Blaine O’Neill

Blaine O’Neill is a bioartist that plays a huge part in The Sanctuary for Independent Media and their community workshops. O’Neill is an artist, designer, and activist and a member of the performance + art lab Early Morning Opera. With a focus on the permeability of activism, art, biology, architecture, and technology; Blaine seeks to immerse and understand interaction among humans, other life forms, and ecologies. He prefers frequently collaborating with everyone. One workshop he held, “Community Mapping with Slime Mold” used the scientific method to investigate and think critically and forwardly about our social and environmental surroundings. Scientists, increasingly compelled to study “smart” behaviors in lower life forms, use slime mold to solve mazes, anticipate events, and even simulate efficient rail and road networks. O’Neill helped teach participants about the way that we inhabit, design, and shape urban communities. By focusing on the social analogy of individual cells coming together to form a complex, intelligent multicellular organism, we investigated how cities grow and connect, how the people and life that inhabit them move through these networks, and how the configuration of these networks may affect public health, prosperity, demographics, and mobility.  This workshop was part of the “BioArt in an Industrial Waste Land” that was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.