Research in the sciences of new-media arts aims to develop original research questions and borrows many different interdisciplinary research methodologies that often involve collaboration with professionals from non-art fields to provide real investigations. Over the last four decades, new-media arts provided unlimited strategies to integrate the laypeople into real interactive conversations allowing them to express their opinions and reflect their concerns regarding boundless scientific, environmental, political and ethical issues. Within this context, this article illustrates the parallel and growing attention to perform effective joint public engagement projects between both new-media arts and biological science domains and how biological science could benefit from the new-media arts projects to allow the laypeople to actively participate in decision-making processes regarding critical biological issues that seek more open and democratic biological investigations. This article, therefore, monitors the developments of public engagement as a concept in biological sciences and its practical principles, which they have been enhanced under the influence of today’s new-media arts strategies of engagement. As an extension of the existed efforts, the article, finally, highlighted one of the most recent international conversation led by the author regarding an assumed new-media arts protocol to use stem cells in new-media arts labs and the role of such protocol to secure the highest standard level of public engagement, by which the laypeople could control and reshape the future of generative biology and personalised medicine.
New media arts take inspiration and tools from new technologies and scientific research. In turn, they have great potential for communication of science and its role for sustainability.
The author created a neural interactive artwork in the form of a holographic puzzle in an attempt to expand the functional role of the neural brain activities in the interactive artistic processes. With synchronous neural communication being the structural concept for this project, the experimental setup connects the display system of puzzle pieces with the participant’s electrical brain activities via an EEG system. This experiment reveals the effect of the functional expansion of the participant’s neural responses and the possibility of analyzing the interactive processes quantitatively in an operational interpretation of the neural dimension in interactive arts.
Bio-pixels is a stem cell-based interactive–generative interface designed to investigate the concept of ‘self-making’. The project uses stem cells as a biological prototype of an identity-free substance and defines in vivo stem cell differentiation processes as nature’s self-making technology. It therefore considers in vitro-induced differentiation processes as artificial self-making technologies that were recontextualized through the interactions between the world of genes and the world of bits. The project’s system was functionally built based on three operational principles derived from convergence technologies that facilitate a mutual functional shift between bio-media and digital media and reveal the extent to which this shift leads to a reconciliation between our biological and narrative identities. Empirically, the project remodelled visual maps of cellular activities during the induced differentiation processes by which cells acquire their identity. Finally, a generative biological–digital mirror was architected by which the viewers see their faces resynthesized as the result of the interactions between the artificial remodelled differentiation processes and the participants’ activities at the project’s physical place and its Twitter page. Within this context, Bio-pixels highlights the consequences of today’s bioinformatics on in vitro artificial processes of self-making through which the public can control, enhance or resynthesize their identities.
This protocol aims at building a methodological synthesis to understand cancerous cells not only by bio lab's facilities but also by new-media arts lab's tools, applications, and vision. The template illustrates potential technical, conceptual, and aesthetic inputs derived from the new-media arts lab. On the other hand, three output channels have been emphasized to contribute to the core of the stem cells research, public engagement, and the core of the research in new-media arts.
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