1 BRAVE BIOART 2 R e v i s i t i n g t h e f u t u r eshedding the bio amassing the nano cultivating emortal life Natasha Vita-More Planetary Collegium Montreal 2007
2 Who are the practitioners?BIOART BioArt — What is it? What are the practices? Where did it come from? Who are the practitioners? Where is it headed? “In its purest form, the term “biotechnology” refers to the use of living organisms or their products to modify human health and the human environment. Ancient biotechnologists manipulated and modified organisms, [tampered] with yeast cells to raise bread dough…, bacterial cells to make cheeses and yogurts, and … bred their strong, productive animals to make even stronger and more productive offspring.” (Peters 1993) So what is so alarming and exciting about this brave new world of artists getting messy with biotechnology? It is alarming because the world has awakened to the business of science producing potentially dangerous outcomes due, in large part, to genetics and bioengineering, only to learn that the most radical of professional practitioners, the artist, is also tampering with life forms and may even want to change the human genome. It is one thing for a scientist, geneticist, or biotechnologist to experiment in laboratories which are for the most part institutionally or financially governed. But with the highly creative personality type, things might get into some very murky waters. To understand what is occurring, it is necessary to first look at what BioArt is all about. What are its Mediums?
3 t a x o n o m y BIOART Where did it come from? New Media ArtGenerative Art Cybernetic Art Biotech Art Algorithmic Art Digital Art BioArt
4 BIOART What are the practices? Genetic Engineering CloningHybridization
5 BIOART What are the materials? DNA molecules Cells Tissue
6 BIOART Who are practitioners? Jens Hauser Eugene Thacker Eduardo KacWhat makes biotechnology such an apt medium for expressing art and how does bio offer a new trajectory for artists whose level of sophistication toward technology has outgrown many of their traditional practices? According to Eduardo Kac, “bio” fulfills a “visceral” need of artists which stems from indulgence in a “cold digital art in an attempt to go beyond a detached medium.” In comes the genome and new opportunities in the bioworld. BioArt is relatively new nomenclature without a codified definition and with a somewhat contested meaning. While there is no concretized definition of BioArt, its practitioners have varied views on the parameters of this medium. BioArt is argued to be concerned with art practices that work with living organisms in which the manipulation of mechanisms of life “involves a wide array of forms both with respect to discourse and technique.” (Hauser) The term BioArt and a newer term VivoArts, (Zaresky) is often used as an umbrella term to include artists working with varied types of biotechnology and living organisms. Jens Hauser claims that biotext and biovisual arts reflecting ideas and practices of biotechnology is not BioArt because the artist must work with living organisms. Yet, he also believes that “BioArt interests more and more performance artists specializing in Body Art; structural relationships connecting both disciplines…. As a medium, BioArt cannot be nailed down with a hard and fast definition of the procedures and materials it must employ.” ‘Information’ no longer comes from the outside (disciplinarily speaking) to describe a biological entity such as DNA. Rather information is seen as constitutive of the very development of our understanding of ‘life’ at the molecular level – not the external appropriation of the metaphor but the epistemological internalization and the technical autonomization of information as constitutive of DNA. (Thacker, 2004: 40) Sean Cubitt Melentie Pandilvoski
7 Who are the practitioners?BIOART Dmitry Bulatov georgegessert Eduardo Kac Marta de Menezes Who are the practitioners? Adam Zarestsky
8 One important question to ask is “What is it that [BioArt] brings that we did not have before?” (Kac) Many artists, including myself, have experimented with blood and other bodily substances in our works. But using biological elements does not necessary constitute BioArt. According to a consensus of bioartists,[i] it has to be a “living medium” wherein the art is produced, and not bodily substances such as blood that has expired. In contract, the “living” blood used in Eduardo Kac's “A Positive,” was funneled into a robot which then used the blood’s oxygen to create a spark and ignite a flame. If living organisms must be used in BioArt, then wouldn’t my being alive right now and monitoring my bodily functions be BioArt? I remember a performance piece known as “Breaking Away” wherein I applied sunlight as the main source of energy attenuated by the Earth’s atmosphere to my body being sculpted to a rock formation at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. The heat from the sun radiating through ultraviolet light acted as an antiseptic for my cellular structure and aided in the production of Vitamin D. As my skin and nerve endings were energized, a physical reaction occurred which energized movements which resulted in a dance as an embodiment of energy. As lovely as it may have been, according to performance artists such as Stelarc and I would merely be human performance artists tampering with our bodies and such works would not be legitimate BioArt, or would it? It seems that Hauser’s understanding of this art medium is that it must be living. He also asserts that the medium itself is evolving. Therefore, I see no reason why there is a bias concerning how may cells are involved, its size, physical location, sex, or what species organism of cells ascends from. Some of this I discuss later in the section under “bias.” [i] Notes from interviews with a series of artists referenced above.
9 BIOART What is the medium? Living Matter
10 BIOART
11 BIOART blog Steve Kurtz? where is it headedJens Hauser contends that the key question is whether artists must contribute to new knowledge or if their role is to be implement subversive by questioning concepts
12 BIOART Thacker, E. (2004) Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anna MunsterThe networks of life
13 ROLE OF BIOARTIST/PRACTICEMaking "art" Making "moral claims"
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17 Eugene Thacker Eugene Thacker is a writer, theorist, and net.artist who has been working with hypertext and net.art since the introduction of the Web, presenting work through Alt-X, Ars Electronica, CTHEORY, Semiotext(e), and V2. He has just joined the faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Language, Literature and Communcation. EUGENE THACKER ] Associate Professor ] School of Literature, Communication, & Culture ] Georgia Institute of Technology ] eugene[DOT]thacker[AT]lcc[DOT]gatech[DOT]edu RESEARCH INTERESTS include media studies, science studies, critical theory & post-structuralism, genre science fiction & horror. Thacker edited: HARD_CODE brings together a group of innovative writers exploring the syntax of new media and computer technologies. From net.artists, to science fiction writers, to computer hackers, to practitioners of "degenerative prose," HARD_CODE is a "mis-users manual" for the network society.
18 George Gessert Since the late 1970s I have been breeding plants, concentrating on the native irises of California and Oregon. … When I first exhibited plant hybrids as art I expected to have to defend my work against criticism that plants were not art, but no one, then or now, has raised that question, at least not in conversation with me or in print. There have been plenty of other questions and criticisms, but not about plants as art. This is rather surprising, considering that until relatively recently nonhuman organisms were not exhibited in galleries. Even as late as the 1980s, shows that included works with live plants were extremely rare. Traditional Western dualism maintains that art is one thing, nature another, and never the twain shall meet (except in specialized ways in landscape architecture). That dualism dominated Western gallery art until very recently. But today the art world is more friendly to the Darwinist view that every aspect of culture is an expression of nature. This view, by the way, is also shared by Buddhists, Taoists, and many Native Americans, among others. Today the obstacles to exhibiting hybrids are less philosophical than social and architectural. My installations sometimes invite audiences to participate in making aesthetic decisions that affect the lives and deaths of plants, and these decisions remind some people of eugenics. Occasionally people get hostile, even though I have never used plants as symbols of human beings.
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