Contemporary Practices In Bio Art

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.

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.

Essays, conversations, selected texts, and a rich collection of thought-provoking artworks celebrate a revolution in bio art. Expertly designed by Omnivore and printed on special papers, including chlorophyll cover and crush citrus and crush cocoa pages. The texts and artworks in Symbionts provoke a necessary conversation about our species and its relation to the planet. Are we merely “mammalian weeds,” as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis put it? Or are we partners in producing and maintaining the biosphere, as she also suggested? Symbionts reflects on a recent revolution in bio art that departs from the late-1990s code-oriented experiments to embrace entanglement and symbiosis (“with-living”). Combining documentation of contemporary artworks with texts by leading thinkers, Symbionts, which accompanies an exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center, offers an expansive view of humanity’s place on the planet. Color reproductions document works by international artists that respond to the revelation that planetary microbes construct and maintain our biosphere. A central essay by coeditor Caroline Jones sets their work in the context of larger discussions around symbiosis; additional essays, an edited roundtable discussion, and selected excerpts follow. Contributors explore, among other things, the resilient ecological knowledge of indigenous scholars and artists, and “biofiction,” a term coined by Jones to describe the work of such theoretical biologists as Jacob von Uexküll as well as the witty parafictions of artist Anicka Yi. A playful glossary puts scientific terms in conversation with cultural ones.

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?”

Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. This book presents a new perspective on this overlooked connection, allowing a unique insight into the role of wonder in contemporary visual practice. Artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting. These accounts not only raise issues of a particular relevance to the way in which we encounter our reality today but ask to what extent artists utilize the function of wonder purposely in their work.

Disclosing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies, understood here as more/than/human entanglements, this book makes a crucial intervention into the field of contemporary artistic studies, exploring how art can conceptualize material boundaries of entangled beings/doings. Drawing on critical posthumanist and new materialist thought, in this book, nonhumans become subjects of ethics, aesthetics, and politics that produce equally relevant meanings. Designed to include multiple artistic perspectives and forms of expression, which range from sculptures to bio-art and performative practices, the book argues that we are entangled with other organisms around us not only by our socio-cultural connections but predominately by the transformations that we all undergo with the world’s materiality. Thus, the artistic works discussed do not merely reflect the world but transform it, offering solutions for practising alternative ethical values and acting better with and for the world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, media studies, body studies, performance studies, animal studies, and environmental studies.

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere. Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

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.