Bio-Artefactuality: Conductive Glass
workshop blog
For Donna Haraway, nature, through the trope of artifactualism is made: both fiction and fact. It is as part of this 'particular production of nature' that I have been thinking through means of maintaining living bioassemblages more permanently and have been working on a glass vessel that will connect to a custom built bio-reactor.
I was recently invited to participate in a conductive glass workshop, organised by the Craft Futures research group at Northumbria University and the National Glass Centre at Sunderland University. The Crafting Conductive Circuits in Glass project is a series of cross-disciplinary workshops that rethink the partnership of materials through combining artisanal glassmaking with digital manufacture and interactive electronics.
The idea of a vessel that could technologically communicate with my bioassemblages was too exciting an opportunity to pass up and whilst this may take a while to build into the design, I thought it would be a good starting point for exploring ideas of connectivity. The Crafting Conductive Circuits in Glass project is ongoing and work to date was presented at the AHRC Conference on 25 July 2017 at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.
