Screener for Is This Art? - Volume 4: MEART The Semi Living Artist DVD available online from http://www.artfilms.com.au.



Blurring the boundaries between the fine and applied arts.

Is This Art? is a fascinating new 12 Volume DVD series featuring interviews with leading practitioners and conceptual artists from media, performance, visual art music and sound.

Each episode presents a series of interviews with contemporary artists intercut with images and recent footage of their work. The interviews provide insight to why, how and for whom these artists create their work, and where their passion and artistic inquiries originate from. Where are the boundaries between science, technology, politics, popular culture and art? Viewers are challenged with the question while witnessing the freeflow of imagination.

VOLUME 4

MEART The Semi Living Artist
The film is an account of a geographically detached, bio-cybernetic research and development project exploring aspects of creativity and artistry in the age of new biological technologies. Created by SymbioticA Research Group (Guy Ben-Ary, Philip Gamblen, Iain Sweetman, Stuart Bunt & Oron Catts) from SymbioticA - the Art & Science Collaborative Research Lab, University of Western Australia in Collaboration with the Steve Potter Laboratory, Atlanta, USA, the unique installation is distributed between two locations in the world. Its brain consists of cultured nerve cells that grow and live in a neuro-engineering lab, in Atlanta in Dr Steve Potters lab. Its body is a robotic drawing arm that is capable of producing two-dimensional drawings. The brain and the body communicate in real time with each other for the duration of the exhibition.

MEART The Semi Living Artist has the ability to sense the outside world through a camera that acts as its eyes. It has the ability to process what it sees through the neurons that act as its brain. It has the ability to react accordingly through the robotic drawing arm that acts as its body. The Internet functions as its nervous system. MEART is a geographically detached entity.