Neurobiotics, Health and Plant life in Art Practice

French Artist Alizée Armet and Australian Installation Artist Gabby O’Connor discuss their work, and the melding of science and art. 

Dr Gabby O’Connor is an artist, transdisciplinary researcher, Antarctican, science communicator and educator. Her work operates across multiple disciplines and audiences– between contemporary art, science communication, social science and community action, and looks at different entry points to conversations to science, place and our changing climate. She frequently collaborates with scientists, other artists, researchers, policy-makers, audiences and school students, thinking beyond normal definitions of stakeholder and public. This strategy acts as an access-point for diverse communities to be part of the conversation around science with artistic methods as the delivery system.

Alizée Armet seeks to shift our perception of the world by questioning the anthropocentric frameworks that shape our relationships with living beings, machines, and environments. She is positioned at the intersection of art, biology, and computational technologies, artist-researcher. Her works are conceived less as autonomous objects than as sensitive ecosystems: dispositifs in which humans, non-humans, biological materials, and technical infrastructures coexist, interact, and transform one another.

Taking the form of installations, interactive environments, or experimental systems, her works incorporate plants, bacteria, sensors, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and digital devices. These hybrid assemblages make it possible to explore forms of distributed intelligence, interspecies communication, and augmented materiality.