Immersive Artificial
Life (A-Life) Art
Edwina Bartlem
In this era of cloning, cyborgs,
simulations and new biotechnologies, the term artificial life (or A-life) can
refer to a range of creatures or organisms that are created and augmented
through diverse medical, prosthetic and digital information technologies.
Hybridity, emergence and symbiosis have become important metaphors for
conceptualising life in this ‘neo-biological’ or bio-tech era. Perhaps not
surprisingly, these themes are also present in contemporary new media art,
especially computer-generated and biological art.1 A-life in art is manifested
in a variety of ways, including computer-based, evolutionary life-systems
(virtual ecologies); animated creatures with life-like behaviours (virtual
creatures); living organisms and ‘semi-living objects’.2
The traditional understanding of A–life
as a scientific and creative field rests on its concern with manifesting
material or organic living systems and life-like behaviours in simulated
(computer) systems or virtual environments.3 This article adopts a broader
definition of this term to include biological A-life — new and hybrid
life-forms created by artificial and technological means, such as cloning,
transgenics or tissue-culture engineering. So, two interwoven strands of
artificial life research in new media art are of interest here:
computer-generated algorithmic art (digital or silicon A-life) and biological
art (bio A-life). Digital A-life is a predominantly synthetic and digital
medium.4 Bio-artists employ biological science knowledge, methodologies and
technologies as part of their artistic practice to create new life-forms and
-systems for aesthetic and ideological purposes.5 Both digital and bio A-life
are human-made; reliant on digital technologies for their development and
existence; and are concerned with redefining how life is conceptualised.
New digital and bio-technologies are
transforming our notions of life and humanity, and these concerns are being
negotiated in the work of new-media artists. A-life created through digital and
bio-technologies brings into question what defines life; what it means to be
human; and what it means to create new lifeforms. Additional questions raised
by the artists working in this area include: What is A-life? Who defines life?
Can life exist in a machine? What are our responsibilities to the hybrid and
artificial offspring that we engineer? This article is concerned with exploring
how the formal, technical and thematic elements of A-life art operate together
in an exhibition context to immerse the participantviewer in a conceptual
dialogue with the work. The process, content and exhibition experience of
particular A-life works are analysed to consider how these works raise
philosophical and ethical issues regarding computer and biologically engineered
life.
At the heart of this project is a
concern with investigating how A-life artworks engage viewers in perceptually
and conceptually immersive experiences. Certain A-life artworks encourage
viewers to contemplate the ethical issues surrounding the use of new
information and bio-technologies in science and art through intereactive and
immersive aesthetics. A-life art is a site of dialogue, debate and intellectual
exchange about the meanings of life — artificial, organic or hybrid. In this
article, I am expanding on art historian T J Clark’s argument that artworks can
be treated as discourses because they are sites of exchange, contention and
dialogue.6 Clark draws on Mikhail Baktin’s concept of dialogue, which asserts
that discourses and languages (written, spoken, visual and audio-visual) are
‘open to dispute’ and infused with meaning.7 Artists, curators and viewers
negotiate the aesthetics, content and ethics of a work of art within a
particular socio-historical context. Considering that A-life artworks are often
exhibited in public galleries as installations, what becomes critical is how
this environment is inextricably linked with how A-life art is experienced and
interpreted.
All the artists discussed here exhibit
their work as multi-media installations in public galleries and exhibition
spaces. This article focuses on the digital A-life artists Jon McCormack and
collaborative artists, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, who develop
computer-generated algorithmic A-life creatures and environments that draw the
viewer into immersive, responsive and interactive relationships with these
artificial creatures and ecosystems. The bio-artists of primary interest here
are Eduardo Kac and the Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A) group: Ionat Zurr,
Oron Catts and Guy Ben Ary. TC&A use biological technologies and
methodologies to create new biological life-forms through tissue-culture
engineering. They recently collaborated with Stelarc on the Extra Ear — 1/4
Scale (2003–2004) project.
Since new-media art practice and A-life
research are interdisciplinary, this article also adopts an interdisciplinary
approach to the ethics and experiences of A-life art. To construct my argument
I will touch on issues in diverse fields, from histories of artificial
intelligence, virtual reality, art, spectatorship and the biological sciences.
I will also draw upon the writing of Christopher Langton, Simon Penny, Sarah
Kember and Mitchell Whitelaw regarding definitions and critiques of discourses
surrounding digital A-life.
