Biofriction Radio collects podcasts interviewing Biofriction artists in residence exploring evolutionary biology, artistic practices, and thoughts from experimental research with biotech.
In the eighth episode of the podcast, we listen to Joel Ong, artist in residence at Cultivamos Cultura.
Joel Ong is a media artist whose work typically involves artistic and scientific perspectives of the environment expressed through sound, video and interactive elements.
In the first part of the podcast, the artist presented himself and his different areas of study in relation to the pandemic era. Within this context, Joel describes and discussed his projects during his online residence at Cultivamos Cultura.
During the residence, he continued to work on his project Frozen sound: Bioart and the atmospheric microbiome which explores how emerging processes of computational creativity can be an alternative resource for scientific understanding of the environment.
The research looks at DNA and transgenics as a way to cast light on a primordial by reversing genetic mutation through CRISPr, retuning each sample to its ‘wild type’.
The project proposes and tries to answer these questions:
“what if cloud-seeding was not just about organizing particles in the air, but reconfigure the particles in the air itself to hold and reveal genetic stories? What would it say, and how would the wind recast these narratives, activate scenography’s, and be a medium that is the message? How could we affect a ‘sensory revelation’ of the atmosphere through a previously described hybridity between the arts and the sciences, and yet retain a mythical or transcendentalist quality of the elements?” (Joel Ong)
—–