Jul 7, 2022
In our second episode with the amazing Laura Splan, we talk about the rewards of providing exhibition opportunities for others, the promise of the NFT as a viable distribution model for long format video art, transfiguration!, the roll of magic in art, how our relationship to science, technology and medicine emerges in our daily lives, the beauty industry’s deliberate misuse of the language of spirituality & science in the service of marketing, the enchanted language of spam email and the use of blood as a medium and a metaphor.
Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her artworks exploring biomedical imaginaries have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and the Triënnale Brugge. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design, Pioneer Works, and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NYU’s Langone Art Collection, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Her recent exhibitions featuring molecular animations and material artifacts of laboratory animals include her large-scale immersive installation in the Brooklyn Army Terminal at BioBAT Art Space. She is currently developing a new series of collaborative artworks with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson for a project supported by the Simons Foundation. Her research as a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC Creative Science incubator included collaborations with scientists to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape. She is now a NEW INC Artist-in-Residence at EY where she is collaborating with the Cognitive Human Enterprise at EY on projects and research exploring the implications of virtual technologies. Splan often creates public engagement with her projects to make concepts and techniques behind her work accessible to audiences with programming including everything from all ages bacterial transformation workshops to remote textiles collaborations.