light, only light

source: factcouk

A magnetic resonance scan of the artists’ brain has been 3-dimensionally printed and its surface covered with transgenic, bioluminescent moss, developed with a technique similar to biomarkers that are routinely used in science. Presenting us with a plant that emits light, Jun Takita comments on the possibilities of manipulating and transforming the innate characteristics of living beings through new tools and methods in the sciences. Takita presents the transgenic as an achievement of the human brain that allows for the creation of plants with the ability to emit light in a way that only certain animal species could traditionally do.

With a background in sculpture backed with research in plant sciences, the artworks of Jun Takita manifest his interest in the natural dependency on light of living beings and the role it plays in the cycle of life.
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source: juntakita-artworks

Jun Takita, born in 1966 in Tokyo, graduated in 1988 from Nihon University, majoring in arts. He received a Masters from Paris Ecole National d’Art in 1992, having received a scholarship from the French government.

He draws heavily from concepts of traditional gardens and their careful and respected arts. Each of his works immerses the audience in the process clocked by the cyclical rhythms of biological and ecological phenomena. Life and death are simultaneously presented and aesthetically represented in the artist’s procedural work around the relationship between man and nature in the era of biotechnology. He collaborates with numerous scientific teams as the Centre for Plant sciences at the University of Leeds (UK), Plant Biotechnology of Faculty of Biology University of Freiburg (DE), CNRS – Université Paris-Sud, MRI Medical and Multi-Methodes(FR), and the Royal Observatory of Belgium Seismology-Gravimetry (BE).
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source: articleno

Jun Takita – Light, only light

The installation consists of transgenic moss, capable of emitting light, which covers a mould of the artist’s brain.

About 3.5 billion years ago photosynthesis opened the way to the abundance and diversity of living organisms in the world as we know it. According to traditional classification, photosynthesizing organisms belong to the plant kingdom. Plants transform light into energy but are usually not capable of bioluminescence. That is, they cannot emit light. With the exception of a few species such as the Dinoflagellata, which belongs to both the plant and animal kingdoms, bioluminescence is only found in a few animal species. In other words, according to the biological evolution, a single organism cannot both consume light as energy and use that energy to emit light. However, genetic manipulation has allowed us to create bioluminescent plants. Acting simultaneously as plants and non-plants, these artificial organisms transgress the ‘laws of nature’.

In traditional gardens the landscape is organized to please the viewer’s perception: his reality and the world around him are brought together as one. Now, by placing these technological plants in a landscape, the viewer sees the light he has ‘himself’ created; a technique of man’s own invention allows him to create a luminous ‘other’. The utopia of our era is the unrealizable desire to possess light. In Light, only light, a sculpture in the shape of a bioluminescent brain superposes the light-emitting man with the light-receiving man, and hence embodies the ability to emit and to perceive.