Art Meets Science

ECCB has a tradition of organizing Art Meets Science events. This year’s event is a joint lecture by Koen Vanmechelen and Jean-Jacques Cassiman, an artist and a geneticist.

Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen (to the left on the picture) makes iconoclastic sculpture, paintings, glasswork and installations. His daring expeditions into contemporary science, philosophy and ethics have resulted into several internationally acclaimed projects. Most known is The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (TCCP), a vast attempt to create and manipulate scores of chicken breeds from whole over the world into a new species, a universal chicken or Superbastard. Four subprojects constitute the TCCP: Virtual crossing, Experimental crossing , The Walking Egg, and The Accident, Chronicles of The Cosmopolitan Chicken.

Prof. Jean-Jacques Cassiman (University of Leuven, to the right on the picture) is a human geneticist, renowned for pioneering genetic testing and forensic medicine in Belgium and for genetic research on cystic fibrosis. From 1993 to 1999, he was secretary general of the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG). In 1998, he demonstrated through DNA testing that Karl Wilhelm Naundorff was not a descendant of the Bourbons and certainly not Louis XVII. In 2004, he demonstrated that the heart that had been kept in Paris belonged to Louis XVII. For several decades, he has been a key figure in communicating genetic research to the general public and the media in Flanders.

Together they have initiated The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project, a genetic research project that ties art and science together by studying the genetic diversity of chicken breeds and Cosmopolitan Chicken hybrids.