Art Biotech

How humans' aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants. Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are prized for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen's hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution. Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants—the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers.

Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this attention, bioart is frequently misunderstood. Bioart and the Vitality of Media is the first comprehensive theoretical account of the art form, situating it in the contexts of art history, laboratory practice, and media theory. Mitchell begins by sketching a brief history of bioart in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, describing the artistic, scientific, and social preconditions that made it conceptually and technologically possible. He illustrates how bioartists employ technologies and practices from the medical and life sciences in an effort to transform relationships among science, medicine, corporate interests, and the public. By illustrating the ways in which bioart links a biological understanding of media -- that is, �media� understood as the elements of an environment that facilitate the growth and development of living entities -- with communicational media, Bioart and the Vitality of Media demonstrates how art and biotechnology together change our conceptions and practices of mediation. Reading bioart through a range of resources, from Immanuel Kant�s discussion of disgust to Gilles Deleuze�s theory of affect to Gilbert Simondon�s concept of �individuation,� provides readers with a new theoretical approach for understanding bioart and its relationships to both new media and scientific institutions.

This Encyclopedia of Biotechnology is a component of the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. Biotechnology draws on the pure biological sciences (genetics, animal cell culture, molecular biology, microbiology, biochemistry, embryology, cell biology) and in many instances is also dependent on knowledge and methods from outside the sphere of biology (chemical engineering, bioprocess engineering, information technology, biorobotics). This 15-volume set contains several chapters, each of size 5000-30000 words, with perspectives, applications and extensive illustrations. It carries state-of-the-art knowledge in the field and is aimed, by virtue of the several applications, at the following five major target audiences: University and College Students, Educators, Professional Practitioners, Research Personnel and Policy Analysts, Managers, and Decision Makers and NGOs.

What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media, and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach. Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.

How do we arrive at a definition of this new art form that utilizes the merging of genetics, art and information technologies, and which has been augmented in its means and accented in its direction through this 'interdisciplinary' interaction?

Traditional fine arts are often regarded as rarefied, something accessed by the uniquely talented and displayed in impressive museums or on lavish stages. Art thusly conceived is something that most people never practice in their lives. Yet in day-to-day life we all experience creative satisfaction through interaction with the physical and social environment that is a form of artistic practice. In Transformative Arts: Biological, Digital, and Everyday Aesthetics, Gary A. Berg explores what we gain through understanding ways to live imaginative lives and considers the increasingly important collaborative role of computers and interaction with nature.