Abstract:

Biomodd is a collaborative new media art project that explores the symbiosis between biological, electronic, and social systems. The project started in 2007 in the United States, and has since spawned multiple versions globally. The Philippine team was led by educators from the University of the Philippines Open University, who organized a course on new media art practice as a springboard for exploring and developing the project. We discuss the imaginative and abstract relationships between biological, electronic, and social systems that learners articulated over the course of the project. We describe how local, culturally-specific narrative elements were imaginatively integrated into the physical and interactive design of the installation, resulting in a technically complex, visually poetic expression of the relationship between nature, technology, and humans that radically departs from the type of student work representative of both art and science university courses in the Philippines.

Keywords:

Biomodd, new media art practice, collaborative learning, interdisciplinary practice.