Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work

Szykowna Sylwia, Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 115–124. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.07. The present paper deals with the work of an Israeli artist, Guy Ben-Ary. His work is a prime example of artistic practice in the field of bio art. Bio art provokes critical thinking about the place and role of people in today’s world. The main purpose of the article is to describe changes in contemporary artistic practices within the framework of art as a laboratory, the aim of which is to study reality.  Szykowna Sylwia, Art as a laboratory – Guy Ben-Ary’s work. “Images” vol. XXV, no. 34. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 115–124. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.34.07. The present paper deals with the work of an Israeli artist, Guy Ben-Ary. His work is a prime example of artistic practice in the field of bio art. Bio art provokes critical thinking about the place and role of people in today’s world. The main purpose of the article is to describe changes in contemporary artistic practices within the framework of art as a laboratory, the aim of which is to study reality

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Eesti Arst 2013; 92(1):5

Relics of bioart: Ethics and messianic aesthetics in performance documentation

Australia-based art collective Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) use the tools of biotechnology as artistic media to create "Semi- Living" sculptures. These sculptures are exhibited, eaten, and killed in various public contexts and, therefore, raise important ethical questions about the existence of life outside of the body. Departing from dominant concerns within the academy about the ethics of producing biological art, the essay instead focuses on the overlooked ethics of its reception. It addresses the ethics of spectatorship in TC&A's work by arguing three main points: first, its documentary images reference, play with, and are haunted by religious iconography; second, examining the messianic resonances in TC&A's work illuminates an ethics of spectatorship that is closely related to the Derridean ethical experience of otherness; and third, focusing on TC&A's documentary images addresses the potential of bioart documentation to generate affect and engage in ethical relations

The dynamics of collaborative resistance: negotiating the methodological incongruities of art, cultural theory, science and design.

This paper reflectively explores how the collaborative team behind in potēntia critically and creatively embraces the methodological dialectics that occur when trying to accommodate the different disciplinary approaches of art, cultural theory, science and design. Hosted by SymbioticA - The Centre of Excellence in the Biological Arts, The University of Western Australia, in potēntia is an example of multi-disciplinary collaborative art/science practice pioneered by SymbioticA. Negotiating aesthetics versus accuracy, risk versus rigor, experimentation versus speculation, and problematising versus problem solving, this paper reflexively discusses how cross-disciplinary collaboration, although fraught with friction also presents new and unique opportunities - professionally and personally - for unexpected creative discoveries to emerge

Semi-Living: Tissue Culture & Art Project\u27s Challenge to New Museum Theory

With the rising visibility of modern innovations in biotechnology that have been defining factors in the turn into the twenty-first century, it is not surprising that artists would engage and critique the implications of these scientific advancements. One artistic partnership working to raise awareness through the critique of biotechnological progressions in their work is the collaboration Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) comprised of artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. Working to bridge the gap between the fields of arts and sciences, TC&A employ living and growing cells as the foundation for their semi-living sculptures and manipulate and coach the tissues into specific shapes. Through the display of their semi-living sculptures in exhibitions, TC&A present the museum-going public with biotechnological advancements and hopefully instigate conversations about future implications of scientific development. In the contemplation of these works, viewers also consider their living quality and its relationship to their own. In evaluating the building blocks of life and the characteristics that define it, observers begin to form relationships with the objects based on the added value they place on these living beings. In this thesis, I examine the exhibition of three Tissue Culture & Art Project works, Pig Wings, Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs, and Victimless Leather, and the ways their living qualities interrupt the museum environment. I explore the required changes to the roles and expectations of the artists, curators, and visitors based on the sculptures’ semi-subjectivity. I argue that the alterations made based on the work’s demands reveal the limits of the new museum theory framework and necessitate a new approach to displaying TC&A’s semi-living works

Real Artificial: Tissue-cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Farm Animals, And Fictions

Although touted by promoters as the cutting edge of food science, meat produced in vitro (rather than from a whole animal) is emerging more directly from developments in fine art—more specifically, from the aesthetic experiments of Australian-based artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, who ask: What language do we have to describe the agency of tissue-cultured life? This essay begins to answer this question by tracing a tradition whereby bioengineered meat mediates complex environmental critiques in literary fiction over the past century, including Margaret Atwood’s exemplary novel Oryx and Crake (2003), which depicts biotech industries producing three distinct kinds of “real artificial meat,” all sourced in genetically modified animals

Evolution, Mutation and Hybridity in Bio-Performance Practice: Wet Biology and Hybrid Arts in the Performance/Installation 'BioHome—The Chromosome Knitting Project'

In this paper I explore the influence of ‘Wet Biology’ practices on the development of my durational performance work 'BioHome: the Chromosome Knitting Project' at research, rehearsal, performance and documentation stages. This work is being developed as part of my Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong where a performance of the full work took place in August 2006. This will be an annotation of methodology and grounded theory, as a result of my experience working with contemporary bio-ethics, Wet Biology and bio-art practices, and the emergence of a new form, ‘bio-performance’. Especially in the stages of research and rehearsal, the influence of the scientific practice has radically hybridized and mutated my performance form and content. This paper documents my experience working with contemporary Wet Biology techniques including DNA extraction, cell culturing and genetic modification of organisms during the research and development stages of the performance and how the influence of the scientific practices and notions of hybridity, evolution and mutation have influenced the form, content and processes of my work. The key topics I investigate for the purposes of this paper include: •That the message does respond to the medium – new biotechnologies can inform creative processes. •That the biological metaphors of evolution, hybridity and mutation are relevant to the development of hybrid performance works.The conference was sponsored by A.D.S.A., the Department of Performance Studies, the School of Letters, Arts and Media, and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Sydney

Spinning a Yarn of Bioart and Labour

The emergence of craft-based tissue culture works throughout the past decade circumscribes this investigation. In particular, I look at recent works by Kira O’Reilly, Julia Reodica and Tissue Culture and Art Project where craft and folkloric arts are introduced into the laboratory environment. Teasing out juxtapositions within these works, I discuss the contrasting forms of labour they contain: traditional women’s work, or social reproduction, and highly masculinised realms of big science and biotechnology. By evoking gendered conceptions of labour and value, I suggest that these works critique differing levels of value accorded to such categorizations. Through introducing highly visible elements of subjectivity into their biotechnological projects, I also argue that these works begin to unravel scientific conventions of objectivity. Thus focused, this paper traces histories of craft-based tissue culture work and explores the productive potential within these critical artistic practices