Adam Zaretsky (1968, USA) is an artist, performer, researcher and art theorist. He practices bioart (embryology, parasitology, etc.) using a wide range of media-strategies and technologies in his projects. In 1999 graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Art and Technology, MFA), where he assisted in teaching the History of Art and Biology course with Eduardo Kac. The next two years he spent as a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) in the Arnold Demain Laboratory for Microbiology together with Joe Davis. Taught the experimental Art and Biology class for the Conceptual/Information Arts Department at the San Francisco State University; at the Contemporary Arts Center Exploratorium (with Julia Reodica, San Francisco), and also co-taught with Oron Catts at the Sci-Art Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia's Art and Architecture Department (Perth, Australia). While researching he works out various forms of bioart focusing on the installation with such elements as environment, cookery (radical nutrition), on performative animalism and laboratory experiments in the sphere of body manipulation. Author of several scientific and literary publications and projects in the sphere of molecular biology (including the social artistic research "Workhorse Zoo" realized in collaboration with Julia Reodica within the show "Unmediated Vision" at the Salina Art Center, Kansas, 2002). Since 2002 A.Zaretsky has been teaching the experimental bioart class VivoArts for the Integrated Electronic Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New York, USA).
Adam Zaretsky is a teacher and practitioner of VivoArts: Art and Biology Studio. Art and Biology is an emerging and politically charged techno-artistic field. Immersion in the world of scientific study exposes artists to the 'other' culture and refines their process and commentary. Often hidden from ideas of free play and improvised action, scientists can glean healthy novelty and even inspiration through close contact with the less regal but often more innovative clan. Included in his Biological Art Practices are such non-laboratory based movements as Live Art, EcoArt, Food Art and Animal Interrelation Art. An active student of Developmental Biology and Transgenic Theory and Practice, Adam believes GMOs are a transnational and diasporic issue for both humans and the rest of the lifeworld. Human desire is reshaping evolution for contentious ends. Designer babies, goat milk pharmacies, racialised germ warfare· the coming century will prove to be another test of world resiliency in the face of the least mature organismic organization: mediated pop culture.
Adam Zaretsky has been published in Nature Magazine, The New York Times, Red Herring, Leonardo, The Washington Post and Johnny's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader. He has spoken at Harvard, NYU, CAA and SCIARC.
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Adam Zaretsky did a DNA workshop on October 4th (more details)
