Week 6 | BioTech+Art

Week 6 Biotech and Art: Bioart and the Boundaries of Life 

    This week’s materials reshaped how I think about biology, creativity, and ethics. What stood out to me most was Ellen K. Levy’s Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications, Anthony Atala’s TED Talk “Growing New Organs,” and the film Soylent Green (1973). Together with the YouTube videos on transgenic art and synthetic biology, they forced me to confront unsettling but fascinating questions: What is life? Who owns it? Can it be art?

    Levy’s essay dives into how artists use biotechnology not just to imitate life, but to create it. The slime mold, capable of acting as both individual and swarm, becomes a metaphor for flexible identity and collective agency. Artists like Stelarc, who implanted an Extra Ear onto his arm, and Eduardo Kac, who engineered a fluorescent rabbit named Alba, are exploring the literal boundary between human and non-human. Levy makes the point that these artistic practices challenge long-held categories like nature vs. culture, organism vs. machine, art vs. science and that these categories carry legal and economic weight.

Anthony Atala’s TED Talk made those ideas even more concrete. Watching him “print” a kidney using a bioprinter wasn’t just revolutionary, it was utterly eerie. Is life itself a valid expressive medium? In Atala’s case, life is not only expressive but potentially lifesaving. But what happens when life is modified not for survival, but for aesthetics, curiosity, or commentary?

    That’s where Soylent Green adds a chilling perspective. The 1973 film explores a world where bodies are commodified to the extreme; being turned into food. It’s sci-fi, but disturbingly relevant. Watching it after reading Levy’s account of genetically engineered animals, tissue cultures, and “semi-living” art made me realize how close we already are to those ethical lines. Projects like Kathy High’s Embracing Animal, (an installation using cancer-prone lab rats in a nurturing setting) call into question the rights of living organisms used in research.

    The TedTalk and Lecture videos also gave me a broader view of this emerging field. They highlight how artists and researchers alike may use things like CRISPR, cloning, and synthetic DNA not just as tools, but as symbols. This raises another key question: Should the restrictions be more or less stringent for artists than for scientists? In my view, artists working with biotech should adhere to ethical standards but also be free to provoke, critique, and expose.

    In the end, this week taught me that creativity, when paired with biotechnology, can be powerful, poetic, yet potentially dangerous. There may be limits to human creativity, but defining those limits is itself a creative, cultural act.

References 

Atala, Anthony. Growing New Organs. TED, Mar. 2011, www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_growing_new_organs. Accessed 8 May 2025.

Soylent Green. Directed by Richard Fleischer, performances by Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973.

Levy, Ellen K. “Defining Life: Artists Challenge Conventional Classifications.” BioArt, 2006. PDF.

“5 BioArt part 1-5.” UC Online, uploaded by UC Online, 12 May. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EpD3np1S2g. Accessed 8 May 2025.

High, Kathy. Embracing Animal. 2004–2006, www.kathyhigh.com/projects/embracing-animal/. Accessed 8 May 2025.

Images

https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/cindy-stelmackowich/  

https://www.labiotech.eu/trends-news/bioart-in-person-eduardo-kac-transgenic-art/ 

https://www.wipo.int/web/wipo-magazine/articles/dr-anthony-atala-md-new-body-parts-the-shape-of-things-to-come-38654 

https://www.kathyhigh.com/videos/embracing-animal/