Capes supports multidisciplinary research from the arts to cutting-edge science, with internationally significant results. Cesar Baio, a postdoctoral fellow in England, is nominated for the Lumen Prize for art and science
Contemporary art is multidisciplinary and engages with cutting-edge science. Artists today are developing projects in fields such as Artificial Intelligence and genetic engineering, and even hybrid environments combining natural and computational systems.
Cesar Baio, an artist and professor at Unicamp who holds a Capes fellowship at the University of Plymouth in England, is working on a project, Culturas degenerativas, with LOIS (League of Imaginary Scientists), which offers a good starting point for discussing the relationship between art and cutting-edge science.
Culturas degenerativas creates a “biohybrid” network in which living microorganisms and artificial intelligence work together.
In an interactive installation, books documenting the human impulse to control and reshape nature are used to grow fungi. The books supporting the installation are literally eaten by fungi. The text is physically destroyed and disappears from the pages.
This process is analyzed by a computer vision program that feeds a reading algorithm based on natural language processing.
The algorithm searches the Internet for texts following the same patterns as those erased and publishes them on Twitter through the project’s account.
The project is competing for the Lumen Prize for art and science, an international award run by a British institution. Online voting is open until September 1st.
Cesar developed the project during his residency at the University of Plymouth. He worked with Lucy HG Solomon of the League of Imaginary Scientists (LOIS), a multidisciplinary U.S. team, with contributions from Jeremy Speed Schwartz (also a LOIS artist) and Scott Morgans (a biologist).
His artistic residency at the university was possible only because he received a postdoctoral fellowship from Capes, Brazil’s Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel.
It is a good example of the importance of public research funding and the losses represented by threatened cuts to Capes’s budget, such as those circulating last week. Innovation and knowledge depend on investment in education and culture. They should be treated as priorities, not as leftovers or luxuries.
In this sense, the image left by the project Culturas degenerativas serves here as a warning, making visible the entropic patterns of human culture that led us to the Anthropocene and the void that emerges from the corruption of knowledge.
Speaking of knowledge, art, and education, I conclude by reminding you that today, August 6, is the last day to apply for the seLecT Prize for art/education, aimed at artists and educators. It will award two winners, one in each category, 20,000 reais each.
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