Simone Handelman Duffy

My capstone bio-installation, Time Piece, is grown from things either alive or once living—algae, fungi, bacterial cellulose, even slime mold! These materials demand a collaborative mode of making. You can't force them to do what you want, but rather have to listen to your organic collaborators and create art collectively. Biomaterials and bio-art are burgeoning new media, even though the materials themselves are as ancient as can be. As artists and designers work to build sustainable art-making modes, it is important to undertake critical, ethical, and aesthetic inquiries into this medium. Time Piece asks how fine arts change when they can grow, die, dehydrate, or change form drastically. What does it mean to make art that dies? Might art that dies be the perfect medium for art making on a dying planet? Further, Time Piece uses creative computation to integrate digital displays and motors, complicating the division between nature and technology, allowing us to see the biological and the mechanical in a new relation.