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Deborah Dixon
Creating the Future-Body: The Visceral Aesthetics of BioArt Deborah Dixon Time of Residency April-May 2008 institute of Georgraphy and Earth Sciences, Website: http://www.ies.aber.ac.uk/staff/academic/deborah-dixon This visit is part of a broader project sets out to investigate the emergence, working practices and underlying philosophies of what has become known as ‘critical BioArt’. Though all manner of works may be labelled BioArt in the sense that their subject is biotechnology, a categorical distinction has been asserted between Art that seeks to represent life, or use it as metaphor, and “Art that uses the matter and energy of life itself as a point of departure” (Zaretsky 2005). Critical BioArt, then, is a very new, loosely held collaborative endeavour between Artists and Scientists wherein biological materials, developed and nurtured within the laboratory, are used as material for Art installations. Cell and tissue cultures, neuro-physiology, bio-robotics and bio-informatics, artificially produced DNA sequences, Mendelian cross-bred organisms, xeno-transplants, homo-grafts, and medical self-experimentation have all come under the banner of a critical BioArt (Hauser, 2005). Though Art and Science have never been self-sufficient categories -- rather, they revolve within a shared history, locked in an awkward embrace -- this particular form of collaboration moves beyond the usual semantics of synthesis and antithesis, into the more complex terrain of negotiations, mutualities and symbioses. It is this rendering of critical BioArt as a ‘breach’ of both artistic and scientific protocols that allows it a distinctive contribution to the many debates concerning biotechnology. For the most part, commentators have looked to the way in which biotechnology exacerbates existent processes and tendencies. Rifkin (1999), Stock (2002) and Critical BioArt, by contrast, aspires to provide a way of thinking about the future that lies outside of these established horizons, positioning itself as a fulcrum around which alternative visions of the future have been formulated. Within critical BioArt a radical re-ordering of the living organism, as well as nature/society relations more generally, has come to be regarded as a realisable outcome of biotechnological advances; what is more, these possibilities are presented to the public, alongside business and government, in a new language that, it is argued, is constituted from all manner of laboratory-created ‘partial lives,’ each contributing its own, distinctive, visceral aesthetic (Kac 2005; Zurr and Catts 2006). Though critical BioArt is a very recent development there is no doubting its relevance not only to broad-scale debates on the appropriate role of technology in reworking what we consider to be ‘nature,’ and especially ‘human nature,’ but also to our understanding of how the history of artistic and scientific practice allows for such a collaboration to be envisioned and realised. Accordingly, this visit will focus on one of the world’s leading centers for the creation of critical BioArt – the SymbioticA laboratory cum gallery housed within The University of Western Australia’s (UWA) * The manner in which institutional space, financial support and intellectual capital have been brought together at UWA in order to allow BioArtists from a number of backgrounds to collaborate on a series of Tissue Culture-based projects subsequently exhibited at national and international symposia. * The specific practices through which biological materials are re-worked such that a ‘new’ visceral aesthetic of form and feature is borne. * The underlying philosophies that animate the initial selection and drawing up of such projects, as well as their materialisation and mode of display. For a month in Perth a number of methodologies will be used to explore the above questions including: archival research into the formation and development of SymbioticA, using the media and university-based materials collected by the UWA library; in-depth interviews with resident and visiting BioArtists regarding their background, their views on the broader role of biotechnology in transforming society/nature relations and their vision of BioArt and its associated projects as a particular form of commentary; and, hopefully, observation of the working practices of BioArtists, noting the technological means through which biological materials are accessed, re-worked and prepared for exhibition, but also the day to day negotiations (face to face as well astechnologically-mediated) through which these collaborative projects are brought into being. References |
