From this week’s lecture, I get the idea that biological
technology can also be a platform to express art and development aesthetic
views. The artists use modern technology and life medium to create art and
draws attention to social and ethical issues. It completes the other side of
the scientific research and technological development, letting us think more
about who we are and what we can be.
Joe Davis, as a bioart pioneer, came up with the idea of
sending human biological information in a bottle to the extraterritorial space.
But his bigger contribution is encoding a symbol for life and femininity into a
E-coli bacterium. He named this Microvenus which opens the gate for bioart. Following
this trend, scientist modify animal genes to give them some unusual
characteristics. For example, they extract the glowing genes in jellyfish and enlarge
the glowing function, then they put it into rabbit’s embryo to make it a
glowing rabbit. We cannot judge whether this action is right or wrong to a
living creature, just like there is still controversy in using rats in medical experiment
today, but at least we can know that modifying and combining genes is a useful
way to “create art”. We also see a familiar face in this lecture---Orlan.
Besides performing plastic surgery on stage, she had another bold idea to make
the Harlequin Skin. She combined skin pieces from different cultures even
different races to represent the unity of people around the world.
Joe Davis
glowing rabbit
The bioart doesn’t only apply to animals but also to plants.
Horticulturalist Edward Steichen and his follower George Gessert use their
aesthetic views to develop their favorite kinds of flowers. They only picked
their satisfied ones for reproduction and throw out the “bad” one. In this way
the human aesthetic preferences influence the natural evolution. Just as the
saying goes: “Only the fittest survive.” Here we decide who is the fittest.
Marion Laval-Jeantet inject horse blood into her own body
In a world, the biological art is a beautiful but
complicated world, we can appreciate it, question it or disgust it, but we
cannot deny that it’s just started and we can get more tips and suggestions for
our own survival in it.
Sources:
Caputo, Joseph. "Creating art with genes and bacteria". Elsevier. 20 Jan, 2016. Web. 6 May, 2016.
"Bioart: An introduction". Physorg. 23 Nov, 2015. Web. 6 May, 2016. http://phys.org/news/2015-11-bioart-introduction.html
Young, Emma. "Mutant Bunny". New Scientist. 22 Sept, 2000. Web. 7 May, 2016.
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