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UC Irvine has put out a call for artists who want to manipulate the building blocks of life as we know it to create art as we’ve never known it – works made of living organisms that owe their existence to biological engineering rather than evolution.
The project’s director, David Familian, said he doesn’t expect any modern Victor Frankensteins to apply – although he concedes it’s almost inevitable that the public, which tends to get queasy about scientifically engineered life forms, might think so, or fear so.
Familian is artistic director of the university’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. It recently invited artists to apply for a chance to create a new artwork using techniques in synthetic biology – the burgeoning science of fiddling with DNA strands that exist in the natural world to produce substances, organisms or, in this case, aesthetic objects or images, that expand upon what nature has to offer.
The exhibition at the Beall Center is tentatively called “Traces of Vitality” and is scheduled to open Feb. 6, 2016. The centerpiece will be the...