Cultural historians and critics such as
N Katherine Hayles, Kevin Kelly and Edward Shanken, who have sought to untangle
the complicated discourses that link biology, philosophy, cybernetics and
virtual reality, are also important to this project. This article is also
indebted to new-media theorists and art historians Oliver Grau and T J Clark,
Darren Tofts and Roy Ascott, who offer their own theories and critiques of
models of participant-viewer experience and interaction with virtual
environments, technology-based art and immersive aesthetics. Finally, this
article draws on the artists’ personal accounts of their philosophical, ethical
and aesthetic approaches to creating A-life. It seeks to contribute to the work
of artists, researchers and scientists who are working in fields of digital and
bio Alife art by emphasising their experiential and ethical dimensions.
Defining A-life
It is beyond the scope of this article
to provide a detailed historical account of Alife art and its origins in
cybernetics, robotics, computer science and engineering. This extensive project
has already been undertaken by Mitchell Whitelaw in Metacreation (2004).8
However, a brief introduction to the field of A-life is still necessary in
order to analyse how artists are negotiating the contentious issues of creating
and defining A-life in art.
A-life refers to an existence or entity
that is made possible, maintained or augmented through artificial means. N
Katherine Hayles contends that the attempt to create artificial life takes place
in three main research terrains: ‘wetware’, ‘hardware’ and ‘software’.9 Wetware
research is concerned with creating organic life and multi-cellular organisms
within a laboratory and through biological procedures. Hardware research is
more focused on developing embodied artificial intelligence within a mechanical
form such as a robot. Software research is directed at generating life-like
behaviours in computer programs and representing these performances and
interactions graphically on-screen. Computer A-life software research is
focused on creating programs that generate ‘emergent and evolutionary
processes’.10
Digital A-life, and the related
discourse of artificial intelligence (AI) emerged out of a convergence of
biological and computer sciences and robotics. Despite their similarities,
these fields of research take different approaches to the modelling of
computer-generated intelligence. Early studies into computer AI and robotics
adopted an ‘abstract logical reasoning’ approach to modelling intelligence in
computer systems.11 Computers effectively mapped out complex problems in terms
of a series of mathematical and logical equations to come up with a solution. A
problem with this approach was that while computer systems excelled in ‘logical
reasoning’ and resolving bounded problems such as winning a chess game, they
failed to be able to work out everyday problems that required ‘common sense’.12
In response to the limits of logical systems theory, new studies emerged that
were more influenced by complexity theory. They were variously known as
‘bottom-up robotics, alternative AI, complexity theory, artificial life,
genetic algorithms’.13
Christopher Langton, who coined the
term ‘A-life’, suggests that computergenerated A-life has a dual function: it
attempts to recreate natural biological or living systems while also attempting
to generate possible life-forms.14 According to Langton, A-life researchers
create systems that allow people to study biological life and existing life-systems,
or ‘life-as-we-know-it’, while creating new systems for imagining and
representing ‘life-as-it-could-be’.15 Thus, it allows for the extension of the
domain of ‘bio-logic’ beyond life as it exists, toward a zoology of futuristic
and imaginary life. Instead of dissecting and deconstructing living creatures,
as the biological sciences have traditionally done, algorithmic A-life attempts
to envisage and create new life-like creatures. Consequently, digital Alife
research can be seen as a productive and creative site for imagining future
bodies and potential life-systems.
Sarah Kember argues in Cyberfeminism
and Artificial Life (2003) that the main differences between AI and A-life are
their problem-solving skills and their agency.16 According to Kember, AIs
require their own ‘agency and autonomy’ to develop better problem-solving
skills, and ‘this shift towards autonomous agency’ represents a shift from
artificial intelligence to artificial life.17 This focus on creating individual
agency and autonomy in A-life has obvious connections to liberal humanist
notions of what it means to be human and sentient. A-life designers aim for
their offspring to be ‘adaptive, robust, flexible and friendly’, while focusing
on clarifying and artificially reproducing the processes that supposedly
constitute consciousness in living things, such as birth, growth, replication
(reproduction), autonomy, evolution, adaptation, self-organisation, social
interaction, learning and even death.18
Cultural critic Edward Shanken makes the
point that digital A-life is grounded in ideas and theories of life, rather
than in the materiality of life.19 Therefore, digital A-life artists are not
creating new life; rather, they are creating representations of life that are
based in biological theories of life. Shanken maintains that applying
biological theories to computer programming does not represent a new ontology
of life; instead, it is a manifestation of an existing biological
epistemologies of life. It is for this reason that Shanken argues that it is
more appropriate for digital A-life to be described as ‘synthetic biology’.20
Although A-life research is firmly tied
to discourses of biological evolution and theory, it is also influenced by
ideas of imaginary becoming. Artificial life as it is defined by Langton and
other A-lifers, such as Thomas Ray, is marked by a decisive break from
conceptualising life and (re)production as natural. Instead, the focus is on
narratives of innovation, replication and rapid artificial evolution. As a concept
and cultural metaphor, A-life evokes associations with posthuman (or at least
post-organic) life as we experience it now through the hybridisation of organic
bodies with non-organic or unnatural elements and processes. Simultaneously,
A-life can be seen as part of a movement away from essentialist and naturalised
ways of conceiving the body, toward a manifestation of Haraway’s metaphor of
cyborg subjects.21 It links to postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of bodies
and identities as being in a state of emergence and technological extension. At
times, A-life discourse contains a prophecy of futuristic and imaginary
posthuman or post-organic life.
