Bioart

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries.

In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me (2011) by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

This text aims to present  autoethnography as a method of examining the art & science phenomenon. The meaning of art & science is not limited here to the area of contemporary art. Instead I try to show it as a social phenomenon. In my research autoethnography is combined with art based research and the role of the artist is connected with the role of an academic researcher. This combination is quite complicated, but by preparing an appropriate order of work involved in the case it might lead to really interesting cognitive processes.

With the emergence of Bio Art, biotechnology became part of the art world. By bringing cutting edge technologies closer to the public, Bio Art has provoked wider reflection about the ethics of turning biology into technology and in particular has raised questions about the aesthetic and ethical status of manipulating living organisms. By showing transgenic organisms in galleries and museum contexts, Bio Art drew attention to the fact that biotechnology had already crossed the divide between the artificial and the natural back in the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, the selective manipulation of living organisms for artistic purposes provoked passionate debates about the shifting concept of life, a concept that has changed dramatically since the arrival of biotechnology within the frame of technoscience. Art emerging from the laboratory opened up non-normative debates about life and its limits in the crossover between Bio Art, ethics, sciences, and the humanities, and also framed controversies about the growing influence of science and technology and a bioscience-based economy on our societies as well as on the fine arts. Whereas in the early days Bio Art primarily sought to reveal the state of the art of biotechnology or tissue engineering, current Bio Art practices interrogate the limits, boundaries, frontiers, and frameworks within which life can exist and how fragile these limits are in an age that some have termed the Anthropocene. Altering nature deliberately using biotechnology – in a scientific laboratory or in the kitchen at home – is still a vital topic in Bio Art. However, because we have transformed our entire planet in recent centuries into a kind of laboratory where traditional distinctions between natural and artificial, subject and object, human and non-human agents no longer hold when confronted by the enormous ecological problems and challenges that exist today, speculative biology is now becoming a major issue in Bio Art. One of the most promising approaches of bringing Bio Art and speculative biology into a fruitful liaison is demonstrated in the work of the Turkish artist and researcher Pinar Yoldas, who has lived in the USA for more than a decade.

TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE in Art & Science

The Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University organizes for the second year in a row the interdisciplinary conference “Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science”, including theoretical and artwork presentations.

The conference focuses: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality - as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. This year’s conference is inspired by the work of the pioneers who challenged the linear thinking towards spatial arts and time-based media and the ones who were able to transcend the illusion of reality and the confines of technology. It is dedicated to all those who keep pushing the limits further than the next gadget and understand the essential role of fantasy when synchronized with reality. One step further, one more time, knowing that the truly opening dimension might be towards the voyaging of consciousness.

Organized within the framework of the 2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference “Taboo-Transgression- Transcendence in Art and Science”, by the Ionian University, two exhibitions were integrated in the program of the 11th Audiovisual Arts Festival. The first of these includes scientific presentations through posters and is organized by the Ionian University in conjunction with the A-Club of the Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University. The second one, “Body Esc”, aims to induce a brief reflection on the meaning of the body in the digital and biotechnological age. It features artworks in photography, video and installations created by Greek and international artists.

If narratives that uphold secular humanism have led to an "unparalleled catastrophe" as Sylvia Wynter notes in an interview with Katherine McKittrick, then it is time to unwrite them. In this essay, I examine the dead as a category that exceeds metaphysical classifications of subject and object and provides alternate possibilities of communication and hybridity. To do so, I call on work by Claire Colebrook, Jacques Derrida, John Durham Peters, Eve Tuck, and Unica Zürn, among others, with the cultural work and words of Sylvia Wynter as a guide and galvanising force. Here, I repopulate the life/death seam with gorgons, witches, fates, and revenge stories. If ghosts are seen simply as other beings, albeit taboo ones like bacteria, or require alternate cultural narratives like villains, or exist both in the symbolic sphere of the mystical and the so-called natural world like roses, what kinds of methodologies can be opened? What do the dead have to say and how do we listen?

In recent years " bioart " has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorisations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from preindividual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.

COURSE SUMMARY

The issue of materiality is central to the understanding of the art object, from the use of gold leaf in Medieval icons to assert the wealth and status of the patron, to the preoccupation with the expressive and political potentialities of paint for avant-garde artists in the 20 th century. New technologies continue to emerge at an ever-accelerating pace, while the importance of the medium for the production and understanding of art is responding in kind. New theories are being put forward that address the unique ontological and ethical challenges of the 21st century, especially regarding the prospect of ecological collapse as CO2 fills the atmosphere and industrial byproducts cover the planet. These theories, when considered in relation to contemporary artistic production, help reveal the intimate connection between the material conditions of a society and the forms of art that are produced in it.

