JENS HAUSER
Jens Hauser was one of the two keynote speakers who shaped the closing afternoon session of the Symposium. He brought his curatorial perspective to the debate. He began by stating that exhibiting wet biology art practices is still an exception. Curators, scientists and cultural institutions still prefer to confine this new emerging artform in white cubes of representation and metaphor, or clean rooms of visualization of the scientific contents. But artists are already transgressing traditionnal procedures. They are in the labs. Biotechnology is no longer just a topic, but a tool and a means of expression. Hauser continued by posing a number of open questions. What is the role of those ‘bioartists’? To demonstrate, illustrate, investigate or to subvert? Where are ‘true alliances’ between the art world and scientific research? Are garage biotechnology studios around the corner? Is there a new popular culture, materializing technophile fantasies inherited from the digital era?

Hauser speculated that after an era of de-materialization, the relational or the procedural in contemporary art, comes a tendency of phenomenological re-materialization. At a time where what can be done, will be done, artists expose the gulf between the apologetic official discourse of technoscience on the one hand, and paranoia, or reasoned refusal of the rapid acceleration of technical prowess, on the other.

 

Originally from Germany, Jens Hauser is a Paris based independent curator, writer and artist. Author of documentary films, radio art and sound environments shown at international festivals and museums. Jens has a background in media and film theory, psychology and scientific journalism (Münster, Bochum, Tours). Since 1992 he has been a regular contributor to the European Culture Television arte, and the cultural programmess of the German broadcasting stations WDR, NDR, SWR, Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandradio and ZDF. Jens has published widely and has given papers about the interaction of film culture, art and video games, and on contemporary music.

In 2003 Jens curated L'Art Biotech – the first festival of biotechnological art at the National Arts and Culture Centre Le Lieu Unique, Nantes/France. Currently he is involved in two long-term film projects about bioart. His forthcoming curated exhibitions deal with the paradigm of ‘skin as a technological interface’.

 

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