CULTURE / Art

Making 'BioArt' a cultural practice

Something blue: 'Common Flowers,' a recent work of the creative duo BCL, Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel, involved the cloning of Suntory Flowers' genetically engineered 'Moondust' carnation using plant tissue culture techniques. They next plan to remove the blue carnation's foreign genes and return it to its original white state. | GEORG TREMMEL

By Verena Dauerer

Jul 30, 2010

At this year's Society for Social Studies Conference at the University of Tokyo, Aug. 25-29, there will be a session on "BioArt," which begs the question: What would that be?

BioArt describes the variety of art forms emerging in the last two decades that use biotechnology or genetics to manipulate living things, altering food, plants, even livestock. In best do-it- yourself tradition, artists have started to swap their studios for laboratories and are using molecular biology to deliberately create hybrids, clones or mutations as artistic expressions.

So is science the new art? A question posed by author Ingeborg Reichle in the newly published and thorough compendium about biotechnology and art "Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art."