Alexis Rockman,The Farm (2000)- oil and acrylic on wooden panel.
Bioart highlights two underappreciated conceptions of information. First, the meaning of bioart cannot be understood as simply a message that can be coded and transmitted. Rather, bioart emphasizes the conditions that allow for the transmission of a message. For instance, in his Alba project, Kac sought to highlight the social and biological conditions for producing a transgenic rabbit.
Second, the medium acts as if it is alive. Not only does the medium allow for the amplification or growth and reproduction of an organism, but in addition the complexity of the interaction between organism and medium allows for unforeseen consequences in the production of the work of art. For instance, in Genesis, we do not know which parts of the E. coli genetic code will be changed. While not necessarily restricted to bioart, this understanding of information highlights the complex relationship between a work of art and its viewers, where unexpected new meanings can emerge.
(http://www.biofuturesdvd.com/project/art/art16.html)
A San Diego beach scene drawn with an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. The colors include BFP, mTFP1, Emerald, Citrine, mOrange, mApple, mCherry and mGrape. Artwork by Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Roger Tsien in 2006.
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Note from: Bioart and the vitality of media, Robert Mitchell, 2010
Bioart is a new mode of art where artists use biological laboratory techniques and technologies both to create “living” or “semi-living” works of art and to keep these new entities alive in the space of artgalleries.
Other terms related with bioart are: ” genetic art”, “transgenic art”.
What bioart claims is to employ bioengineered life as an artistic medium; thing that cross a technical or a moral threshold. By using the materials of life itself for artistic purposes it has been achieved a break with tradition.But this break with tradition can become a risky situation where the artist who uses living tissues or organisms loses the control.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/16/art_in_a_time_of_terror
“In his first broadcast interview, Steve Kurtz discusses the bizarre case of how he became the focus of an FBI bioterrorism investigation. On May 11, 2004, his wife Hope Kurtz tragically died in her sleep. When he called 911 for help, a nightmare that would last for the next four years began to unfold. The police became suspicious of his art supplies and harmless bacteria cultures that he was using for an antiwar project about the public health impact of germ warfare programs. His home was raided by the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Homeland Security. His belongings, his cat, and even his wife’s body were seized. “
Mitchell suggests that bioart is better understood less as a new kind of art than as a new mode of conceptual art- that is , part of a tradition of art less interested in either the specificity of particular media or what Mitchell calls “visuala payoff” than in using the work of art to point to an idea or concept. (p.23)
Kac considers as bioart only those works that employ biotechnology as a medium, for, he argues, bioart proper “must be clearly distinguished from art that exclusively uses traditional or digital media to address biological themes, as in a painting or sculpture depicting a chromosome or a digital photograph suggesting cloned children. Bioart is in vivo” (p.24)
Vitalist bioartworks seek to bring art to life- and life to art- quite literally.
Vitalist bioart produces the feeling of becoming a medium.
Vitalism is the doctrine, often advocated in the past but now rejected by mainstream science, that “living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things”Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the “vital spark”, “energy” or “élan vital”, which some equate with the soul. (wikipedia)
On the late 19th and early 20th century bio-technologically oriented industrial methods of plant and animal farming and production emerge. In the 1930s Edward Steichen , photographer and plant breeder, bean to appropriate new technologies of plan hybridization. He found a technique that allowed him to re fertilize strains of infertile delphiniums. He said that: ” the science of heredity when applied to plant breeding, which has as its ultimate purpose the aesthetic appeal of beauty, is a creative art.”. In fact , in 19346 MoMA will exhibit his delphinium as artwork. That exhibition encouraged the sense that the limits of art were expanding, whether for good or bad.
Microvenus by J. Davis is an example of bioart in the era of molecular biology and DNA manipulation. On the 1940s and 1950s researchers establishes that chromosomes, where composed of long and twined strings of deoxyribonucleic acid. and that DNA can serve as the basic mechanism through which traits were passed form generations to generation. By the early ’70s , biologists have developed ways of breaking up the DNA strings and combined DNA from one organism with that of another. The research is focused on “cracking codes”.
