Plant and Microbial Art

Catalog description

This inter-domain general education course provides a cross-disciplinary platform for plant- and microbe-facilitated creative production and art-mediated scientific learning. The course balances studio art activities with lecture- and discussion-based learning about integrated science and art topics. Students use the media of plant and microbial pigments, growth, and biology in a hybrid studio-lab environment. The biology, chemistry, and physics of these living and life-derived media are expected to form integral parts of student presentations. Lectures will provide information about broad scientific principles and in-depth learning about specific phenomena underlying the biologically-based media as well as relevant bio-art issues and contexts in which work is produced. Student projects will represent an integration of natural science understanding with artistic expression. Students will be encouraged to go in various directions with their creative efforts, including visual mechanics (light, color, composition), mark making (painting, drawing), meaning making (metaphors, allegories, cultural appropriations), storytelling, sensing (ways of seeing, phenomenology), and new media issues (e.g., post-humanism). Some example types of bio-media and their scientific connections include: plant pigments, which facilitate discussion of light, photosynthesis, basic chemistry and chromatography; bacterial cultures, which facilitate discussion of microbiology, cell biology, and cellular movements; and fluorescent proteins, which facilitate discussion of DNA, RNA, protein structure, mutations, species concepts, and genetic engineering. Student projects integrate the scientific basis of the bio-art media used such that the media become part of the message of the art.