Photograph: © Royal Academy of Arts, London, David Parry

 

December 4, 2019 / Studio, Daisy
Eco-Visionaries at Royal Academy of Arts      

 

We are delighted that The Substitute is included at Eco-Visionaries at the Royal Academy, open from 23 November 2019 - 23 February 2020.

October 29, 2019 / Studio, Daisy
The Rapoport Award for Women in Art & Tech 2019

 

We are delighted that Resurrecting the Sublime received received the Lumen Prize's Rapoport Award for Women in Art & Tech 2019. 

August 8, 2019 / Studio, News
Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2019

 

We are delighted that Resurrecting the Sublime received an Honorary Mention in the Artificial Intelligence & Life Art category at the Prix Ars Electronica 2019. This year, the Prix received a total of 3,256 entries from 82 countries. We will show documentation of the project in the CyberArts exhibition at OK OÖ Kulturquartier, as part of the Ars Electronica Festival. 

May 11, 2019 / Studio, Events, News
Nature– Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

The Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial opened simulataneously at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC and at Cube design museum, Kerkrade, Netherlands, on the 10th May. The organising museums commissioned a new work, The Substitute, and a new edition of Resurrecting the Sublime where visitors can smell the extinct Orbexilum stipulatum, last seen (and smelled) in 1881, in Kentucky, US. 

Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

February 18, 2019 / Studio, Events, News
Resurrecting the Sublime launches at Centre Pompidou, Paris

Resurrecting the Sublime, a major new collaborative project, launches today in the exhibition La Fabrique du Vivant, curated by Marie-Ange Brayer, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. The project is a collaboration between Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sissel Tolaas, and an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers from the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks, led by Creative Director Dr. Christina Agapakis, with the support of IFF Inc. You can read more about the project here

At the Centre Pompidou, a 1m x1m suspended smell hood diffuses the smell of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock, which was lost around 1912 as its habitat on ancient lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, was destroyed by colonial cattle ranching. Using DNA extracted from a pressed flower specimen from Harvard University’s Herbarium, Ginkgo’s scientists predicted and then resynthesized gene sequences that encode for fragrance-producing enzymes. From this information, Tolaas reconstructed the flowers’ smells. While we know which smell molecules the flower may have produced, the amounts are also lost. Thus, fragments of the smell mix in the hood: there is no “exact” smell. The lost landscape is reduced to its geology (a large lava boulder, as found on the slopes of Mount Haleakala), and the flower’s smell: the human connects the two, and in contrast to a natural history museum, the human becomes the specimen on view.

The work will appear in a number of exhbitions this year, in different iterations and with different flowers. For more information, visit resurrectingthesublime.com



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Photograph: © Royal Academy of Arts, London, David Parry

 

Digital reconstruction of the extinct Hibiscadelphus wilderianus Rock on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii, around the time of its last sighting in 1912. © Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.