The guiding questions for this class will deal with the study of art via its material configuration: art as object, art as medium, and art as a locus for networks of entangled political and technological forces. There will be an emphasis on the lineage emerging from actor-network theory (ANT), as articulated by Bruno Latour and others in the 1980s, which comprises a number of contemporary theories that are preoccupied with the agency and vitality of the non-human realm. We will examine the ways that artists respond to new technologies and use them to complicate our relationship to ourselves and our creations. Furthermore, we will interrogate the role of matter in determining the shape and meaning of both artworks and our lives more generally.

Some of the guiding questions for the class: How do artworks allow objects to speak? How do new technologies challenge dominant paradigms of art making and interpretation? How do we reimagine artworks when we consider their material component as an active constituent of their formation and significance? When materiality is placed at the forefront, how does the analysis and understanding of a work of art change? This question will open onto a discussion of the diminished importance of the aesthetic that is frequently found in theories that focus on materiality. Is there a dichotomous structure at work here – does a study of materiality preclude the aesthetic? How do the two approaches work together in the field of art studies and how do they conflict?

The book of papers on the work of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, artists forming the Tissue Culture & Art Project. Particular chapters analyses different issues, like artistic, ethical, philosophical of their art as well as problems related to posthumanistic contexts of bio- and biotech art and the relationships between art and science.

In this paper, new media art, which is fundamentally associated with technology and science, will be discussed as a contemporary form of artistic avant-garde. In my argument, I will focus on its connections to earlier manifestations of avant-garde mindsets and attitudes, that is, to
historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. I will also address the role of the art world and its institutions in establishing their mutual relationships.

This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity of art-encounters to reconfigure and reinvent the subject. Drawing principally on the innovative conceptualization of habit articulated in the philosophies of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze, where it is theorized as a much more volatile and creative force of repetition that makes change possible, I first explore how habit pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its ontogenetic emergence from material and affective processes and ecologies, as well as its plastic susceptibility to immanent disruption. Second, and through an engagement with the bioaesthetic and micropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that it is precisely on the ontogenetic terrain of plastic habits that art-encounters might be understood to intervene. I unpack this empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), whose ‘semi-living’ installation art, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking perceiving, and relating to the nonhuman.

El arte de las últimas décadas no ha estado ajeno a los sucesos bio-tecno- políticos ocurridos en las últimas décadas, esto es, la imbricación profunda entre los procesos de politización y tecnificación de la vida (así como sus respectivos reversos: la biologización de la política y la incorporación de la técnica). Como no ha cesado de ocurrir a lo largo de la historia del arte como esfera autónoma, éste ha tomado nota de los acontecimientos extramuros, resultado de lo cual han surgido artistas, piezas e incluso géneros que han comentado –con diferentes modos y grados de relación: beneplácito, distancia reflexiva, definitivo rechazo– la expansión de lo que, siguiendo a Scott Lash (2005), proponemos denominar “formas de vida tecnológicas”.
Desde el punto de vista de los medios utilizados, y si se toma la escala del cuerpo humano como base, cabe señalar tres grandes series de prácticas artísticas que pueden leerse como diálogos explícitos con la matriz biopolítica de las formas de vida tecnológicas. Una de ellas es la que utiliza sustancias biológicas como materia específica: elementos pre-corporales o infra-corporales como el ADN, células, tejidos cultivados o conservados, así como pequeños seres vivientes: microorganismos, bacterias, hongos, etcétera. La segunda es la que toma los cuerpos humanos como objeto de indagación: su carácter maquínico, operable o cyborg; su carácter inestable, siempre cambiante, portador de diversos sentidos; su cualidad singular e irrepetible, y al mismo tiempo su ser “cualquiera” (Agamben, 2001: 21). La tercera toma en cuenta, ya como tema, ya como materia (habitualmente ambas cosas a la vez), el tipo de relación que se establece entre los cuerpos: si colaborativas, de sumisión-dominación, de participación. Alude a un tipo de dispositivos que sólo recientemente han sido interpelados desde la perspectiva crítica de la técnica: las llamadas "tecnologías sociales". Entendidas en su doble acepción: en el sentido restringido de los artefactos propiamente tecnológicos que promueven socialidad –los medios de comunicación de alcance masivo, el correo tradicional o electrónico, las redes sociales con base en Internet, teléfonos fijos o celulares y demás–. Y en el sentido más amplio de los mecanismos institucionales que delimitan modalidades regulares, sistemáticas y previsibles de vínculos e interacciones orientados por objetivos prácticos: desde los grandes aparatos tecnosociales de vinculación obligatoria que organizan la vida social de una población hasta, en el terreno del arte, dispositivos espaciales y simbólicos como los museos tradicionales.
Enfocaremos en particular en el primero y el tercero de estos tres tipos de aproximación, en tanto constituyen las dos flexiones más significativas de aquello que mencionamos hace un momento como rasgo de las formas de vida tecnológicas: la tendencia a expandirse más allá de los límites del cuerpo propio.

