Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, the Art + Science programme was designed to advance projects that explored artistic applications of emerging thoughts and technologies with the help of partners from the scientific industry and academia. In 2018, the Art + Science Grant funded a small number of projects that engaged emerging themes around science and technology. The grant consisted of a six-month research and development period culminating in a four-week residency and Open Studio at KHOJ in March 2018.
Darya Warner and Puneet Kishor
MycoPrinter is an open source 3D bioprinter that prints mycelium substrate ready for inoculation with various types of fungi. MycoPrinter combines additive manufacturing with plant biological tissue to create living organisms sculpted into artistic shapes. As such, it brings together engineering, biological sciences, and art under the umbrella of open citizen science. The printer would allow printing relatively fine details that otherwise would be difficult to sculpt using regular mycelium growing techniques of mold-making. Any artist wanting to work with mycelium would be able to use the MycoPrinter. In this project, we started with a DIY 3D printer kit and modified its print head to extrude biological substrate. Starting with a 3D printer allowed us to focus on the substrate and its extruder. A well-regarded ready-to-assemble 3D printer kit based on the open source RepRap project can be combined with a multi-substrate paste extruder, or better yet, an open source syringe pump design to create a basic 3D bioprinter.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Goutam Ghosh, and Susanne Winterling
Project Speculation: Desert takes off from the two interlinked futurist descriptions of anthropogenic impact on the planet: the desert planet and the drowned world. The desert planet and the drowned world from one angle seem to be absolute opposites: the latter the result of global warming leads to melting polar arctic ice and the permafrost layer, producing apocalyptic visions of gigantic tsunamis, unconquerable floods, and drowned cities or countries, while the former represents the desertification of the planet, loss of greenery, biodiversity and arable land, with widespread hunger, drought phenomena and so on.
From another angle, the desert planet is the ultimate future, for many deserts of the present were not too long ago covered in water, or lush greenery, and teeming with life–whose presences remain to this day. In India and the subcontinent, there is no dearth of examples of parts of the country suffering droughts, desertification, and flooding at the same time, leading to widespread destruction of property and loss of life- not just human life, but all manner of flora and fauna.
Nuclear apocalypses of the Cold War period have been replaced by these apocalypses for a new epoch in the new millennium. If statistical models and extrapolations such as the planetary boundaries model are acknowledged, then one can see that these problems of our time will only intensify, leading to scientific visions and science fictional visions merging with spiritual-apocalyptic visions of the end-times.
The project maps this merging from three intersecting nodes: the geo-cultural, the biological, and the science fictional, uniting the theoretical and practical engagements of the three different members of the group. At the heart of this project is what we call the “speculative desert.” This speculative desert will be researched, classified, and designed in terms of fictional and real deserts, the real and imagined creatures and technologies that inhabit these deserts, the socio-cultural life in these deserts, and the geological peculiarities of these deserts and their futures.
