Gut Instinct- Art, Bacteria, and the Gut-Brain Axis Public Discussion

Gut Instinct: Art, Bacteria, and the Gut-Brain Axis Public Discussion Jens Hauser and Charissa Terranova Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency Tuesday, February 9 at 6:30pm The digestive systems of mammals are brimming with internal dwellers. Our guts are teeming with billions of microbes! Yet, it usually is a happy coexistence. We live in a state of mutual symbiosis with these inhabitants: in an alimentary feedback loop, we nurture them and they nurture us. While we provide a hospitable environment in which they can live, they are necessary for our holistic well-being. Various bacteria aid in the digestion of the food we eat. Bacteria like Escherichia coli produce vitamin K and B-complex vitamins for us. Increasing evidence indicates that the microbes in us may affect the functioning of our immune system and our mental health. The microbiota (the actual bacteria) and the microbiome (their DNA) clearly contribute to our well-being. And the good news is that artists are making art about and WITH microbiota! Join us at Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency for a discussion between curator/writer Jens Hauser and Charissa Terranova. They will discuss and take questions about art and the microbiome. In parsing this head-stomach federation, Hauser and Terranova will show how rational thinking is connected to the intestines. They reveal that consciousness and mind are seated in the brain as well as the GI tract. Mind is thus a matter of seeing, smelling, and tasting as well – anything that brings our gut-brain axis to a joyful equilibrium. Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based art curator and writer. As a media studies scholar he is focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He holds a dual research position at both the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and at the Medical Museion/Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, and is a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University. His curated exhibitions include L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003), Still, Living (Perth, 2007), sk-interfaces (Liverpool, 2008/Luxembourg, 2009), the Article Biennale (Stavanger, 2008), Transbiotics (Riga 2010), Fingerprints... (Berlin, 2011/Munich/2012), synth-ethic (Vienna, 2011), assemble | standard | minimal (Berlin, 2015), SO3 (Belfort, 2015), and Wetware (Los Angeles, 2016). Hauser is also a founding collaborator of the European culture channel ARTE and has produced numerous reportages and radio features. Charissa Terranova is Associate Professor of Aesthetic Studies at UT Dallas, author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and coeditor with Meredith Tromble of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016). Inaugural director and curator of Centraltrak, Terranova regularly curates and writes art criticism. She is currently curating the on-line exhibition about art and the gastrointestinal microbiome, Gut Instinct with Davidson College Professor of Biology Dave Wessner. In the fall of 2015 she curated Chirality: Defiant Mirror Images, an exhibition about art and non-superimposable mirror images.