Hauser started with the example of DNA11. Using a sample of DNA that you provide with a simple kit, DNA11 will create a one-of-a-kind artwork that you can then hang up on your wall. Is this bio art?

The rest, after the jump...

What should be qualified as Bio Art and what is not? A work cannot be described as bio art simply because of the content it represents. Chimera-sculptures, DNA-portraits, chromosome-paintings are no more examples of Bio Art than Claude Monet's paintings could be classified as "Water Lily Art" or "Cathedral Art." Similarly, computer simulations of biological processes cannot be regarded as Bio Art.

Bio-art has changed greatly in the past ten years. Hauser underlined 4 trends:

1. Bio Art is increasingly re-materializing itself. The fascination with the "code of life" is receeding and making way for a phenomenological confrontation with wetwork.
2. Instead of representational objects, graphic depictions or simulations, we're having more transformational processes with performance characteristics.
3. Bio Art interests more and more performance artists specializing in Body Art; structural relationships connecting both disciplines.
4. As a medium, Bio Art cannot be nailed down with a hard and fast definition of the procedures and materials it must employ. The manipulation of the mechanisms of life involves a wide array of forms both with respect to discourse and technique.

1. As Peter Weibel wrote "the task of artificially creating life can be approached from 2 directions: the hardware and the software side." After a period that conceived life as code, language, immaterial software, etc. artists like Kac and Jeremijenko are coming out with works that use concrete, organic material and, simultaneously, clear critiques of genetic fetishism.

2. But this re-materialization is doesn't mean we're back to strictly object-centered art. Many artists opt for performative presentations that establish interrelationships between biotechnologies and their philosophical, politic and economic framework conditions. The viewer experiencing Bio Art must switch back and forth between the symolic realm of art and the "real life" of the process on display.

3. Artists are increasingly using their own bodies to explore themes and issues that have arisen in connection with the Life Sciences. For example, Art Orienté Object is planning a transfusion of filtered Panda blood; pioneers of Body Art Orlan and Stelarc have joined the Tissue Culture and Art Project to use tissue culture to grow an extra ear and a patchwork-like material made up of hybrid skin cultures of different donors from various ethnic origins. Body Art and Bio Art survive as film, photo or video documents, as traces like posters or in the form of material remnants.

4. The use of biotechnological procedures as a medium of expression may not have primarily only a depictive function. This is first an art of transformation in vivo that manipulates bio materials at small levels (cells, proteins, genes, etc) and create displays to allow audience to partake of them.

Example that demonstate the complexity of Bio Art:

- Disembodied Cuisine ("the artistic dimension of a frog"), an experiment to grow frog muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption. They even cooked it (frog steaks marinated in Calvados) afterwards and invited people to feast on it.

What is called for is greater selectivity when it comes to the relationship between the methods used and the content: artists who only themathically apraise biotechnology from a distance often lack technological knowledge and thus pose less relevant questions.

The key question is whether the artists must necessarily contribute to the process of knowledge production or whether their role lies in the subversive questioning of emerging concepts and dogmas.

Jens Hauser (DE): art curator and writer, teaching activity on media theory and intercultural approaches, various conference activities, director of documentary films, sound environments; collaborator with several broadcasting stations; currently involved in two long-term film projects about bioart.