Lecture by Jens Hauser: Art in the epistimological turn: How do we know what we know. Given on 8 May 2015 at the Rijksakademie voor Beelden Kunsten in Amsterdam.

ens Hauser elaborates on ‘fruitful’ misunderstanding between arts and the technosciences, especially in the context of the lifesciences. Is there anybody in the exchange that can control to get what he exptects, and is not the unexpected more ‘lively’? Hauser sees art increasingly linked to knowledge production and dissemination, within a larger scope of what he has coined an epistemological turn, in which cultural practitioners less translate and transform what we know, but question how we know what we know.In the particular area of the biological sciences, art can build on its own long history of lifelike imitations and appearances. Contemporary artists who employ biotechnology are particularly ‘close to life’, and the new discipline of Synthetic Biology is well suited to upgrade art historical paradigms of ‘creation’. In parallel, the democratization of lab tools leads to their appropriation by tinkerers and tactical media activists who apply the potential of open source culture from the digital age of Media Art to DIY biology and biohacking.

http://waag.org/fasc