In Out of Control: The Rise of
Neo-Biological Civilization (1994), Kevin Kelly proposes that the old line between
‘the born and the made’ has become irremediably blurred.22 Self-replicating
computer programs that mimic evolution by developing unplanned order and
artificial intelligence, bringing the dynamics of living systems into digital
systems, suggest that life can be synthesised. Simultaneously, the biological
sciences, especially genetic engineering, have begun to insert technical
processes into organisms. As Kelly states, ‘at the same time that the logic of
Bios is being imported into machines, the logic of Technos is being imported
into life’.23 The result is a culturally perceived meld between the organic and
the technological, with mechanical and synthetic objects or systems becoming
more life-like, and organic things (such as human bodies, plants and viruses)
becoming more constructed and engineered. Ultimately, life is becoming more
artificial and more hybridised:
The realm of the born — all that is
natural — and the realm of the made — all that is humanly constructed — are
becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming
engineered.24
The digital A-life paradigm shares with
biology a tendency to reduce life to a simple genetic code and the inclination
to interpret life as a form of information processing. Once life is symbolically
reduced to code, this raw data can then be recoded or recombined into
alternative patterns and systems — alternative lifeforms and ecologies. Life is
often understood by A-life artists and designers as being a system of complex
behaviours, rather than as related to matter, such as a biological body. As
Langton claims, ‘life is a kind of behaviour, not a kind of stuff’.25 This
raises questions about how we define life, and how we differentiate between
living, non-living or semi-living creatures. Is life simply a series of
behaviours and processes? Can life in all its complexity simply be reduced down
to a string of numbers? What role does embodiment play in conceptualising and
experiencing life?
It seems that embodiment is often
removed from the A-Life equation. Bodies are either ignored completely, or
viewed as vessels that can be refined and replaced. Simon Penny (1997) and N
Kathryn Hayles (1999) have observed that the philosophic traditions that inform
computer and cybernetic science affirm the Cartesian duality of the mind/body
split. The mind is understood as the central site of identity and as a system
that holds information (such as memories and knowledge), not dissimilar to a
computer hard drive, while the body is viewed as a prosthesis to the mind.
Theoretically, information can be transferred into another body or cybernetic
system. Cybernetic research of this nature indicates a fascination with
transcending and transforming the biological body. This paradigm is imbued with
utopic ideals and transcendental longings for an escape from the physical body
to a dematerialised world of data or ‘pure information’, as Michael Benedikt
calls it.26 This idea of information as a pure, incorporeal substance is
analogous to Christian notions of the soul or spirit.27 Similarly, the desire
for an escape from the body to a realm uncontaminated by the chaos and
confusion of the actual world and the corporeal body has striking similarities
to the Christian notion of ascending to heaven.
Simon Penny critiques cybernetic and
A-life tendencies of privileging the mind over the body and of conceptually
separating thinking from embodiment.28 According to Penny, we should be
reworking understandings of the body to see it as a whole system, and thinking
needs to be reconceptualised as something that is distributed throughout the
body, rather than being localised in the brain.29 Penny has critical and
artistic interests in the role of embodiment and interactivity in engaging with
A-life and new-media environments. Penny argues that digital art practice is in
conflict with traditional art practices because it represents a movement away
from embodied art practices and bodily knowledges. In his words:
The virtualization of artistic practice
by the use of simulatory tools implies the eradication of kinaesthetic or
somatosensory awareness and skills.30
While this might be the case for the
artist’s experience of making digital art, it is not necessarily the case for
viewers observing and experiencing these digital works. This is not to claim
that all digital art installations present effective and complex embodied modes
of interaction. Small computer monitors and keyboard interfaces are not
necessarily the most effective ways of displaying and experiencing digital
artworks. However, artists and curators have been developing more effective
display techniques and interfacing systems for digital artworks that involve
viewers in more bodily and psychologically immersive processes of interaction.
In fact, Penny and artists such as Ken Rinaldo, Bill Vorn, Louise- Philippe
Demers, Jon McCormack, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau have all
developed A-life artworks that are designed to be immersive and affective
environments for viewers. These artists have embraced immersive and interactive
aesthetics and interfaces that stress embodiment and kinaesthetic experience.
