Week 6: Biotech and Art

The though there is much debate on how to define "bio art", a term coined by Eduardo Kac, I understood it as a form of art which utilizes medicine, genetics, and the body to highlight the relationship between living and nonliving organisms ("What is Bio Art?").  This is an art form that emerged from the advancements in science and technology, specifically advancements in biotechnology and genetics, which allowed artists to expand their palette.  As a result, artists began to enter laboratories to work directly with different types of scientists. 

Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny (2000)

This type of art was pioneered by Joe Davis who had the idea that genes and genomes could be a new palette for artists and came up with ideas that scientists believed were dangerous or crazy. He begun this work in the 1980s with his piece, Microvenus, where he "collaborated with geneticist Dan Boyd to encode a symbol for life and feminity into an E. coli bacterium". His piece was the first artwork to utilize molecular biology (Caputo, 2016). 

Much of this week's material, though intriguing, left me with a slight unsettling feeling especially when going over Stelarc's contributions to bio art. Many of his pieces focus in on transhumanism, the idea that our body is not enough and that the use of science and technology—neurotechnology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology—could overcome human limitations. I believe this type of thinking is incredibly problematic as it will exacerbate existing inequities, especially racial inequities. According to McNamee and Edwards, some critics of transhumanism argue that only the wealthy will be able to make use of transhumanism which can result in treating those who cannot as lesser than (2006). 

Stelarc's Third Hand

Works Cited

Anker, Suzanne. “What is Bio Art? – ARTDEX.” ARTDEX, https://www.artdex.com/what-is-bio-art/. Accessed 3 May 2022.

Caputo, Joseph, et al. “Home Elsevier Connect Creating art with genes and bacteria.” Elsevier, 20 January 2016, https://www.elsevier.com/connect/creating-art-with-genes-and-bacteria. Accessed 3 May 2022.

McNamee, MJ, and SD Edwards. “Transhumanism, medical technology and slippery slopes - PMC.” NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563415/. Accessed 3 May 2022.

Vesna, Victoria, director. “5 BioArt pt4.”

Vesna, Victoria, director. “5 bioart pt1 1280x720.”

Works Cited Images

“Joe Davis' 'Microvenus' as molecular muse.” Jacket2, 24 September 2016, https://jacket2.org/commentary/joe-davis-microvenus-molecular-muse. Accessed 3 May 2022.

Kalenberg, Angel. “Eduardo Kac.” ArtNexus, https://www.artnexus.com/en/magazines/article-magazine-artnexus/5d633ac790cc21cf7c0a1932/69/eduardo-kac. Accessed 3 May 2022.

“THIRD HAND.” STELARC, http://stelarc.org/?catID=20265. Accessed 3 May 2022.