Public symposium: “Plastic Futures: biological life, art and design innovation” outcomes of BioTech Art Workshop. 20 Nov
Plastic Futures: biological life, art and design innovation
A public symposium discussion addressing intersections of biotechnology, art, design and cultural change, and the outcomes of SymbioticA’s intensive BioTech Art Workshop hosted by RMIT University.
Friday, November 20, 2009
2:00pm – 5:00pm
The Design Research Institute, RMIT University, Design Hub Gallery Ground floor, Building 91, 110 Victoria Street, Melbourne.
“We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered.” H. G. Wells 1895
“…the very borders between life and death, borders that are still so final, have become so open to negotiation and dispute. As indeed are all those entities such as tissues and ova, hovering between life and death, oscillating between vitality in a test tube or vat of information in a database or biobank…” Nikolas Rose, 2007.
The plasticity of biological life – its ability to change and evolve – is being entertained by new and rapidly accelerating technical capacity. Clearly, this raises new challenges, problems and opportunities that require careful attention.
Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, and others at SymbioticA; Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts (UWA), have been international leaders in engaging with these issues through artistic practice. Increasingly the role designers may have to play in this terrain is being explored and called into question.
From November 16th to 20th, RMIT’s School of Applied Sciences (BioSciences) and the School of Architecture and Design are hosting a one week intensive SymbioticA Biotech Workshop. This workshop is an introduction to biological techniques and issues surrounding the manipulation of living systems, offering a practical and theoretical introduction to the basics of biological techniques and the creation of biological art and design. Through applied ‘hands-on’ methods, the broader philosophical and ethical implications of human intervention with other living things are explored.
Over the week, reports, comments and thoughts arising during the workshop will be posted to a blog, including a twitter feed. People can follow the action at: http://liveness.org/plasticfutures
This workshop closes with the wider discussion of an open forum. The aim of this forum will be to discuss and reflect upon the workshop, including the broader cultural, research and pedagogical issues it raises, for the benefit of both participants and a wider interested public.
Convened by Oron Catts and Pia Ednie-Brown
All welcome.
zarathrusta
The quote from HG Wells above is taken out of context. Wells was arguing that to regard human being or beings as a biological resource is one of the dangers of an industrialised, modern society. The danger is that the deeply held values of equality of all mankind, democratic moral feeling and sort of middle-class good will are threatened by the very thing upon which they are built: exploitation of resources. The danger comes in the inability to distinguish as a matter of moral reflection, between people and the world.
But the discernment of resources relies precisely upon the strange seeing, alienated eye, disinterest or objectivity that allows the use value of resources to become visible. This contradiction is masked with the image of “neutrality” in which a lack of consciousness on the part of the resource is used to argue for its lack of “interest” in being exploited. Human being is thus placed “above” in a moral and ethical sense, the world that it exploits. Relying on linear causality and rational approach to what can be knowing and being, the moral order to nature allows the increase of human power and civilisation in its modern form.
Applied to non-life this seems unproblematic, but when the resource is alive, the question of sentience suddenly seems crucial. Thus a moral order is drawn according to such distinctions: humans on top, then sentient animals, non-sentient life and then non-life such as rocks and water. Naturally, the differences between life and non-life, sentient and non-sentient beings are founded on pre-modern notions of being and identity that lead to problems of precision, definition and discernment under modern notions of equality and democracy. The moral battle lines are drawn between being as a neutral “object” and being as an interested “subject.” Ironically and with a certain degree of humorous potential, the properties of both are necessary in the other. The object requires a subject and the subject requires an object: thus a person requires a body and vice versa, in a self-contradictory interplay filed with dysfunctionality and alienation. Thus the great comedy of modern life is played out as alienated self-body contradictions. Self-consciously taking a myopic scientific approach to the “body” as a material for artwork is part of this comedy.
Art that uses human biological material as a resource, as is done by other human biological material, or “persons,” is essentially a comedy of power. Thus a power relation is created between two types of human biological material as a matter of culture and art, just as has been seen between European empire builders and Africans. The result is slavery, cruelty and resentment and, as Marquis de Sade has shown us, can become a theatre in which such cruelty becomes an aesthetic interest. Moral absolution is achieved by seeing a person purely as a body and a body purely as functions. The empathetic view is denied leaving the alienated of stranger’s view. Through the stranger’s eye, all cruelty is absolved of its moral content and becomes aesthetic and thereby available to the bourgeois concept of ars gratia artis. As with the slave owners and their slaves, the power relation must seem absolute and must be expressed through ideas such as culture, consciousness and of course, art. One side of the power differential becomes god-like and the other more and more denigrated. But in a modern democratic world, such an arrangement is an assembly in which all human being, as a matter of individual being, takes parts. Each person becomes both the slave and the slave-owner, a half-god – half human, self-strange and subject to cruelty as a matter of aesthetics. Cosmetic surgery, dietary dugs and machinic forms of exercise are all ironic symptoms of alienated self-harm bent on aesthetic gratification. Thereby, each person becomes both a half god and a slave to their own bio-aesthetics. Intolerable to artists such as the rather damaged Rudolf Schwarzkogler, the irony of such a world is deeply attractive to artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Nu Descendu is precisely the image of the god-like self-harming machine person/skeleton.
But one cannot remain half a god for long, as the slave owners discovered and is so beautifully described in Greek mythology with figures such as Heracles and Achilles. To be half god and half mortal is to fall victim to the failings of both. Age takes its toll, genetic disorders abound and the young are the measure of such a fall. If such artists really want to take their work to its natural end, which is to say as if they were gods they would express the same destructive caprice that all gods, especially the Greek ones, have done. Naturally this would seem deeply unethical in a world unable to escape its own moral values but nevertheless consistent with their artistic approach.
Dec 27, 2009 @ 12:07 pm