A Living Art, Part 1

January 19, 2008

This is the first posting of a series on the bioarts, a relatively new field in which artists are using living tissue and organisms to create their works. This article addresses the question, What is Bioart? In future postings I will reflect on the ethics of bioart and offer a vision for bioaesthetics.

What is Bioart?

Are you ready for animal body parts to become the canvases (and living paint) for the works that you see in museums and art shows? How about using your own body in this way? NPR recently covered the emerging field of bioart, through which artists are pushing the boundaries of what is considered conventional – and ethical – in realizing their aesthetic visions.

NPR reviews the developments in one arena of the bioarts: living cells, tissues, and the occasional animal that have been engineered to embody an artist’s vision. Examples include a miniature ear (pictured above) created with human skin cells grown in a micro-gravity bioreactor, and a rabbit genetically engineered to glow green in blue light. More ambitious artists are hoping to make the human body their canvas through various biotechnologies, such as Stelarc’s project to surgically attach a living ear to his own forearm.

Beyond the surprise that these “flesh sculptures” elicit from most audiences, what’s remarkable to me is how versatile and resilient living organisms are to human manipulation. Mix jellyfish genetic material with rabbit embryos and – voila! – a fluorescent bunny is born. The question emerges: will it be much more difficult to use humans (volunteers or otherwise) in the next phase of bioart? And is it ethically appropriate to do so? I will address the ethics of bioart in my next article on this topic.