Digital A-life art: embodied and
immersive environments
Whitelaw maintains that while artists
have ‘followed a-life science’ in constructing artificial environments, they
are often less concerned with ‘replicating the dynamics of biological systems’
and are more concerned with creating environments ‘for human experience and
interaction’.31 Artists often create A-life forms and artificial ecologies, or
‘cybernatures’, that effectively provide viewers with constructed environments
that encourage interactive and immersive experiences.32
Australian artist Jon McCormack
explores themes and processes of A-life, unnatural selection and artificial
evolution in screen-based installations that physically, visually and
conceptually immerse the viewer. McCormack has been working with video and
computer-generated interactive and responsive screenbased installations since
the late 1980s. One of McCormack’s most famous and dynamic works, Turbulence:
an interactive museum of unnatural history (1995), extends Langton’s theory of
A-life by generating digital A-life-forms that have an uncanny appearance of
realness or liveliness about them. The digital interface of Turbulence
symbolically links digital A-life-forms to biological and medical histories of
collection, classification and experimentation.
Turbulence was recently exhibited at
the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. The installation
consisted of an interactive projection of digitally generated A-life-forms
(stored on laser disk) and a soundtrack amplified in multi-directions.
Turbulence offered viewers the opportunity to enter and amble around an
architecturally and visually immersive installation. To experience this museum
of un-natural history visitors needed to enter the installation via a narrow
corridor and entrance — a threshold to a turbulent and uncanny zone. The only
light came from the touch-screen and screen projection, directing the viewer’s
attention to the images on the screen. The digital component of the work
featured apparently organic A-life-forms in a state of evolution and
transformation.
Whitelaw has commented that McCormack’s
works reflect an ambivalent attitude toward the possible outcomes of artificial
life and artificial natures.33 These virtual creatures and worlds do not
necessarily appear harmless or benign. In fact, they are sometimes in a state
of rapid evolution and display frightening and aggressive behaviour.
Participants were able to use a
touch-screen to interact with the work, selecting A-life-forms that were
grouped according to biota (or type), and then projected in a process of
emergence on a large screen. New media theorist Darren Tofts has said of Turbulance
that:
The modest user interface of Turbulence
heightened the sensation of being in an unencumbered experience, and its impact
was such that you didn’t necessarily have to be in command of it to feel a part
of the ‘place’ that was created within the installation.34
Tofts’s assertion that viewers were
given a sense of being a part of the artificial environment while occupying
this temporary installation implies that Tofts and other viewers had the
impression of being embedded in, and immersed within, the aesthetic space of
the installation and the digital projection. Arguably, this immersive
experience was created for viewers through a combination of elements: the small
entrance; the architectural space of the installation; the darkness of the
space; and the projection of ephemeral digital A-life. The ability to enter
into and wander through this space, and to interact with the digital artwork
via the touchscreen interface, were central to the aesthetic experience of this
constructed and virtual world as being both immersive and physically affective.
Interactivity and physical immersion work together to increase the
psychological immersion and connection that viewers have with the A-life
environments and creatures presented on-screen. By becoming more immersed in
the architecture of the work, viewers are also enticed into a more emotional
and engaged relationship with the content of the work.
In 1994 Austrian-born artist Christa
Sommerer and French-born artist Laurent Mignonneau completed their generative,
evolutionary artwork and installation AVolve. This work was developed while the
artists were ‘artists in residence’ at the National Centre for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA), Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology,
University of Illinois at Urbana, USA. Soon afterward, A-Volve was exhibited at
Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), where it won the Golden Nica Award.35 It
stands out as an effective and affective example of a projected evolutionary
artwork, in part because of its aesthetics, but also because of its exhibition
presentation and interactive design. The title of the work calls upon the
concepts of artificial life and evolution, implying that the work seeks to
present a form of artificial evolution. What is not explicit in the title of
the work is that the artificial growth and expansion implicit in the work
refers to something beyond the virtual creatures generated by the software and
hardware. The interactive viewer is asked to ‘a-volve’ their imagination and
their notions of life and evolution as they immerse themselves in a physical,
intellectual and emotional dialogue with the work.
A-Volve is an interactive, real-time
installation that requires visitors to interact with it by designing
marine-like creatures to inhabit a virtual pool. Visitors design the creatures
by tracing a shape with their finger on a touch-screen. The interfacing system
then translates this two dimensional image into a threedimensional
representation that appears to come alive and swim around as a virtual aquatic
life-form as it is projected into the real space of a water-filled glass pool.
The imagined gap between virtuality and reality is partially bridged through
the inclusion of the pool of water as a liquid projection screen that is part
of the installation.
