Neus Torres Tamarit Art

Group picture. From left to right: Neus Torres Tamarit,  Dr Christelle Soudy, Bea Haynes, and Ben Murray Binding Art and Science is a workshop developed in collaboration with Dr Christelle Soudy (Francis Crick Institute), artist Bea Haynes, data scientist Ben Murray, and myself (Ben and I as Phenotypica). The workshop responds to Soudy's research in drug design for cancer research.  The objective of the workshop was to use Soudy's lab equipment to do the research, as a metaphor for the designed drug, and the public would have to construct the tumor cell around it. To make the tumor cell, we took the sequence of aminoacids of a real cancerous cell, that Soudy has already worked with, printed it onto paper and cut into sequences.  The real aminoacids are similar in shape, so we made five groups that were representative of those, we assigned them geometrical shapes, and we cut on the CNC pieces of foam with those shapes. In the workshop, people took a sequenc...

We had the pleasure of taking part in the last Festival of Stuff Saturday Extravaganza event at the Institute of Making, at UCL, the past Saturday 24th of March 2018. Slime was an event about polymers, and our stand was called ‘Art from Polymers: Bioplastic, DNA and Fruit Fly Cocoons’, the three polymers that inspire our artistic practice. We had exhibited two artworks; a video artwork, result of the initial period of Neus’ residency at the Reuter Laboratory at UCL, in which microscopy videos of bioplastic and fruit flies cocoons get decontextualized by the macro view and the constantly changing focal plane ( https://vimeo.com/255299709 ). The other artwork was ‘Incubator for Twin Lifeforms’, an installation inspired by the formation of the pupae, and lots of bioplastic samples that people could manipulate. We were also cooking bioplastic live and visitors were very engaged with the process, wanting to know more about what each ingredient does. They were leaving ou...

Metagenomics in Art is a workshop that I developed during my collaboration with the BP Art Exchange at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Metagenomics as a subject is very human and intimate, but the word does not communicate the richness of the subject and its importance to the human condition. Each of us has a host of other life-forms that reside on and in us, some of which are vital to keep us alive, some of which are invasive and harmful. They even leave fragments of themselves in our own DNA, and Metagenomics is the field concerned with how the genomes of the bacteria and viruses that call us home can interact with our health on a fundamental level. At the start of the collaboration with the Tate, we were asked to work in response to artworks that were being displayed in the Tate Britain. Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais, has always been one of my favourite artworks. Ophelia lies there on the point of death, but around her is a scene full of life, and this thought inspi...