Joe Davis (artist)

Joe Davis with the '"Golden Nica" of the Prix Ars Electronica 2012 for his Bacterial Radio
Galaxy: Earth Sphere, in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Fall 1989)

Joe Davis (born 1950) is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT, and in the George Church Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. His research and art includes work in the fields of BioArt (using molecular biology and bioinformatics), "space art", and sculpture, using media including centrifuges, radios, prosthetics, magnetic fields, and genetic material. Davis' teaching positions have been at MIT, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the University of Kentucky.

Davis' works include the sculpture Earth Sphere, a landmark fog fountain at Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the MIT campus;[1] RuBisCo Stars, a transmission of a message to nearby stars from the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope in Puerto Rico, carried out in November 2009;[2][3] New Age Ruby Falls, a project to create an artificial aurora using a 100,000 watt electron beam fired into the magnetosphere from a NASA space shuttle (which has not yet been carried out);[4] and Microvenus, a piece of symbolic art involving engineering the genetic code of a microbe (one of the first uses of DNA digital data storage).[5][6][7]

  1. ^ Joan Brigham (Summer 1990). "Steam Heat" (PDF). Places. 6: 42–49. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-08-07. Retrieved 2010-05-23.
  2. ^ Joe Davis (18 Nov 2009). ""Rubisco Stars" transmission to extraterrestrials (Centauri Dreams Blog)".
  3. ^ "ET: Check your voicemail (from MIT News)". 24 Nov 2009.
  4. ^ "The Brilliantly Weird World of MIT's 'Mad' Scientist". The Daily Galaxy. Oct 2008.
  5. ^ "Viewing Space".
  6. ^ Joe Davis. "Artistic Molecules, Microbes, and the "Listening Microscope". "New Media" is Very Old".
  7. ^ Joe Davis (1996). "Microvenus". Art Journal. 55 (1): 70–74. doi:10.2307/777811. JSTOR 777811.