Bio Art

A visually striking, authoritative survey of the crossover between art and biotechnology by an expert in the field In an era of fast-paced technological progress and with the impact of humans on the environment increasing, the concept of “nature” itself seems called into question. Bio Art explores the work of “bio artists,” those who work with living organisms and life processes to address the possibilities and dangers posed by biotechnological advancement. A contextual introduction traces the roots of bio artistic practice, followed by four thematic chapters: Altering Nature, Experimental Identity and Mediums, Visualizing Scale and Scope, and Redefining Life. The chapters cover the key areas in which biotechnology has had an impact on today’s world, including ecology, biomedicine, designer genomes, and changing approaches to evolutionary theory, and include profiles of the work of sixty artists, collectives, and organizations from around the world. Interviews with eight leading bio artists and technologists provide deeper insight into the ideas and methods of this new breed of creative practitioners.

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 book explores the emergence of a new subdivision in Bio-art — Dendro-art, the interrelationship between humans and plants, the recreation of vanished species of plants, the ecological education of the population, and, more broadly, environmental protection. The innovative quality of this work lies in the fact that many aspects of the phenomenon of Bio-Art are looked at from a new angle: the author of the present study is herself an artist who has received academic training in the field. Therefore, she able to examine the works of bio-artists both from the “inside” and the “outside”. The conclusions drawn from the study may be of use to students, scholars, and teachers preparing courses in art studies, technology, and natural sciences. The study materials may also be used for setting up exhibitions and compiling catalogues on various types of Bio-technological art.

Thanks to the ICT economy, today's world is witnessing a gradual process of transfer and displacement from a society based on the production of man-made material goods to a new society driven by science and knowledge. This new society uses human intelligence to try to solve cultural problems, to sustain activities, to rationalize performances, and to plan, program and develop strategies and projects for the future. This book therefore proposes a multi-faceted framework through which contemporary art, biology, digital science, geology, technology, physiology, chemistry, and philosophy enter into debate and complement each other. It is structured around a number of logically interconnected questions, such as: “What is bio-art?”, “Can a laboratory artist manipulate living beings, perform complex hybridizations, and give birth to chimeras that would coexist with human beings?”, “Do we have the right to use them?”, “Should we authorize research that will allow the development of these techniques, prohibit such research, or fund it?”, and, “Do we have the right to create embryos for transplantation or injection?”

"Eduardo Kac's work represents a turning point. What it questions is our current attitudes to creativity, taking that word in its most fundamental sense." -Edward Lucie-Smith, author of Visual Arts in the 20th Century "His works introduce a vital new meaning into what had been known as the creative process while at the same time investing the notion of the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical responsibility." -Frank Popper, author of Origins and Development of Kinetic Art "Kac's radical approach to the creation and presentation of the body as a wet host for artificial memory and 'site-specific' work raises a variety of important questions that range from the status of memory in digital culture to the ethical dilemmas we are facing in the age of bioengineering and tracking technology." -Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of Art For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, first inventing early online artworks for the web and continuously developing new art forms that involve telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Interest in telepresence, also known as telerobotics, exploded in the 1990s, and remains an important development in media art. Since that time, Kac has increasingly moved into the fields of biology and biotechnology. Telepresence and Bio Art is the first book to document the evolution of bio art and the aesthetic development of Kac, the creator of the "artist's gene" as well as the controversial glow-in-the-dark, genetically engineered rabbit Alba. Kac covers a broad range of topics within media art, including telecommunications media, interactive systems and the Internet, telematics and robotics, and the contact between electronic art and biotechnology. Addressing emerging and complex topics, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art.

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

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.