This collaboration brings together two highly qualified and experienced women working the fields of science and art.
The SciArt Center, based in New York City, published a blog series from the pair. Currently on-going (began 10 weeks ago), they published writings and experiments exploring how scent and smell affect emotions between co-sleeping couples, and how this contributes to the live of the relationship.
Pooneh is a physician, a cognitive neuroscientist, and a clinical hypnotherapist. She also paints and does calligraphy, and considers herself a scientist who is art inspired. Over the blog series, she posted reflective writing, including small anecdotes, almost autoethnographic, while supporting her statements with evidence. She is “especially interested in the neuroscience of smell and the self”.
Joana explores the intersection of art and science in her creative practice and as an educator, and has a background in cellular biology and genetics. She approached the commission pragmatically, and had made 2 agar Petri dishes (though they were square, not round) in the 2nd week. She painted on top of the agar with acrylic paint. One dish was innoculated with a swab of herself and her husband, and the other with a swab of herself, her husband and their 1 year old child, drawing a spiral for each person with the swab. This is similar to Maurizio Montalti’s Bio-Logic, and makes me consider ways I can manipulate the surface of the agar, and treat it as a canvas for the swab-paintbrush, to strengthen the aesthetic parameters of the piece.
In a previous project by Joana titled Other Self Portraits, Joana made a Petri dish from over 400 people. Each one individual, it stands in for the person the sample was taken from, and yet what grows is bacteria that live on our skin, entirely different living beings to us. They are responsible for our smell, and eat our sweat. The project follows from Joana’s notion that:
“…These non-human parts of us [microbes] can’t be dismissed as a biological add-on to the human wetware, they are an essential part of our biology and play an integral if largely unknown role in determining who we are.”
The idea of microbes being responsible for something as fundamental as who we are makes it an exciting subject for an artist. So much art is occupied with understanding the self.
I particularly like this blog series because both writers speak candidly about their motivations and process. They relate their study to broader social and cultural contexts, but write in a way that feels personable, including their subjectivity as researchers (I will discuss this more in a future blog). By showing how they develop ideas, they made the process of research and art production more embedded in everyday life. The researchers are open and honest as they explore microbes as a biological, sensory catalyst for emotion.
I am interested to see how their project develops, as they reflect on their conversations and shared practice.
References:
Ricou, J. (2015) Other self portraits. [Online] Available at: http://microbialart.tumblr.com/page/4 [Accessed: 13 December 2016].
The SciArt Centre (2016) Group 3: Pooneh & Joana. [Online] Available at: http://www.sciartcenter.org/group-3-pooneh–joana [Accessed: 13 December 2016].