ART-PRESENTATION: Designing The Living
The new ways of habitation that are on show at the exhibition ”Designing The Living” at Center Pompidou, are not only impressive but also dreadful, because they actually show us the gate that will lead the human being to the future. If these images in the past looked like science fiction scenarios, today all that is happening around us and next to us is just a picture of how things will evolve in the near future!
Text & Photo: Efi Michalarou
In this era of digital technologies, artists draw on the world of biology, developing new social and political environments based on the issue of the living. The group exhibition “Designing the Living” offers a prospective presentation of the recent work of some fifty designers, in addition to research from scientific laboratories. Between biology and genetics, design takes a cross-disciplinary approach, like a biotechnological artefact where living matter dictates the form. Design now turns to ‘bio-manufacturing’ and new ‘disruptive technologies’ around living matter. Bio-materials, made from organic life (fungus mycelium, laminar algae, bacteria and yeasts, etc.) have led to new sustainable, biodegradable objects. To create the architectural sculpture “Living”, David Benjamin uses a new building method based on fungus mycelium bricks which grow together and are assembled by bio-welding. Micro-organisms are transformed into an architectural medium and building material. Studying the behaviour of life (animals or plants) leads to innovative architectural design producing new forms of nature, between the digital ecosystem and living systems. The artists of the exhibition question the links between the living and the artificial, as well as the processes of artificial recreation of life; the manipulation of chemical procedures on living matter; self-generating works with ever-changing forms; hybrid works of organic matter and industrial material, or the hybridisation of human and plant cells. In the digital era, a new interaction is emerging between creation and the fields of life science, neuroscience and synthetic biology. The focus now lies on matter itself. The notion of “living” takes on a new form of artificiality, somewhere between inertia and momentum.
Info: Curators: Marie-Ange Brayer and Olivier Zeitoun, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, Duration: 20/2-15/4/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 11:00-21:00, www.centrepompidou.fr
