The Medicine + Media Art Initiative is a multi-layered artistic and scholarly endeavor that serves as a national and international hub for the artistic exploration of contemporary medical science and biotechnology. The fellowship will act as a conduit for advancing new projects and artistic research that reimagine the medicalized body, corporality, notions of embodiment, posthumanism, and the effects of our environment on our sense of bodily presence and well-being in the world.
In a time of pandemic conditions, the exchange between media art, medicine and the medical humanities in particular foregrounds the critical role of art practice in negotiating the human experience. And while medical science has evolved over time in culturally specific ways that are not value-neutral, media art and its related discourse have advanced the social, ethical, and humanistic investigation of medicine. Embedded in this network lies the interconnected categorizations of gender, race and class—intersectionality—as media art and medicine explore the corpus and its hidden landscape under the skin.
Through lectures, exhibitions, symposia, and the production of original creative work, The Medicine + Media Art Fellowship will bring together various collaborative partners that include: UCLA’s Art|Sci Center, the California NanoSystems Institute, and School of Medicine; the Sam Fox School of Visual Art, the School of Medicine, the Institute for Public Health, and Medical Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis; Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Stuttgart; Angewandte University of the Arts, Vienna; Ars Electronica; Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology (ISAST); Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA); and Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA).