Lecture "TISSUE CULTURE POINT OF VIEW" by Tagny Duff (Canada)

Lecture and meeting organised by the North-Western Branch of the NCCA,
the PRO ARTE Foundation
and the Biology Department of the St Petersburg State University.

September 25, 2012 (Tuesday) 6.30 pm

TISSUE CULTURE POINT OF VIEW

 lecture by Tagny Duff (Canada)
St Petersburg State University

September 26, 2012 (Wednesday) 7.00 pm

Meeting with the artist Tagny Duff (Canada)
The Pro Arte Foundation

 
Canadian artist Tagny Duff employs a broad range of modern media technologies in her science art and net art. She has made many solo projects, including installations and performances.

The artist is interested in the issues of preservation and transmittance of data using biological media. Some of her works deal with the usage and cultural perception of viruses. In her work, Duff relies of biotechnologies and scientific equipment and thus demystifies them for the public. 

The first methods of cultivation of separate organs appeared in the beginning of the 20th century, and later they were able to deal with tissues and cells. Doctor Honor Fell, head of the Strangeways Lab in Cambridge and one of the pioneers in this field, coined the very formula ‘tissue culture point of view’. He used it to prove that in vitro tissues can be an object of research and that turning away from organism to tissue culture does not distort the big picture. On the contrary, watching the tissues allows for dynamic investigation, not just vivisection. The lecture of Tagny Duff will be focused on the various tissue processes that help look at the living matter in a different way.

The Tissue Culture Point of View project presented at the I.P. Pavlov Memorial Apartment in terms of the Contemporary Art in Traditional Museum Festival will show how the changes in size – for example, the size of lab equipment – have changed the perception patterns. In her new video installation, Tagny Duff reverses the top down perspective of a scientist looking at the Petri dish, making it bottom-up. 

Tagny Duff will also tell of her other works, such as her current projects Cryobook Archive and WetNet, in which she creates conceptual prototypes of environmentally friendly lab equipment. These works employ agar, mould fungi, and human tissue cells infected with lentivirus. 

The lecture and the meeting are held within the framework of the Special program of the 11th festival “Contemporary Art in the Traditional Museum”.

Free entrance!

Address of the lecture:
St Petersburg State University
Chair of Botany of the Biology Department
Auditory B1
7/9 Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya, entrance from Mendeleevskaya Liniya
The volunteers will be waiting at the entrance to the Twelve Collegia Building.

Adress of the meeting:
The PRO ARTE Foundation
3, Peter and Paul Fortress
PRO ARTE lecture hall