The virtual aquatic creatures are
products of evolutionary rules and are influenced by human decisions made while
tracing the original shape. The form, movement and survival probability of the
A-life entity in the pool are related to how the creature is designed by the
participant. Within the pool, the rules of evolution and survival in an aquatic
environment come into play, with some creatures becoming predators while others
end up as prey. As with real ecosystems, the introduction of a new species can
totally reorganise the balance and hierarchy of the system. Darwinian notions
of natural selection through competition, mutation and adaptation come to mind
as one observes the organisation and perpetual reorganisation of this virtual
aquatic world. Life, as it is played out in this pool, is dynamic and subject
to radical change. It is in a constant state of flux and ‘becoming’ over the
duration of the show.36
As Roy Ascott argues in relation to
interactive artworks, ‘without the interaction between the viewer and the work,
the work cannot be said to exist’.37 The meaning and the actual content of
interactive artworks such as A-Volve evolve with the presence and interaction
of the participant-viewer, who simultaneously makes, views and experiences the
work. The viewer becomes the co-creator of the work. In the case of A-Volve, it
is the participant-viewer who brings the virtual creatures to life by designing
and engineering them, with the assistance of digital technologies and the
interfacing system designed by the artists. The role of the viewer is
transformed from distanced observer to creator, interactive participant and
immersant. Participant-viewers become enveloped in the process of creation and
the unfolding of this artificial life and aquatic ecology.
By creating their own creatures,
participants become more psychologically attached to their virtual creatures
and consequently become more invested in nurturing, protecting and ‘playing
parent’ to these virtual offspring. Although these A-life creatures are virtual
and non-material, some participants react to them as if they are real and
organic life-forms. This connection between the image and the imagination of
the participant-viewer is so strong that some visitors attempt to touch these
creatures and to intervene in the open-ended evolution of this aquatic
eco-system.38 Some viewers attempt to protect their creatures from being
attacked and devoured by other A-life forms by trying to plunge their hands
into the pool, as if it were a matter of life and death of a pet.39 So there is
a sense of realness about the encounter with this virtual environment that
heightens the responsibility that viewers feel for their artificial offspring.
A-Volve invites participants to reconsider what they conceptualise as life;
what their roles in artificial evolution might be; and what their
responsibility to their artificial offspring are as they interact with this
virtual ecology.
Bio A-life: designed, not born
Biological artists employ biological
science knowledge, methodologies and technologies as part of their artistic
practice to engage in acts of artificial evolution and A-life creation for
aesthetic and ethical purposes. As an aesthetic practice, bio A-life art seems
to generate more anxieties and uncertainties in regard to the ethics, processes
and meanings of these works than digital A-life art. This is partly to do with
the fact that bio-artists move beyond the digital realm into the organic,
biological and physical realm. They deal with the materiality of tissue, cells
and flesh in the creation of their new organisms, as opposed to the
immateriality of digital code. Ambivalences about bio-art also emerge out of
cultural anxieties that circulate around bio-technologies and genetic
engineering more generally. Anxieties about the loss of the biologically human;
the engineering of artificial life-forms; the re-emergence of old forms of
eugenics; the suffering of animals in the name of scientific research and art;
and human inabilities to deal with death are just a few ethical issues
circulating around bio-art.
When artists utilise animals or
techno-scientific knowledges, practices and procedures as part of their
artistic practice, questions about the appropriate uses of these things seem to
emerge. Ethical questions are raised about the legitimate use of
bio-technologies and procedures as part of an aesthetic practice. Is it ethical
for artists to use these technologies and techniques in this way? Is this a
valid form of social and ethical creative critique?
Bio A-life art draws attention to the
ongoing human project of manipulating life and creating new, hybrid living
organisms for aesthetic and scientific purposes. Bio-art is not a new
phenomenon; it has a history that is associated more with folk culture than
with high art. American artist George Gessert refers to the aesthetic project
of propagating and cross-breeding flowers, plants and animals as a form of
‘genetic folk art’.40 Gessert positions his own art practice, which involves
creating hybrid varieties of wildflowers and plants, then exhibiting them
within an art gallery context, as part of a folk art tradition. Enacting a
process of unnatural selection and artificial reproduction, Gessert decides
which flowers are most aesthetically pleasing to continue propagating and
cross-breeding into new hybrids. His work alludes to human histories and
processes of evaluating, interpreting and manipulating ‘nature’.41 Besides the
fact that Gessert’s art questions definitions of art, it also highlights the
human history of creating new life-forms.
Although Gessert utilises techniques of
selective breeding and genetic engineering of plants in the production of his
art, it does not seem to generate as much controversy or anxiety as art that
involves animal experimentations, genetic engineering or other bio-tech
procedures as part of the aesthetic practice. This is probably because humans
create hierarchies of living things — usually positioning themselves at the top
of the evolutionary pyramid. Furthermore, an imaginary division between
sentient and non-sentient life-forms comes into play when we contemplate
invasive experimentations with living things.