Living artworks created with biotechnology raise a range of ethical questions, some of which are unprecedented, others well known from other contexts. These questions are often discussed within the framework of bioethics, the ethics of the life sciences. The basic concern of institutionalised bioethics is to develop and implement ethical guidelines for ethically responsible handling of living material in technological and scientific contexts. Notably, discussions of ethical issues in bioart do not refer to existing discourses on art and morality from the field of aesthetics. The latter framework is primarily concerned with how the moral value of an artwork affects its artistic value. The author argues that a successful integration of these two frameworks will make possible an ethics of bioart that is adequate to its subject matter and relevant for practice. Such an integrated approach can give increased depth to under-standings of ethical issues in bioart, inspire new ways of thinking about ethics in relation to art in general and give novel impulses to bioethics and technology assessment. Artworks by the Tissue Culture and Art Project and their reception serve as the empirical starting point for connecting perspectives in art with those of bioeth-ics, developing an ethics for bioart. The author suggests that consideration of the effect of these artworks is vital in validating ethically problematical applications of biotechnology for art. It is argued that the affective, visceral qualities of living artworks may spur the audience to adjust, revise or develop their personal ethical framework.

The emerging technological developments across various scientific fields have brought about radical changes in the ways we perceive and define what it means to be human in today’s highly technologically oriented society. Advancements in robotics, AI research, molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, medicine, etc., are mostly still in an experimental phase, but it is likely that they will become a part of our daily experience. However, human enhancement and emergence of autonomous artificial beings have long been a part of futures imagined in SF and cyberpunk. While focusing on the phenomenon of cyborg as a product of both social reality and fiction, this chapter will attempt to offer a new perspective on selected SF and cyberpunk narratives by treating them not only as fictions but as theories of the future as well. Furthermore, selected examples of the existing real-life cyborgs will show that SF narratives are not merely limited to the scope of imagination but are a constituent part of lived experience, thus blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.

As a non-visual mode of communication, body odour plays a significant role in perceptions of self-identity, the identification of others and the social and psychological aspects of interpersonal exchange. What is more, it is a reflection of our genetic make-up, state of health and our environment. The use of perfume to mask or control body odour is a long-established practice extending from early civilisations. Sprayed on the skin, perfume is understood to stimulate mood or memory, effect cognitive performance or confidence, and even influence sexual attraction. Modern advances in manufacturing technologies however are producing a shift in methods of fragrance delivery. From conventional sprays we are moving toward microencapsulated garments and sensory fashion designs that respond to biometric measures such as heart rate or body temperature. Against this background of technological innovation in fashion and beauty practices, self-labelled ‘body architect’ Lucy McRae has developed the Swallowable Parfum (2011). Wresting smell back into the realm of the conceptual, McRae and collaborator, synthetic biologist Sheref Mansy, propose the release of a unique genetic scent ‘synthesized from the body’s natural processes,’ and emitted through perspiration. Crossing the dermal threshold, Swallowable Parfum internalises what has previously been an external bodily practice. Can McRae’s project be seen simply as an evolution of technological advances predicated on cosmetic surgical procedures that transform the body? Will such a product render subjects alien from their biological selves, and produce crises in relations with others? Does this speculative project widen the scope of olfaction, or can we understand this as yet another way of colonising bodily functions that are recuperated back into commodity? This chapter will explore these possibilities, including the prospect that Swallowable Parfum has the potential to create a revised ‘epidermic self-awareness,’ transcending its own difference to create a new, even if synthesised, embodied subjectivity.

