Week 4 Part 1 - Biotech + Art

To me, BioArt has always been this weird, fictional thing that I’ve seen in comics, videogames and movies. Watching some of the lecture videos and seeing the more immediate applications kind of grounded the idea to Earth for me, and it’s been a bit crazy just seeing all the places that people are willing to take their bodies for the sake of art. To be honest, it isn’t something that I fully understand on an artistic level, but it is intriguing to study the artists’ motivations and thoughts behind their work.

One of the most infamous and earliest examples of BioArt- the earmouse.

My initial research led me to a piece from Wired which went into some of the ethical concerns behind BioArt. It even gets into the practice of having the audience participate by touching the art and allowing it to die after the exhibition ends. Wild! The biggest takeaway I gained was that those artists weren’t really doing anything worse than what already happens in research labs across the world. The way I see things at the moment, BioArt is useful in its present state for at least raising discussion over the issue of using live test subjects, and also for presenting thought-provoking exhibitions.

Stelarc and his exoskeleton. He's only about a couple degrees away from being Doc Ock.

I also found myself checking out the work of Stelarc. His most infamous work was growing a third ear on his arm, but I found myself more interested in the way he connected his body to electrodes and allowed online user to control his body. That immediately made me ponder the idea of machine-controlled humans. What if we weren’t capable of building hardware that could perform certain human actions, but we could write a program that could control a human and eliminate the potential error that comes with us inherently? That’s the kind of thing that both frightens and fascinates me.

Works Cited

Adam, Clement. "Bioart, Ethics And Artworks." Masters of Media. N.p., 18 Apr. 2012. Web. 20 July 2014.

Dayal, Geeta. "For Extreme Artist Stelarc, Body Mods Hint at Humans’ Possible Future." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 30 Apr. 0012. Web. 20 July 2014.

Dvorsky, George. "7 Bio-Artists Who Are Transforming the Fabric of Life Itself." Io9. N.p., 24 June 2013. Web. 18 July 2014.

"Performer Gets Third Ear for Art." BBC News. BBC, 10 Nov. 2007. Web. 18 July 2014.

Solon, Olivia. "Bioart: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Using Living Tissue as a Medium." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 26 July 2011. Web. 18 July 2014.