In 1998 artist Eduardo Kac generated
impassioned debate about the use of genetic engineering and animal experimentation
as a creative process and medium. Kac argued for a new medium that he called
‘transgenic art’: the transferral of genes from one organism to another to
create (or engineer) a hybrid creature.42 In 2000, Kac commissioned a French
Research Institute to create Alba, a rabbit that glows fluorescent-green when
illuminated by blue light. The scientists engineered the transgenic rabbit by
injecting the green fluorescent protein (GFP) of a pacific jellyfish into the
egg of an albino rabbit. Alba was to be part of an installation and performance
by Kac entitled GFP BUNNY (2000).
The engineered rabbit produced heated
debate among scientists, artists, animal-rights activists and art critics about
the use of bio-technologies in the production of art. People questioned whether
it was appropriate for artists to use these techniques in order to reflect upon
the bio-ethics of medical science. The questions exploded: Is it art? Is it
exploitation? Should we be thinking of animals as research objects or art
objects? What responsibilities do artists have for the living or ‘semi-living’
creatures that they create in the name of art? Just as Marcel Duchamp’s
introduction of ready-mades into the context of the gallery pushed the limits
of what was considered to be art, so too did Kac’s project of introducing a
genetically designed animal as a design object extend the limits of what was
considered to be art.43 One of the most interesting aspects of Kac’s work is
that it raised questions about what was considered to be legitimate and
illegitimate forms of animal research. It became evident that while scientists
had a broad scope for animal experimentation, artists were policed far more
rigorously by the general public and art critics when they incorporated live
animals into their work.
Some critics argued that GFP Bunny was
not just problematic, it was not even art. Paul Virilio describes transgenic
art as ‘pitiless art’ because it utilises genetic engineering, a science that
Virilio sees as one of the great evils of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, as a creative medium.44 Virilio is highly critical of contemporary
bio-art because he sees it as a new kind of ‘expressionism’ and ‘teratology’,
where the monstrous is not an accident of nature or a fabrication of the
artist’s imagination but a material manifestation of scientific and artistic
experimentation.45 Virilio’s critique articulates an anxiety about the
obliteration of the natural body and Christian humanist ideals of humanity.
Ironically, the main point of Kac’s
‘transgenic’ artwork is to generate debate about the ethics of bio-technologies
and genetic engineering. The work is intended to create a dialogue between the
artist, the creature-artwork and the viewer.46 Kac’s art does not just exist in
the creation of the genetically engineered object but also in the discussion
provoked about the themes and methodologies that are integral to the production
of the work. Kac’s work is conceptual art with a material component. It attempts
to immerse the viewer conceptually in an intellectual and emotional dialogue
with the themes of his work: transgenic A-life, A-creation and A-volution.
Bio-artists often collaborate with
scientists in laboratories during the development of their work. This
collaboration symbolically replaces the Romantic notion of the artist working
alone in their studio with the image of the artist as experimenter and
collaborator in the laboratory. Collaboration between art, technology and
science is not a new development, yet it has become more prominent in the past
decade. As Oliver Grau comments in Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion
(2003), there has been a ‘renaissance of the classic alliance between art,
technology and science’, which has contributed to the emergence of particular
artists who have a reputation for using new technologies and sciences as part
of their creative practice.47
Working closely with scientific
researchers allows bio-artists to exchange ideas and skills with scientists in
the development of living art objects, while also providing artists with an
opportunity to discuss the ethics of the procedures being performed in these
labs. The science lab can be a site of dialogue about the ethics involved in
experimenting with life on a genetic or cellular level, and the creation of new
A-life-forms. In some cases, artists see their role as challenging scientists’
ideas about their own research by encouraging them to think critically about
the creative and destructive potentials of their endeavours. This seems to be
the case for the Perth-based art collective Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A).
The TC&A Project was initiated in
1996 and is an ongoing project that uses ‘tissue technologies as medium for
artistic expression’.48 TC&A are currently based at SymbioticA (The Art
& Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the School of Anatomy and
Human Biology, University of Western Australia). SymbioticA is an artist-run
research laboratory that was established in April 2000 with the aim of acting as
a site where art and bio-medical sciences could interact and mingle.49 The
members of the TC&A group, Ionat Zurr, Oron Catts and Guy Ben Ary, bring
different aesthetic and technical skills to the group. TC&A’s tissue
engineering technique involves growing cell-cultures from skin, muscle and bone
cells over a degradable biopolymer support-structure. Tissue cultures are used
to produce hybrid ‘semi-living entities’ that exist as art objects, rather than
being engineered for transplantation into another body. Thus, they subvert the
intended use of tissue engineering by using it for creative purposes, playing
provocateur within laboratory and gallery environments.