This paper explores the nature of habitual spaces as well as the uncharacteristic ones in the
development of Bio-Arts. I have concentrated on two projects: The BioARTCAMP, led by Dr.
Jennifer Willet, where participants explored the intersections between science and art in a
fully functional biological science laboratory high up in the Canadian Rockies, and TOXICITY,
a total white box experience (Plug-In ICA, in Winnipeg), co-curated by Dr. Willet and myself,
imagined not only as a showcase of the best Bio-Art practices in the country and
internationally, but also as an attempt to reconstruct the current environmental situation
and the socio-political contexts by looking into modes of contemporary cultural and
technological production, which I co-curated together with Jennifer. The project stemmed
from, and unified in many ways, our practical work as curators and artists, but it was
naturally also grounded in our academic work.
The BioArt Camp included building a portable Bio-Lab on the premises of an ex-internment
camp (where Ukrainians were held in the Rockies during WWI), with a very engaging Open
House event in order for the public to interact with the artists and scientists, as well as a
Conference. The complexities of setting an improvised but fully functional biological science
lab up in the Canadian Rockies certainly refer to phenomenological aspects of spatiality,
giving a deeper meaning to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of habitual space, referring to neither
‘explicit comprehension nor blind reflex’. The nature of the BioArt Camp as public space
added art-science rituals, which in turn became a setting of the habitual. The habitual
knowledge, thus acquired, makes knowing and doing work with biotechnology a process
that is somewhat intuitive, and certainly generates enthusiasm for the creation of habitual
knowledge in process. If one was to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty one could draw a conclusion
that Biotechnology never seizes to amaze, and through its complexity, radically reconstructs
relations between politics and nature, allowing for a reassessment of how we look at life
today. One could not help but amazed and aware of the magnificence of Banff National Park
and Jennifer’s vivid description of the natural beauties of Banff and the surrounding
mountains as a giant petri-dish! Only one fully dedicated to, and obsessed with, Bio-Art
could come with a description like that.

Con los textos reunidos aquí se pretende incidir en el modo de plantear la pregunta por la relación entre arte, ciencia y filosofía. Hay que comenzar con las interrogaciones evidentes: ¿Por qué pensar una vez más esta relación? ¿Por qué crear nuevos puntos de intersección y de entrecruzamiento? ¿Qué es lo “nuevo” que hay aquí?

"Bioart is a new art form with specific characteristics and aims. In order to state this, one should provide a definition
of bioart that explains its novelty and the extent to which it differs from traditional art forms. Bioart is the
essential form of expression of our techno-scientific epoch, bringing about an interaction of science, technology
and art that requires explanation in order not only to understand it as a new art form but also a possible way for
our techno-scientific epoch to develop a more appropriate means of artistic expression. The traditional philosophy
of art, which has created various definitions of art over the course of the past decade, is not sufficient for analyzing
the ontological consequences of bioart. Therefore, this paper explores the possibility of creating a theoretical
framework that is drawn from the discipline of aesthetic ontology in order to examine the ontological implications
of bioart."

Anthropocentric views historically have limited respect for other-than-human beings by promoting ideologies of human exceptionalism. The doctrine of human supremacy has become normalized in capitalistic cultures, driving the domination and exploitation of other beings and natural systems for their ‘use-value’ as ‘resource,’ leading to today’s catastrophic harms of climate change, species extinction, ocean acidification, industrial farming, and animal slavery. In aesthetic practices, anthropocentric views take the guise of ‘freedom of expression’, exploiting other animals metaphorically and physically as art supplies. Should there be limits on artistic expression when other beings are involved? Are there positive modes of depiction or collaboration with nonhuman animals that contribute to compassionate relations with nonhuman worlds? This paper examines the ethics of animal involvement in art. The Compassion Manifesto was originally written as a spoken word document for an event held by the Vegan Congress, a relational art group that practices mindful action towards eliminating suffering of other animals. The reading was delivered on March 19, 2015 at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

This article weaves together microsocial interactions, evolutionary theories of community and queer understandings of family, kinship and intimacy to grasp some of the complex microbiopolitics of the CandidaHomo ecology. I discuss contemporary scientific understandings of Candida albicans sociality as highly tactile and sensual, bodies constantly in touch with surfaces - chemicals, cells, tissues, prosthetics. I explore the highly contested field of evolutionary theories of social selection, including biogenetic kin selection and its biases about reproduction, intimacy and care. CandidaHomo ecologies are woven through queer kinship that is biological, but not genetic; embodied, but not essentialist. Queer communities, founded on choice and more-than-biological recognition, are considered as an alternative to dominant gene-centric kinship theories. These communities are intimate, performative and more-than-human, emerging from necessity and constantly co-created. However, homonormativity and biogenetic exclusion lurk in the closet of contemporary families of choice. I consider Luce Irigaray?s figuration of eros as a visceral and tactile reorientation of relatedness and care towards CandidaHomo kind, always already formed through impersonal intimacies and caresses. Finally, the artwork Surface Dynamics of Adhesion (2015) is discussed as a material-semiotic resolution and "technology" for making kin, as Donna Haraway might say.

