Ting-Tong Chang: Sciennes Galleries, Summerhall

Using robotic devices to simulate living animals, P’eng’s Journey to the Southern Darkness brings lifelike characteristics to lifeless animal bodies. The sophisticated mechanism of each automaton contain within them a notion that life can be simulated by art and science. By blurring the line between the animate and the inanimate, these inventions embody a philosophical question to our perception of what makes a living being. This question posed by automatons is still a recurrent theme of science fiction; what we think of the future is in fact deeply rooted in the past.

Synthetica, a special contemporary art exhibition co-curated by Edinburgh International Science Festival, Summerhall and ASCUS Art & Science, will showcase the work of established international artists working in the field of bioart, including renowned artists Marta de Menezes, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Tarsh Bates and Ting-Tong Chang. Through works derived using the tools, techniques and often living tissues of scientific research, Synthetica will explore how our notions of the natural and the artificial may need to change in an era in which hybrid and synthetic life forms have come into existence.