Archive of Author | Laura Splan

About Laura Splan

Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her artworks exploring biomedical imaginaries have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and the Triënnale Brugge. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design, Pioneer Works, and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NYU’s Langone Art Collection, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Discover, designboom, American Craft, and Frieze. Splan’s research and residencies have been supported by the Jerome Foundation, Institute for Electronic Arts, uCity Science Center, Harvestworks, the Knight Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdepartmental New Media Art courses including “Embodied Interfaces”, “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology” to Engineering, Computer Science, Biology, Math, as well as Art majors. Companion programming for her exhibitions has included illustrated lectures, collaborative textiles performances over Zoom, bioart workshops, and new media art classes. She was a Digital Arts Fellow at AS220 Industries supported by the National Endowment for the Arts where she taught free, all ages workshops in creative coding and physical computing. Her research as a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC Creative Science incubator included collaborations with scientists to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape. www.laurasplan.com (Photo credit: Danielle Ezzo)

Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her artworks exploring biomedical imaginaries have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and the Triënnale Brugge. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design, Pioneer Works, and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NYU’s Langone Art Collection, and the Berkeley Art Museum.  Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Discover, designboom, American Craft, and Frieze. Splan’s research and residencies have been supported by the Jerome Foundation, Institute for Electronic Arts, uCity Science Center, Harvestworks, the Knight Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdepartmental New Media Art courses including “Embodied Interfaces”, “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology” to Engineering, Computer Science, Biology, Math, as well as Art majors. Companion programming for her exhibitions has included illustrated lectures, collaborative textiles performances over Zoom, bioart workshops, and new media art classes. She was a Digital Arts Fellow at AS220 Industries supported by the National Endowment for the Arts where she taught free, all ages workshops in creative coding and physical computing. Her research as a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC Creative Science incubator included collaborations with scientists to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape.

www.laurasplan.com/

(Photo credit: Danielle Ezzo)

Articles with Laura Splan

Mediating our relationship to the molecular world

Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her recent exhibitions featuring molecular animations and material artifacts of laboratory animals include her large-scale immersive installation in the Brooklyn Army Terminal at BioBAT Art Space, NYC.

Manifest Expressions

Laura Splan’s work explores intersections of art, science, technology and craft. Her conceptually based projects examine the material manifestations of our mutable relationship with the human body. She examines perceptions and representations of the corporeal with a range of traditional and new media techniques. She often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to explore culturally constructed notions of order and disorder, function and dysfunction. Her frequent combinations of textiles with technology challenge values of the “the hand” in creative production and question notions of agency and chance in aesthetics. Much of her work is inspired by experimentation with materials and processes, which she mines for their narrative implications and untapped potentials. Her recent work currently on view at NYU Langone Medical Center Art Gallery (New York, NY) uses biosensors to create data-driven forms and patterns for digitally fabricated sculptures, tapestries and works on paper. She is currently developing a series of durational performances with biosensor actuated sculptures and sound.

Biological Imaginings

The elaborate and often fragile, vulnerable nature of the human body, including its thought processes and memories, find perfect correspondence in these works by Laura Splan. Pattern and structure, often referencing neuroanatomical forms, are explored and revealed through delicate works that often employ blood as both imagery and material.