Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart

Abstract

Bioart is a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practices in contemporary art that involve the use of bio-materials (such as living cells, tissues, organisms) and scientific techniques, protocols, and tools. Bioart-works embody vulnerability (intrinsic to all beings) and depend on (bio)technologies that allow these creations to come into being, endure and flourish but also discipline them. This article focuses on 'semi-living' sculptures by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). TC&A's artworks consist of bioengineered mammal tissues grown over biopolymer scaffoldings of different shapes and require sterile conditions of a bioreactor and constant care in order to survive. The article explores how bioart-works are always already intertwined with multiple (bio)technologies and techniques of care and labour, forming specific feminist technoecologies that challenge conventional bioscientific and cultural imaginaries of embodiment and the relation between physis and techné. TC&A's sculptures expose life as the non/living: the processual enmeshment of the organic and inorganic, living and non-living, and growth and decay. The article argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart mobilises philosophical inventiveness: not only does it problematise the entwinement of technology and biomatter and of culture and nature, but it also prompts us to rethink the ontology of life.

Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: A Biophilosophy of Non/Living Arts

“…Many of these insights refer to French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari's conceptualization of three ecologies (equated with the environment, society, and individual human subjects), where the term "ecology" describes a multiplex arrangement of relationalities between entities and their milieu, including "the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations" (Guattari, 1989(Guattari, /2008. What follows from there is a very wide understanding of the entanglement between nature and culture, where the planetary environmental disruption cannot be fully conceived in separation from the global mechanisms of advanced capitalism, cultural processes, social and political crises, communities, and individual human subjects (Radomska, 2017). It is also an understanding implicitly or explicitly shared by feminist posthumanities and new materialisms.…”

“…4 Feminist techno-ecology refers to "multiplicitous relationalities between differential organic and inorganic matter, 'hard' and 'soft' technologies and techniques, as well as other power mechanisms and processes" (Radomska, 2017).…”

Perspectives of Bioartists and Community Lab Organizers on Working with Living Organisms

“…Alexander Fleming, who is credited with discovering penicillin, created paintings of stick figures, soldiers, and houses on paper using bacteria as a medium in the late 20s [51]. In the 1930s, artist Edward Steichen manipulated the chromosomes of delphiniums using a common crossbreeding technique for creating mutant plants, resulting in oversized leaves [44]. More recently, many artists and performers, such as Eduardo Kac, and Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, utilize advances in biotechnology to enable the incorporation of living organisms in works of art [39,44,48,51].…”

“…There has been attention from several research communities on both the potential and implications of the bioart movement. Much of this research comes from critical media studies and sociotechnical studies [30][31][32][33]44,47]. For example, Lapworth explores the ontogenetic possibilities of bioart, past thinking through the meaning of art, life and the sciences, but to thinking through the reconfiguration of the subject; the material production of new subjects and worlds [32].…”

“…Straughan focuses on tacit knowledge, specifically through the embodied practice in the lab space to "think through the roles of the somatic senses and non-human others, as well as artists themselves, in the acquisition of knowledge" [47]. Radomska argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart allows us to reimagine the ontology of life, including our dichotomies of living and non-living [44].…”