Biotechnology: A Tool of Body Manipulation

In my project I will explore how biotechnology as a tool of body manipulation and enhancement can redefine the contemporary notion of the human and life in a more ethical and aesthetical way. My argument will address ways in which art that engages with biotechnology as its medium, can give a more tangible because ethically and aesthetically combined understanding of life and the human body. I will focus on selected case studies that work with biotechnology to study ways in which art, can reveal the power of biotechnology to act and produce meaning. This allows me to research how biotechnology can reconstruct and reshape the notion of matter as active and capable of producing meaning.

This project will investigate art’s dealing with biotechnology as a form of reflection embedded within practice. It will concentrate on art’s dealing with moist and living tissue materials through the non-instrumental use of new biotechnological tools as expression of the body, its nature and its limits. Next, it will analyze how this creative and publically engaged approaches to technology exercises ethico-aesthetic paradigm of knowledge production concerned with biotechnologies. By analyzing particular case studies of bioart’s dealing with the materiality of the body outside fixed boundaries that the emergent technologies offer, it will examine a more emotionally aware and tangible ways of analysis concerned with the notion of life and human body through the promises of biotechnology.

Theoretical background and research gab

In recent decades, postmodern and poststructuralist views within ethics, media and philosophy of technology have underscored the need for a more material approach in terms of emotional and carnal analysis (Mampuys and Roeser ...

... middle of paper ...

...e future of growing new organs in the lab for the regenerative medicine. Through imaging the implications of stem cells technology using, for instance, 3D printing, it aims not at the notion of progress, not to be faster, stronger or smarter, but on to how far can we get in the pursue of creativity and novelty.

Case study 3: Svenja Kratz, The Absence of Alice (2008-2011). As series of six evolving exhibitions, the work reveals artist’s experiences working with the Soas-2 cell line which is a cancer cell line extracted from an 11-year old girl called Alice in 1973. The series of artworks exercise how the body in tissue culture and its further use in medicine can be outside one’s identity and how this needs to be regarded within ethical and aesthetical realm. Finally the artist forces questions about the implications for the notion of agency beyond fixed identity.