Joe Davis was one of the first to work with molecular biologists to create a sort of proof of concept work of art: Microvenus: a string of DNA nucleotides created from the ground up, and formed to a specific shape by Davis’ s biologists colleagues: a shape that for Davis is resemblance of female genitalia.. But the fact that this artwork employs DNA as a carrier of message that is replicated by living beings is more important than the symbolic meaning that can have. Microvenus is not about cracking code but about manipulating genetic material to create a mew form of coding that intends to connect humans with unknown forms of life of other planets.
“Artistic work constructed from synthetic molecules of DNA. The first of these artistic molecules, Microvenus, contains a coded visual icon representing the external female genitalia and by coincidence, an ancient Germanic rune representing the female Earth. [The] work was carried out with molecular geneticist Dana Boyd at Jon Beckwith’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School and at Hatch Echol’s laboratory at University of California, Berkeley.” (Ars Electronica)
Genesis (1999)by Eduardo Kac: the creation of ” artist’s gene” -as it called by him- that is a string of DNA made in accordance of Kac’s “sentence”: Kac converted a sentence from Bible to Morse code. Then he converted the Morse code into DNA code. the he had teh DNA specified by the code synthesized to create the Genesis E.coli bacteria strain.
“Alba” by Eduard Kac: the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene
– Gastrulation (1992) by davidkremers: image produced by living bacteria genetically altered and afterwards sealed within acrylic plates coated with agar. http://calendar.bic.caltech.edu/~kremersd/wonder/start.html
– One Tree (1998) by Natalie Jeremmijenko: she work with a botanist to clone 1.000 identical tree raised in protected laboratory conditions.
COHEN VAN BALEN:
(http://www.cohenvanbalen.com/)
Electrocyte Appendix from Revital Cohen on Vimeo.
“Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats – unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices?” Cohen Van Balen
JOE DAVIS
“Part of my installation at Ars Electronica is undertaken in collaboration with Katie Egan and pertains to a question about two “singing plants”. At a point in time now almost exactly two years ago, a young pre-med student approached me with an interesting question. She had recently returned from South America where she had carried on field work in the Ecuadorian rain forest. There she had encountered a Native American brujo or “medicine man”. The brujo had told her that a given species of plant in the mountains sings a different song than the same species of plant in the valley. The student wanted to know if it was possible to “listen” to plant cells.”
| Audio Microscope allows the user to image particular living cells while simultaneously listening to their greatly amplified – and species-specific – microacoustic signatures. |
DAVID BENQUE’
Acoustic Botany (2000)
In this project, Benqué explores the possibilities of manipulating flowers and plants through a combination of traditional techniques, genetic engineering and synthetic biology, with the aim of having them produce music.
ANNA DUMITRIOU
Visual and performance artist based in Brighton, England specialising in bioart. Her installations, interventions and performances use digital, biological and traditional media including bacteria, digital projections and embroidery, working with diverse audiences,
The Hypersymbiont Dress is a dress stained with bacteria
HEIDY HATRY
Hatry was the first artist to use untreated pigskin and other animal parts to create realistic depictions, chiefly sculptural, of the human visage, sometimes of a character suggestive of renaissance art. She has experimented with numerous preservation techniques, including the now-famous “plastination” method of the prominent pathologist, and impresario Gunther von Hagens.
http://www.cosmoto.com/projekte/heide-hatry-event-dokumentation-skin.html
Head and Tales:
Sculptures made out of animal skin and body parts, using untreated pigskin, raw meat for the lips, and fresh pigs’ eyes. As part of the work, Hatry charged 27 prominent and emerging authors to select one of the images and essentially “give life” to her creations by writing a short story about their lives.
http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/03/heads-and-tales-by-heide-hatry-at-elga-wimmer-gallery-in-new-york-food-art/
RICK GIBSON
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“At the center of this wall mounted display, is a freeze-dried human uterus. It is pinned to copies of the catalogue page I ordered it from, my purchase receipt and the signed customs forms I used to import it into Canada. After freeze-drying it, I used it to practice masking, painting, sawing, sanding, and drilling freeze-dried tissues. I discovered that freeze-dried tissues are as easy to work with as balsa wood.This piece was exhibited for the first time in September 1982 at the Unit/Pitt Gallery.”
http://www.rickgibson.net/freezedry.html