Physarum polycephalum (slime mould/mold) is an organism used in scientific research that is commonly found in piles of leaf litter and human composts. Intelligent yet brainless, P. polycephalum forms a fan-like network of tendrils in its quest for food. Each tendril moves almost visibly by cytoplasmic streaming – a pulsing movement of the liquid inside its cell walls. It is simultaneously beautiful and repulsive – an oozing, bright yellow, lace-like blob. This paper proposes to engage in a (s)mattering of Baradian “agential cuts” to draw out the intra-active performativity of this evocative critter. A dialogue is established between scientific and artistic ontoepistemologies, focusing on how (and why) the matter of slime mould/mold matters. Visual images from explorations which include P. polycephalum are woven through the paper, to support Karen Barad’s assertion that “meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” [1, p.821].

Desde los primeros años del siglo XXI, el bioarte se ha consolidado como un campo de especial interés para artistas, teóricos e instituciones. Sin embargo, las relaciones entre arte, biología y tecnología pueden documentarse desde el primer tercio del siglo xx. La tarea de historiar este contexto de relaciones se hace necesaria para comprender la génesis y las transformaciones que ha experimentado este campo de trabajo artístico. Este tipo de análisis histórico revela que, bajo la aparente homogeneidad del término bioarte, se oculta una gran heterogeneidad de prácticas y discursos que no deben ser obviados, ya que son una fuente valiosa para comprender las distintas voces y controversias que acoge el bioarte. El bioarte, para el historiador del arte, no existe como un elemento autónomo, sino que se nutre de inercias y genera tensiones como resultado de su interacción con otros campos artísticos con los que inevitablemente se relaciona: el arte de los medios y el arte contemporáneo ortodoxo. En este texto planteamos que la labor de historiar el bioarte se ha de abordar en relación con tres aspectos fundamentales: la elaboración de una historia desde un punto de vista cronológico de las relaciones entre arte, biología y tecnología; los problemas y soluciones que resultan de la comprensión del bioarte como parte del arte de los medios, fundamentalmente relacionados con la materialidad, y los retos metodológicos y ventajas derivados de la comprensión del bioarte en relación con otras manifestaciones del arte contemporáneo.

En las últimas décadas, una parte relevante de los esfuerzos gubernamentales públicos y privados se han abocado a desarrollar tecnologías para la recolección, el almacenamiento y el análisis de datos acerca de los vivientes. Por un lado, datos sobre sus dotaciones biológicas, como en la biometría o en los bancos de datos genéticos. Por otro,  los datos sobre sus "formas de vida": sus hábitos de consumo, sus ideas, sus opiniones e incluso sus emociones, como en el datamining y en las diferentes operaciones de gestión de las conductas de poblaciones y públicos. Propondré aquí que entre la "gubernamentalidad algorítmica" y la "vigilancia biológica" se tiende una de las grandes líneas de fuerza de la que pende, hoy, la grilla de inteligibilidad gubernamental acerca de qué somos y qué podemos ser y hacer los vivientes.


ABSTRACT
In recent decades, a significant part of public and private government efforts have been devoted to developing technologies for collecting, storing and analyzing data on living beings. On one hand, data on their biological endowments, as in biometrics or in the genetic data banks. On the other, the data on their "forms of life": their consumption habits, their ideas, their opinions and even their emotions, as in datamining and in the different operations of behavior management of populations and publics. I propose here that between "algorithmic governmentality" and "biological surveillance" we can see one of the great lines of force from which pends today the grid of governmental intelligibility about what we living beings are and what we can be and do.

