[Synapse elist] "bio art" (or however we cant to call ot) and inbetween-ness

[Jens Hauser]

Dear list members,

such a discussion forum is always a pandora's box that we consciously 
open between various disciplines; the most difficult is to start!

I would assume that the motivation for inviting me as a curator and 
writer to take part in this forum might be less to expect me to put the 
relevant philosophical issues at stake into perspective, but more to 
raise the question of how to stage and display them, creating 
aesthetical zones of encounter. From this pesrpective, I would like to 
kick off first with two apparently simple and rudimentary 
question-statements:

1) If "bio-art" exists, how is the 'art element' structured and constructed?

2) Is there a way out to escape the epistemologically quasi-automatic 
dualisme (inherent even in the term) and to see "bio-art" more generally 
as a step to thinking/living 'inbetween-ness'?


To 1)

There seems to be a tendency in technology based art in general to favor 
argements of WHY a work is done as art more than HOW it is done. All 
questions Monika is bringing in on the evolution of vitalist's concepts 
and their potential power to challenge anthropocentism may be as valid 
as Oron's definition of a 'secular vitalism' are. The questions that 
this art raises are crucial - but it is as relevant how this art raises 
them. "Bioart" conferences often ressemble hobbyist philosophers 
lectures (which is indeed exciting) where loads of concepts are quoted 
and applied to give own hands-on experiences theoretical flesh. Can we 
just be satisfied by the explanation that in new media art thus the 
discursive dominance is meant to justify and counter-balance central and 
massive use of contemporary technologies?

In other words: Art that uses biotechnology as its means of expression 
is currently addressed less as art and more as a discursive and often 
instrumentalized form of contributing to ongoing public debates beyond 
the aesthetic realm. For me, one of the key thinkers in argueing in 
favor of technoscientific appropration by the arts in the past has been 
Bauhaus artist Laslo Moholy-Nagy. But despite the aspect described by 
Moholy-Nagy that artists as seismographs "may press for the 
sociobiological solution of problems just as energetically as the social 
revolutionaries do through political action", art that typically 
operates on the level of presence of biological process rather than on 
its representation loses its particularity and its complexity when being 
grasped only through its popular agenda setting potential. The holistic 
view of art Moholy-Nagy suggests, in which "not only the conscious but 
also the subconscious mind absorbs social ideas", depends on the 
capacity of the arts to transform weltanschauung into emotional form, 
and "with means largely comprehensible by sensory experiences on a 
nonverbal level. Otherwise any problem could be successfully solved only 
through intellectual or verbal discourse."

Having right now the exibition "sk-interfaces" at display at FACT in 
Liverpool until march 30, we are currently in the galleries facing not 
only emotionnally challanged visitors, but also all the technical 
difficulties of what it means to keep cells, moss and tissues alive, 
without significant contamination, and to display live "bioart" work 
over such a long period of two months, which is an exception. I suggest 
that the questions inherent in the material conditions to stage such 
work are as important, and may be joining external references. Or said 
otherwise: "Bioart" is much about the material staging of presence of 
"biofacts" (notion by N. Karafyllis to be discussed later), and should 
not be reduced to topics it may re-present or point to. The question of 
its perception, in presence, is central.


To 2)

I suggest that the dualistic term "bio art" is a terrain vague-like 
catchword to describe a still unclear post-digital paradigm and its 
specific metaphors, which stands for both bio-media and bio-topics, but 
which tends to abolish their ontological differentiation. On the one 
hand, art in which the use of biological metaphors and symbols serves to 
fuel biopolitical discussion and which can get along fine with 
conventional techniques  on the other, art that utilizes biotechnology 
but does not necessarily address thematically linked issues. The medium 
can, but does not necessarily meet the message.

As Monika has started to argue, "bio art" (seen as a possible embodiment 
of vitalist concepts) may have the potential to overcome anthropocentism 
as it conveys "the impersonal and inhuman vitality of all biological 
life in order to fully include augmented, modified, and technologically 
supported life of all kinds in the world of our symbiotic dependencies 
and responsibilities." Recently after one of my lectures, in Warsaw, 
Monika also made me think about the differences about BIOS and ZOE. I 
found this fruitful disctinction also in Susan Merrill Squier's book 
"Liminal Lives  Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedecine". 
In reference to anthropologist Paul Rabinow, Squier distinguishes bios, 
"the appropriate form given to a way of life of an individual or a 
group", and zoë, "the simple fact of being alive and applied to all 
living beings per se", but "zoë is increasingly confused with bios, with 
the result that we are finding it harder and harder to define what life 
is, much less to decide whether we should attribute a variation we 
encounter to forces of nature or culture."

Squier argues, (science) fiction, poetry, literature, visual and 
performance art are cultural spaces located at this threshold where 
worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are 
being worked through. She examines "the whole range of interventions 
including embryo culture, in vitro fertilization, growth hormone 
administration, inter-species fertilization as part of assisted 
reproduction, stem cell therapy, xenotransplantation, and fetal cell 
transplantation", arguing that "we must link our contemporary strategies 
for modifying things and people with our strategies of representation". 
Artists and other cultural practitioners located at this threshold may, 
as a consequence, function as agenda-setters, and therefore not only 
share responsibility in our perception of these liminal lives but in 
their development and design as well. Is art merely reflecting and 
anticipating the consequences of far-reaching biomedical developments? 
Or does it play a more active role, providing the aesthetic framework 
which paves the way for the very coming-into-being of these liminal lives?

To illustrate how these liminal lives come into our world, Squier 
borrows and extends the notion of liminality from Scottish 
anthropologist Victor Witter Turner and his concept of the rite of 
passage, an emotionally uncomfortable betwixt and between period of 
transition during which one is in a neither here nor there situation 
of enhanced self-reflexivity  for example during an initiation 
ceremony. But Squier views us as human beings in the era of 
biotechnological interventions in birth, growth, ageing and death as 
liminal ourselves, "as we move between the old notion that the form and 
trajectory of any human life have certain inherent biological limits, 
and the new notion that both the form and trajectory of our lives can be 
reshaped at will." Thus, the overlap of both cultural and biological 
liminality seems to be central to artistic strategies dealing with 
biological systems or biotechnological techniques as means of expression 
and extending into areas such as cell and tissue cultures, 
neurophysiology, transgenesis or medical self-experimentation.

In the "sk-interfaces" project at FACT, other media than biomedia are 
included in the exhibition on purpose: Materially and metaphorically, 
artists explore trans-species relationships, xenotransplantation, 
telepresence and permeable architecture. The exhibition presents 
"victimless
, tissue cultured miniature 
leather
 garments or designer 
replacement hymens, video-, interactive- or haptic installations. The 
idea behind this is closed to the McLuhan sense of media/technologies as 
providung at the same time " extentions" and "autoamputation". Whatever 
the media are, they are generating a liminal state of inbetween-ness - 
which we encounter in the age of technological extensions and bio- and 
nano-political changes, and beyond the consequences of the digital age.

My thesis is that 'inbetween-ness' is open to non-dualistic liminal 
thought, going beyond human/animal, human/computer, nature/culture, 
bio/art etc.

Looking forward to a vivid discussion,

Jens