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As part of the new Berggruen Institute Transformation of the Human (ToTH) program, artist Agnieszka Kurant discusses her work in relation to the evolution of labor, knowledge, creativity, nature and surveillance capitalism with the philosopher and anthropologist Tobias Rees of the Berggruen Institute and pioneering synthetic biologist Drew Endy of Stanford University.
Participants: Agnieszka Kurant (Artist & Artist Fellow, Berggruen Institute), Drew Endy (Pioneering Synthetic Biologist, Stanford & President, BioBricks Foundation)
Moderator: Tobias Rees (Director, Berggruen Institute Transformation of the Human & Reid Hoffman Professor of the Humanities, New School for Social Research)
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Conceptual artist, Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social and economic systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism and the evolution of labor and creativity, her works often behave like living organisms. Her past exhibitions include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center and commissions for Palais de Tokyo, Witte de With, Cleveland Triennial, Moderna Museet, Bonner Kunstverein, Tate Modern and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a Berggruen Institute artist fellow.
Drew Endy is bioengineering faculty at Stanford University and BioBricks Foundation president (biobricks.org). His research teams pioneered amplifying genetic logic, rewritable DNA data storage, reliably re-useable standard biological parts, and genome refactoring. Drew helped launch the new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford; he also co-founded the iGEM competition, a global genetic engineering “olympics” now engaging over 6,000 students annually (igem.org). Drew was a co-founder of Gen9, Inc., a DNA construction company and served as director while Gen9 was successfully acquired. Esquire lists him as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century.
Dr. Tobias Rees is the Director of the Transformations of the Human program at the Berggruen Institute and Fellow of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR). Rees’ expertise lies at the intersection of anthropology, art history, the history of science, the philosophy of modernity and the study of knowledge. More specifically, he is interested in how categories that order knowledge mutate over time—because of humans, microbes, snails, the weather, AI—and the effects these mutations have on conceptions of the human. The main areas of Rees’ research have been the brain sciences, global health, the microbiome, and AI.