There is an evolution gap in modern human that is, between his biological body and contemporary technology. Hence, the biological body has to be redesigned to respond to high technology and the prospect of its space habitation.
The artificial evolutionary step after Modern Homo Sapiens, is Transhuman, a transitory being with more powerful physical, intellectual and psychological abilities, having as a visionary target, the Posthuman. The bio-ethics issues arising from the prospect of Transhuman, touch on both the sphere of society, and also, the evolutionary stage of his consciousness.
Quantum Mechanics research into biophotonics leads us into the logical assumption that all biological systems on our planet are interactively interconnected, not only through the generally accepted food chain of biosystems, but also biologically, through a biophotonics’ network.
In an ideal, Planetary Civil Society, a possible counterweight to financial globalization may be a transcultural planetary network of minds, which will be connected in a non-hierarchical, and accessible by everybody, interactive network that combines the silicon technology with Biophotonics.
If the aim is the maturing of consciousness of contemporary Human, then Roy Ascott’s vision for Telenoia is of defining importance for the holistic redesign of life. This is where society, science and intercultural technologies meet in the spirit of a new Art, where the “post” prefix is not required to determine itself.

In the 21st century, a humanly-impacted climate is the natural state of planetary affairs: a global environmental disaster but perhaps also an artwork of geological scale. Responding to this idea requires an artistic spirit with an ecological conscience--perfectly espoused by the work of artist Jennifer Willet. From speculations on the genetic future to reflections on the ways that art challenges engagement, interaction and analysis, the contributions in this book share a key concern of Willet's: a recognition of the complexities of artistic engagement in a time when the stakes of technological living have never been higher. 

Edited by Ted Hiebert. With contributions by Warren Cariou, Louise Chance-Baxter& and IAIN BAXTER&, George Gessert, George Gessert & Beth Franks, Christian Kuras, Marta de Menezes, Natasha Myers, Kira O'Reilly, Melentie Pandilovski, Paul Vanouse, Amanda White & Alana Bartol and Robert Zwijnenberg.

Mit der Entstehung der Bio-Art sind die Ausdrucksmittel der Künste reicher geworden, den traditionellen Ausdrucksmitteln sind neue biologische Medien an die Seite getreten, deren Spektrum von transgenen Organismen bis hin zu synthetischer DNA reicht. Biotechnologische Methoden und Verfahren zur Manipulation und Rekombination des genetischen Codes auf molekularer Ebene faszinieren von Beginn an Wissenschaftler und Künstler gleichermaßen. Heute ist die Faszination, Kunst im Labor herzustellen, der Erkenntnis gewichen, dass der Mensch die Welt im Zeitalter des Anthropozän in ein großes experimentelles Labor verwandelt hat – mit ungewissem Ausgang.

Ingeborg Reichle: Bio-Art: Die Kunst für das 21. Jahrhundert, In: Kunstforum International, Kunstnatur | Naturkunst. Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur, 258 (2018)

The growing field of bioart and design raises significant questions for artists and designers working with life as raw matter. What is necessary in such practices is that critical discussions centered on ethics and power are integrated into broader cultural dialogues in the creation of objects and products that design or redesign biological parts, devices or systems. This paper will examine specific examples of wearable art produced by architect and designer Neri Oxman. Using generative software to develop the series titled 'Wanderers, An Astrobiological Exploration', computational growth patterns give rise to undeniably biomorphic designs that emerge as external-organs-as-outerwear. Articulated as an imaginative set of prostheses hosting their own synthetic biology, these pieces represent a new frontier worn at the threshold of the skin. In the appraisal of these examples, I register speculative critical design as a methodology that interrogates the underlying assumptions of bioart and design processes as they converge with the life sciences. I ask what happens when the human body presents as a parasite to the apparatus upon which it depends? And further, what status can a prosthetic organ achieve if it becomes a co-participant in life? This paper will pursue these questions and examine whether the symbiotic relationships established between humans and their wearable prostheses could enable us to transcend corporeal difference, effectively challenging some the key analytical challenges facing a biotechnological future.

‘Prosthetics Imagery: Negotiating the Identity of Enhanced Bodies’ is an explorative journey of an art gallery space, following social narratives of perfecting the human body through technological intervention. It is an invitation to re-consider notions of ‘normality’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘beauty’. Motivated by the need to create an open, transdisciplinary debate on the controversial subject of human enhancement, I argue that bioart can be used as tactical media for exposing the sociocultural narratives that currently frame technical development. For exploring how ‘identity’ becomes a poly-semantic concept, negotiated at the intersection between biology and technology, my chosen case-study is the HUMAN+: The Future of Our Species (2011) exhibition from Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin – namely the artistic photo series by Howard Schatz of Aimee Mullins and her designer-signed prosthetics.