Review of Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts (original) (raw)
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Through the Scope of Life. Art and (Bio)Technologies Philosophically Revisited
Through the Scope of Life. Art and (Bio)Technologies Philosophically Revisited, 2023
This book offers intriguing philosophical inquiries into biotechnological art and the life sciences, addressing their convergences as well as their epistemic and functional divergences. Rooted on a thorough understanding of the history of philosophy, this work builds on critical and ontological thought to interpret the concept of life that underscores first-hand dealings with matter and experimentation. The book breaks new ground on the issue of animality and delivers fresh posthumanist perspectives on the topics addressed. The authors embark on a deep ontological probe of the concept of medium as communication-bridging and life-bearing. They also take on the concept of performativity as biotechnological art. The book includes concrete, well-documented case studies and shows how certain narratives and practices directly impact ideas surrounding science and technologies. It will interest philosophers in art and technology, aesthetics, ontology, and the life sciences. It will also engage art practitioners in art and science, curators and researchers.
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Over the last three decades, the rise of new conceptualizations around the human body in connection with technology and machines has led to the development of new art practices in parallel with technological advances in the fields of biology, medicine and computing. This paper examines the human body in art contexts where biotechnology plays a relevant role in the generation of new conceptualizations around the human body topic. Thus, re-contextualized in social and cultural spheres and technical terms, the body will become redesigned, revamped, or augmented through the use of technological advances ranging from plastic surgery to robotic prosthetics. The human body is our vehicle of direct interaction with the environment. Its modification, alteration or expansion implies a redefinition of the existing limits between our corporality and the environment itself. Not only in the physical sense, but metaphysical and social. Hence, the introduced artists and strategies blur these limits and establish new relations through the body as a physical and social entity. In the search of new boundaries far beyond socio-cultural and natural limitations, they will reach new social, perceptual and conceptual statuses, far beyond aesthetic practices, focusing on the generation of political and social debates.
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The growing field of bioart and design raises significant questions for artists and designers working with life as raw matter. What is necessary in such practices is that critical discussions centered on ethics and power are integrated into broader cultural dialogues in the creation of objects and products that design or redesign biological parts, devices or systems. This paper will examine specific examples of wearable art produced by architect and designer Neri Oxman. Using generative software to develop the series titled 'Wanderers, An Astrobiological Exploration', computational growth patterns give rise to undeniably biomorphic designs that emerge as external-organs-as-outerwear. Articulated as an imaginative set of prostheses hosting their own synthetic biology, these pieces represent a new frontier worn at the threshold of the skin. In the appraisal of these examples, I register speculative critical design as a methodology that interrogates the underlying assumptions of bioart and design processes as they converge with the life sciences. I ask what happens when the human body presents as a parasite to the apparatus upon which it depends? And further, what status can a prosthetic organ achieve if it becomes a co-participant in life? This paper will pursue these questions and examine whether the symbiotic relationships established between humans and their wearable prostheses could enable us to transcend corporeal difference, effectively challenging some the key analytical challenges facing a biotechnological future.
The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between Art and Science in the light of EJ Marey's work and the invention of chronophotography. We begin historically with Marey's technical inventions, allowing for a representation of biological changes by freezing humans, while walking, while horses are galloping, or while birds are still in flight. From these traces of life Marey built prototypes made up of generic behaviors, and created a new visual language for artistic and scientific communities. We hypothesize that the lines separating Art and Science tend to disappear as soon as they share the same pictorial medium. We then go on with recent empirical approaches describing the visual process at work during the perception of human movement, an experiment based on Marey's methodological innovation. We show that visual displays of a shapeless walker brought significant sensorimotor information, a result confirming that the motor system plays a crucial role in visual perception, especially when only a few dots are visible. Finally, we turn to a crucial question for both the scientist and the artist: how can an abstract and impersonal trace rendering biological movement reach the field of the observer's private representations? We conclude with the notion of singularity in Science and Art.
The Artistic Status of Bio-art
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2021
This paper aims to define Bio-art by strengthening its artistic status through two distinct approaches. The first is based on the acceptance that the concept of Bio-art includes both the term “art” and the term “bio” that could stand for Biology, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. It is argued that despite its direct connection to scientific research, Bio-art is only partly linked to the methods of the pure science of Biology, while it stands closer to the technoscience of Biotechnology. However, while bio-artists often use scientific methods and techniques, they eventually focus on bioethical questions. To amplify the artistic status of bio-artworks, we claim that they are kinds of visual “enthymemes”, a term used by Aristotle to define incomplete rhetoric syllogisms linking all recipients to common questions. Our second approach is developed around Levinson’s intentional-historical theory, showing that Bio-art belongs to the evolutionary narrative of art and artistic intentions. We all...
Bioart: a Brand New Critique of Contemporary Science
Bioart is an artistic experience born several decades ago that explores life, science, biotechnology and art in new ways. Using developments of science in a creative way, some artists started their exploration by having organic matter used as an expressive medium: the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs made manipulating genome possible, as well as wide applications of genetic engineering. That also made a new research possible, in which bioethical questions are investigated by transcending the conventional notions and applications of art, ethics and science. Bioartists aim at discussing problems related to activities that shape the relationship between man and biotechnology, in order to explore both the concerns and moral, social and political issues that those activities arise. They are rather ―provocative‖ in their search for a bridge ―between two cultures‖ as Vesna suggested in her paper in 2001, following the distinction posed by Snow in his essay The two cultures. There are several different issues at stake in bioartistic expressions and in bioartworks. Let us see some examples: Davies and Kac use recombinant DNA to demonstrate the capabilities of encounter between art, science, biotechnology. Some activities in the sector of transgenic art (Joe Davies and the manipulation of Escherichia coli bacteria; Eduardo Kac and rabbit GFP Bunny) try to cope with genetic engineering in a problematic way. Sometimes they do not press a discussion about risks that genetic engineering entails in blurring the boundaries between different species. On the contrary, they risk to pose biotechnological manipulations as something easy to achieve, thus making them unproblematic. The consequences on social attitude and the valorization of genetic engineering are major implications of their bioartworks. In other cases bioart performances stimulate a reappraisal of feminist discourses on science, biopower and possible ways in which female body is conceived by contemporary society. We can mention Orlan and Chrissy Connant as two women bioartists trying to disseminate a feminist critique about — respectively — standard woman beauty and female social role in society. Their work is again provocative: for example Orlan underwent some aesthetical surgical interventions that became part of performances (chirurgie performance series). Chrissy Connant made a project named Chrissy Caviar, dealing with harvesting her gametes and conserving them in a particular case. Chrissy Caviar is perceived both as a selling commodity for reproductive technologies (IVF) and as a luxury good. They address some problematic questions, giving new forms to old voices in feminist criticisms against male domination on women. In many forms and under several circumstances, art is proposing itself as a full criticism of science and technology, thus entering the domain of philosophy, and helping seeing things under different perspectives, while using very powerful media to arise public interest in the ethical debate. It seems although paradoxical that criticisms come from bioartists that employ the same biotechnologies they aim to dissect in order to bring them under the eye of ethical concern.