City and Science Biennial Performance and concerts at MACBA
MACBA participates in the City and Science Biennial celebrated in Barcelona from February 21 to 26. For six days, the City and Science Biennial invites you to reflect on the fact that we live in a time full of challenges of all kinds and on all scales, and on how to address, from a scientific perspective, the crises to which we are exposed today.
The Biennial will focus on the science that observes the relationships of our species with the natural, human and digital environment. It will offer an active and proactive vision of that science that promotes relationships, coexistence and brings us closer together. That which encourages participation and opens the door to greater citizen involvement.
Cities, where most of the population lives today, will appear as the preferred scenario, with the tensions and contradictions that this entails, and with the science that should allow us to resolve them, connecting diverse fields of knowledge, such as social, environmental and health sciences. The vital message of this Biennial will also be present in activities where people working in universities and research centres will share what it means to live doing science. And the arts will also allow you to discover living science in innovative formats and from different perspectives.
This Biennial brings you a lot of proposals to live today's accelerated changes, to live in dignified and equal conditions, to live creativity, complexity, research and its processes, all from science and knowledge.
Programme
Demiurgós
Demiurgós was born from the collaboration of two artists and a scientist from the University of Barcelona who studies planarians, extraordinarily queer beings. They reproduce asexually in a clonal manner or sexually via hermaphroditism. Their immortal bodies contain stem cells capable of regenerating all their parts and functions.
This project explores the crossovers that problematise the anthropocentric Western view of biological life. Demiurgós deconstructs the cellular atlas that science makes of planarians in order to generate conditions of possibility where art and philosophy recover the hidden animal. Reflecting on our limitations, we can imagine the possible and the impossible, based on a sympoietic dialogue in which the planarian and human bodies are intertwined.
Generative and computational music
“Generative music” is understood as music in which the composer establishes prefixed sound materials and rules that govern its evolution over time. This compositional technique can be considered an algorithmic approach to music, which puts it in direct relation with computer science. This City and Science Biennial presents very diverse cases of generative music, from the work of Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny, a pioneer of computational music on an international level, to experimentation with writing code live.