In the process of producing new
‘semi-living’ artworks, the TC&A project engages with debates about artificially
created life-forms, animal testing and the possible futures of
bio-technologies. Ultimately TC&A call into question some of the myths of
scientific objectivity, rationality and the idea that new technologies are
controllable by scientists. By using bio-technologies and techniques in an
alternative way, they pose the questions: What if we do something else with
these technologies? And how can scientists control the outcomes of these
technologies? In a recent collaboration with Stelarc, TCA worked on the Extra
Ear — 1/4 Scale project. This project entailed the growth of an easily
recognisable human body part, an artificial ear, out of animal skin-cell
cultures. A quarter-scale model of Stelarc’s ear was produced before skin was
grown over the model in ‘a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor which allows the
cells to grow in three dimensions’.50
Extra Ear — 1/4 Scale confronts viewers
with a miniaturised human body part that is semi-alive while also being
separate from the body. This project is an extension of TC&A’s concerns
with creating semi-living objects as artworks, while tapping into cultural and
ethical debates about how we conceptualise and contend with life-like objects
that are grown and sustained through technological means. For Stelarc, this
project represents an addition to his continuing project of redesigning the
body through technological augmentation and alteration. Stelarc uses prosthetic
elements as ‘signs of excess’, rather than as signs of replacement for lacking
or dysfunctional parts of the body.51
Strangely enough, artificial ears have
become powerful signs of tissue-culture engineering and bio-technologies more
generally. In the mid-1990s the ear-mouse appeared in scientific and cultural
journals as a sign of a new post-organic, biotech era. Catts and Zurr claim
that it was the footage of the ear-mouse that initially prompted their interest
in tissue engineering as a provocative creative media:
We
were amazed by the confronting sculptural possibilities this technology might
offer. The ear itself is a fascinating sculptural form, removed from its
original context and placed on the back of mouse; one could observe the ear in
all of its sculptural glory.52
The ear-mouse is a disturbing sign of
human experimentations with bioengineering, and it acts as a reminder of the
human-centric nature of these technologies. It is a powerful signifier for a
posthuman era where boundaries between the human and the non-human have been
completely breached. This nude mouse, with a human ear upon its back, is one of
the most famous examples of a creature created for xenotransplantation — the
transplantation of cells, tissues or organs from one organism to another,
usually a non-human creature to a human. Xenotransplantation has emerged as a
profitable scientific field partly because of the demand for organs to be
transplanted into humans. Species boundaries are transgressed at a genetic
level in the production of these donor animals, with the transplantation of
various organs into human recipients blurring the imagined border between
humans and animals. These experiments result in an actualisation of Deleuze and
Guattari’s metaphor of ‘becoming-animal’.53 Xenotransplantation suggests that
on a genetic level, engineered animals are becoming humans and, in the process
of incorporating animal parts (their skin, organs and cells) into human bodies,
we are becoming-animals. Humans have a symbiotic relationship with the hybrid,
artificial offspring of bio-science.
An intention of Extra Ear — 1/4 Scale
project is that it should stimulate debate about bio-ethical issues and
concepts of life as they relate to scientifically engineered ‘semi-living’
organisms. Ironically, when the work was exhibited as part of the Clemenger
Contemporary Art Award at the Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria
(Australia) in 2003, the artists were asked to declare that the work did not
‘raise ethical issues in general and in particular in the biomedical
community’.54 Seeking reassurance from the artists as to the political
neutrality of their work seems paradoxical, given that the primary aim of
TC&A’s work to date has been to generate critical dialogue about biomedical
procedures and research. Zurr and Catts have made a point of stressing the
political nature of the TC&A project in a number of articles and artist
statements. In Zurr and Catts’s words:
As
artists, we believe that our role is to reveal inconsistencies in regard to our
current attitudes to life and to focus attention on the discrepancies between
our western cultural perceptions and the new techno-scientific understandings
about life … our role is to further problematise ethical frameworks … and shift
the goalposts of contemporary ethics by drawing attention to the existence of
partial life and semi-living entities.55
One of the ways that TC&A
problematise ideas of living and semi-living creatures is through the ‘caring’
and ‘killing’ rituals involved in maintaining and ending the life of their
tissue-culture artworks.56 Part of the responsibility associated with creating
new bio A-life-forms is the role of sustaining and caring for these
(semi-)living creatures. Zurr and Catts refer to the responsibility of
maintaining bio A-life as ‘The Aesthetics of Care’. Artists who engineer new
organisms, cell cultures and animals as part of their creative practice are not
just involved in the creation of new A-life-forms, they also need to nurture,
protect, feed and maintain these organisms or cultures. When artists are no
longer able to care for their semi-living entities, they need to euthanase
them. TC&A call this ‘the killing ritual’.
