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Willard Straight Theatre

Central Campus

Documentary and post-screening Q&A with Joe Davis

The fantastically true story and around the world journey of a peg-legged artist, philosopher and the father of Bio-Art, Joe Davis.

Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis documents the life of an artist who is drive to pursue questions that can only be answered in the space where science and art lose their individual distinction. Why would someone want to encode poetry into the eyes of a fly, fish for paramecium or send transgenic organisms into outer space? Joe Davis' projects can seem fantastical, impossible, even ill-advised. A deeper look into his work reveals a hidden logic that is surprising and contagious - more philosophy than art.

Working with hundreds of hours of footage shot over ten years from around the world, archival footage, photographs and interviews from respected scientists and artists, Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis not only answers these questions, but illuminates why these questions are important now, at this moment in human history.

About Joe Davis

Davis is a research affiliate in biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School. He has taught in MIT’s graduate architecture program and at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research and art includes work in the fields of molecular biology, bioinformatics, BioArt, “space art” and sculpture, using such media as centrifuges, radios, prosthetics, magnetic fields and genetic material.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Physics, his visit is part of the first Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” April 7 to May 2, 2014.