Joe Davis is going to have one of his lectures at the Musashino Art University

6th October, 2011, starting at 16.30h.

The lecture will be in English, Japanese translation will be available.

We are pround and happy to announce the japanese premiere of Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis, a feature documentary by Peter Sasowsky about the life and works of the polymath bio-artist Joe Davis.

Place: University of Fine Arts (Geidai), Ueno (access)
Date: Sunday, October 2nd 2011
Time: 14.00h (Doors open at 13.30h)
Admission: Free (registration form)

The film will be shown in English with Japanese subitles.

After the screening Joe Davis will be present for a Q & A session.

If you haven’t done so, please go to the film’s Facebook page and ‘like’ it.

Here’s also the announcement in japanese from Geidai’s Art & Media Center.

About Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis
Thirty years ago, a peg-legged motorcycle mechanic walked into the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. They had not returned his calls. The police were summoned. Forty-five minutes later he walked out with an academic appointment. Since then Joe Davis has sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, encoded poetry into DNA, and designed a sculpture to save the world. It’s a great life for a man driven by imagination – except when it’s not. No one pays him. He is evicted from apartments and labs. His uncompromising approach to art and life collides with the world’s banal requirements. This is a story of self- discovery, sacrifice and the complexity of human endeavor, of the price of art and the ecstatic joy of discovery.

About Peter Sasowsky (Producer/Director)
Peter has been producing and directing film and video projects in New York City and around the world for over a decade. He is the founder and director of Serious Motion Pictures, a script to screen production company that produces documentary and narrative films, corporate communications and educational media.

Universal artist, grand seigneur of bio-art and ‘Lebenskünstler’ par excellence Joe Davis will hold a public lecture on Friday, 30th September at 19h at the Iwasaki Lab of the Waseda University in Tokyo. Here are more details in Japanese:

The lecture will be in English with translation into Japanese. That means that it will probably longer than expected. This is a free, public event, but maybe it’s a good idea to come early to get a seat. Here’s more information from the Iwasaki Lab site in Japanese.

Or, as Google Translate has it: Bio-art special lectures father, descended to Tamami!

Date: September 29 (Thu), 16:30 to 18:00
Location: Tama Art University, Hachioji, Department of Information Design Building 25-205

Here the original japanese and the automatic translation.

On the occasion of the publication of the Coded Cultures book, we decided to publish the full dialogue between Verina Gfader and us.

Go on, read it in it’s entire glory. You know you want to.

50 plus 3 questions for BCL aka The BCL meets … Nullnummer

50 plus 3 questions for BCL is a dialogue between BCL and Verina Gfader conducted via a shared online document in June 2010. Discussing the underlying codes and strategies of the work Common Flowers / Flower Commons, 2008-, the dialogue forms the base for the essay Imaginary Agents — Flowers and the Common (in Russegger, G., Tarasiewicz, M. and Wlodkowski, M. (eds) Coded Cultures. New Creative Practices out of Diversity. Springer Wien/New York Edition Angewandte 2011). As a parallel investigation to the theoretical elaboration, this more informal exchange of thoughts pushes the artists’ ideas further into an improvised process of gathering data about their activities and everyday. Subjects of 50 plus 3 questions for BCL include issues of bio-hacking, the common, DIY flowers, tactical practices, societal plants, instructions for actions and Tokyo sites.

And that’s what Amazon has to say about the book:

International Authors from Europe and Asia explain the impact of codes and cultures on society

Through the establishment of new creative cultures, enabled by digital media and global communication networks, new practices and ability profiles of artistic delineations and explorations are gaining new grounds. Furthermore, economic models are eager to create synergies with symbolic values of cultural and artistic programs to deal with the potentials of »creativity«. At the present day it is difficult to predict which catalysts and draft programs can be put into effect for these creative innovation processes. In this book a detailed review from international artists, theorists, researchers and curators will be given on new vectors of creative and artistic coded and cultures departed from digital media related art projects and observation models on the intersection of disciplines like Art, Science, Technology and Design.