‘The killing ritual’ is probably the
most affective immersive experience for viewers faced with TC&A’s
semi-living objects because of its immediacy and tactility. Audience members
are invited to participate in the killing ritual by touching the tissue
cultures. On exposure to human touch, the tissue cultures become contaminated
by the bacteria and fungi, which live in the environment and on humans. These
evocative rituals bestow a meaning and value on the semi-living tissue cultures
as living entities that they would otherwise be refused. Confronted with the
tactility of this experience, which effectively kills the tissue-culture
entity, participants are forced to question whether these organisms are really
living or semi-living.
Paradoxically, it is during this
experience of touching these tissue cultures and causing their death that
participants have the strongest sense that these entities are semi-alive or
un-dead. While they may not seem to be truly alive when viewed inside a
bioreactor in a gallery, they certainly appear to die during the killing
ritual. Caring and killing rituals encourage participants to contemplate the
responsibilities that humans have for their artificial offspring and to think
about the symbiotic relationships that humans have with their natural and
artificial environments. For tissue cultures, humans are infectious agents and
host animals for various bacteria, fungi and viruses, which effectively kill
them. This suggests that there can be no purity of species or organisms without
symbiosis and that humans cannot exist separately from the environment and
other creatures. In the past ten years, new-media artists have been designing
more immersive and affective environments that include more direct and
corporeal forms of audience participation. This move toward interactive,
immersive and affective aesthetics is partly generated by a desire to create
more engaging and complex levels of aesthetic and conceptual interaction for
viewers. In the case of digital and bio A-life art, immersive and affective
aesthetics are often applied to encourage viewers to contemplate the ethical
issues surrounding the creation, maintenance and ideologies of cybernetic,
biological and creative A-life. The works surveyed in this paper suggest that
digital and bio A-life artists often have an ambivalent relationship with the
technologies and procedures that they utilise in their work. While the artists
may not have the answers to the ethical questions that their works raise
regarding the uses, regulations and outcomes of new information and
biotechnologies, they do provide a space for participant-viewers to reflect on
these issues.
Notes
1 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise
of Neo-Biological Civilization, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1994.
2 Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, ‘Are the
Semi-Living semi-Good or semi-Evil?’, Art in the Biotech Era, Adelaide
International Arts Festival, Adelaide, Australia, 2003.
3 Christopher Langton, ‘Artifical Life’
in Timothy Druckrey and Ars Electronica (eds), Ars Electronica: Facing the
Future, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1999, p 261.
4 Artists working with digital A-life
systems include: Karl Sims, Tom Ray, William Latham, Troy Innocent, Jon
McCormack, Robb Lovell and John Mitchell, Christa Sommerer and Laurent
Mignonneau, Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley, Paul Brown, Richard Brown and Mauro
Annunzianto.
5 Artists working with bio A-life
include George Gessert, Mel Chin, Joe Davis, Eduardo Kac, Natalie Jeremijenko
and the Tissue Culture and Art project (TC&A).
6 T J Clark, Farewell to An Idea, Yale
University Press, New Haven & London, 1999, p 305.
7 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination, Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.), University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1981, p 276.
8 Michael Whitelaw, Metacreation: Art
and Artificial Life, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2004.
9 N Kathryn Hayles, ‘Narratives of
Artifical Life’ in George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird,
Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (eds), FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture,
Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p 147.
10 Hayles, op. cit., p 147.
11 Simon Penny, ‘The virtualization of
art practices’, Art Journal, vol 56, no 3, Fall 1997, p 33.
12 ibid.
13 ibid.
14 Christopher Langton, ‘Artificial
Life’ in M Boden (ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Life, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 1996, p 53.
15 ibid.
16 Sarah Kember, Cyberfeminism and
Artificial Life, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p 1.
17 Kelly, op. cit., p 3.
18 ibid.
19 Edward Shanken, ‘Life as we know it
and/or life as it could be: epistemology and ontology/ ontogeny of Artificial
Life’, Leonardo, vol 31, no 5, 1998, p 384.
20 ibid.
21 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto:
Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in
Neil Badmington (ed.), Posthumanism: Readers in Cultural Criticism, Palgrave,
Hampshire and New York, 2000, p 91.
22 Kelly, op. cit., p 1.
23 ibid., p 2.
24 ibid., p 1.
25 Langton, ‘Artifical Life’ in Ars
Electronica: Facing the Future, p 262.
26 Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First
Steps, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, pp 122–3.
27 Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates
of Cyberspace, Doubleday, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto, New York and London, 1999,
p 45.
28 Penny, op. cit., p 30.
29 ibid., p 35.
30 ibid., p 32.
31 Whitelaw, op. cit., p 63.
32 ibid.
33 ibid., p 86.
34 Darren Tofts, Parallax: Essays on
Art, