Saturday 29 October, 2–6pm
Murray Edwards College, Huntingdon Road, CB3 0DF 

Join us for a series of talks and a panel discussion with artists, writers and scientists as they discuss Joey Holder's current solo exhibition at Wysing, Ophiux.

Taking Holder’s new film, also entitled Ophiux, as a starting point, invited artists, scientists and writers will discuss and question the constitution of the 'human' and 'animal' biology, exploring the technology around genetic data collection and manipulation.  

We are delighted that the two scientists whose research has provided the starting point for the work in the exhibition will be presenting at this symposium: Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge and Dr Marco Galardini, Computational Biologist, European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge. The event also includes a presentation from artist Katja Novitskova and artist, writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe.

Bookings for the event can be made here.

We are also extending our opening hours at Wysing for anyone wishing to see the exhibition before the symposium, from 11.30am. Plus we are offering transport from Cambridge Station to the exhibition at Wysing then onto the symposium. Details can be found here.
 

Schedule  

2pm, Welcome, Eliza Gluckman, Curator of New Hall Arts Collection at Murray Edwards College, Joey Holder, artist and Lotte Juul Petersen, Curator at Wysing Arts Centre.   

2.10pm, Screening of Joey Holder's new film Ophiux which contains unseen footage from deep-sea expeditions showing the harvesting of organisms for their unique genetic information. The film stimulates current digital technologies used to read genetic data and utilise this for our own evolution.  

2.30pm, Dr Marco Galardini will give a presentation on evolution and how we can use it to understand differences between individuals. 

3.10pm, Katja Novitskova will make a presentation on alien-world and frontier-environment exploration in relation to big data and image production, from the perspective of her work as an artist. 

3.50pm Break, tea and coffee available. 

4.10pm, Dr Katrin Linse will give a presentation on biodiversity, phylogeography and evolution of the Antarctic marine. 

4.50pm, Roundtable discussion with all of the contributors, chaired by Jamie Sutcliffe, writer, artist and publisher with Strange Attractor Press.   

5.30pm, Plenary presentation by Jamie Sutcliffe.  

6pm, Ends 
 

Biographies   

Dr Marco Galardini is a computational biologist interested in microbiology. He holds a PhD in genetics, microbiology and bioinformatics from the University of Florence, where he has studied the genomes of several strains of the plant symbiont Sinorhizobium meliloti. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Pedro Beltrao's lab at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, where he is developing models to predict the impact of 
genetic differences among different strains of the model gut bacterium Escherichia coli, in collaboration with microbiologist Nassos Typas (EMBL, Heidelberg). 

Joey Holder received her BA from Kingston University (2002) and her MFA from Goldsmiths (2010). Recent solo/duo exhibitions include Lament of Ur, Karst, Plymouth (w/ Viktor Timofeev);
TETRAGRAMMATON, LD50, London (w/ John Russell); BioStat., Project Native Informant, London (2015) and HYDROZOAN, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2014). Recent group exhibitions include The Uncanny Valley, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2015); Sunscreen, online and at Venice Biennale (2015); A Plague of Diagrams, ICA, London (2015), WEC - Whole Earth Catalyst, The Composing Rooms, Berlin (2015); h y p e r s a l o n, Art Basel Miami, (2014);
Vestige: The Future is Here, Design Museum, London (2013) and Multinatural 
Histories, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Massachusetts, USA (2013). Holder was a finalist for the Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2013) and was nominated for the VordembergeGildewart Award (2016). 

Dr Katrin Linse is a Senior Biodiversity Biologist, the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge and been a marine benthic biologist with seventeen years’ research experience in the biodiversity, phylogeography and evolution of Antarctic marine invertebrates. She is part of the team designing the first georeferenced Antarctic benthos database, resulting in new Antarctic provinces and an updated biogeography for the Southern Ocean, which is now applied to different taxa. She is involved in the research on phylogenetic relationships of current Antarctic species and their evolutionary histories and has significantly contributed to the discovery of high biodiversity in the bathyal and abyssal Antarctic deep sea, as well as in the recent discovery of the first hydrothermal vents in the Southern Ocean. She has participated in thirteen shipboard expeditions of which four studied hydrothermal habitats in the Southern Ocean. 

Katja Novitskova lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. Novitskova researches ongoing ecological transformations of matter, social and informational processes in the present world, developing personal strategies to render its future forms. With a background in visual semiotics, graphic design and new media, her works range from digital collages to sculpture and installation, collaborative projects and artist publications. In her installation Pattern of Activation (Loki’s Castle) she imagined how robotic deep sea explorers merged with the alien extremophile life forms at Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent site into a new hybrid ecosystem. www.katjanovi.net 

Jamie Sutcliffe is a London-based writer, artist and publisher with Strange Attractor Press. He is co-editor of Ian Breakwell’s DIARY, forthcoming with Occasional Papers, and comprises one half of the Pond Scum Light Show.