Making strange or making sense - art and the life sciences

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr talk about the future with Bioart.

For the last ten years or so, there has been an increasing interest among artists in the use of the tools of modern biology. Recently the term Bioart was coined to describe this kind of artistic engagement.

This phenomenon is not surprising considering that biotechnology is rapidly becoming more accessible and enables non specialists to treat life as a material that can be manipulated, shaped and formed.

However, more importantly, new knowledge in the life sciences and its application (biomedical, biotechnological and ecological) exposes the discrepancies between what we know about life scientifically, what we can now do with life technologically, and our cultural perception of what life is.

Generating cultural debate

New scientific understandings and their applied technologies can never be restricted to pure knowledge or the business of strictly 'saving life'. Technologically manipulated life forms are already being used for military, profit-driven industries, entertainment, farm life, family life, etc.

As research in life sciences is not cheap, markets need to be generated in order to justify the investment, and as a result, need and desire are often manufactured, and profound ethical questions needed to be addressed.

Artists can play a role in exploring these issues and spawn 'philosophy in action' using the very same tools and techniques offered by biotechnology for the sole purpose of generating cultural debate.

Tissue culture and art

SymbioticA, the Art & Science collaborative Research Laboratory at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia is one of very few places in the world that offer an opportunity to artists to engage hands on with the science and the technologies of life.

One of the on going research projects in SymbioticA is The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A).

Since 1996 TC&A has explored the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. TC&A utilises living tissue engineered constructs in order to create what can be referred to as semi-living sculptures.

These semi-living entities are a new class of object/being that is both similar and different from other human artefacts (an extended phenotype of Homo sapiens), such as constructed objects and selectively bred domestic plants and animals (both pets and husbandry).

These entities consist of living biological systems that are artificially designed and need human and/or technological intervention in their construction and maintenance. They are evocative objects that raise cultural discussion about the ethics and epistemologies of technologically manipulating living systems for human-centric purposes.

Victimless meat

As part of TC&A's exploration of the relationships humans form with semi-living creations we looked at the possibility of eating victimless meat by growing semi-living steaks from a biopsy taken from an animal while keeping the animal alive and healthy.

This piece deals with one of the most common zones of interaction between humans and other living systems, and probes the apparent uneasiness people feel when someone 'messes' with their food.

The project offers a form of 'victimless' meat consumption. As the cells from the biopsy proliferate, the in vitro 'steak' continues to grow and expand, while the source, the animal from which the cells were taken, is healing.

This work presents a potential future in which the killing and suffering of animals destined for food consumption would be reduced. However, by making food a new class of object/being -- a semi-living object -- we risk making the semi-living a new class for exploitation.

What is edible and what is foul?

Our own research into this project began as part of our residency at the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2000.

The first steak we grew was made out of pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle). We used cells that were harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. Thus, the steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born.

This project was exhibited and performed in 2003 as part of L'art Biotech exhibition in France. We titled the installation 'Disembodied Cuisine', playing on the notion of different cultural perceptions of what is edible and what is foul.

We grew semi-living frog steaks, with the intention of raising questions about the French resentment towards engineered food and the objection by other cultures to the consumption of frogs. We grew frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption while having the healthy frogs living alongside as part of the installation.

On the final day of the show, the steak was cooked and eaten in a Nouvelle Cuisine style dinner, and the four frogs that we rescued from the edible frog distributor were released to a beautiful pond in the local botanical garden.

Victimless Leather

In our latest project, Victimless Leather, we grew a miniature stitchless jacket out of immortalised cell lines that were cultured to form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix.

The Victimless Leather project concerns growing living tissue into a leather like material.

This artistic, grown garment confronts people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and further confronts notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise.

An actualised possibility of wearing 'leather' without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.

Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings.

Making meaning of new knowledge

We see our role as artists as one in which we can provide tangible examples of possible futures, and conduct research on the potential effects these new life forms could have on our cultural perceptions of life.

It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context.

This piece also presents an ambiguous and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving 'a victimless utopia' as the stitchless jacket that was grown as part of this project could only survive within a techno-scientific body -- a bioreactor.

The above two examples of recent projects by TC&A represent one approach in which art and science can work together.

While science attempts to generate new knowledge that sometimes bring into question long-held beliefs, technology tries to find ways to exploit this knowledge. Art, however, endeavors to both make sense and make strange of this knowledge in order to help us make meaning of these new developments.

Oron Catts is artistic director and Ionat Zurr is an artist in residence/PhD with SymbioticA.

The research and development of 'Victimless Leather' was conducted in SymbioticA: the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, and in consultation with Verigen, a Perth-based company that specialises in tissue engineered cartilage for clinical applications. Verigen was recently acquired by Genzyme.

The perfusion pump for the semi living art works was constructed with the assistance and consultation of Prof Arunasalam Dharmarajan from the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, at the University of Western Australia.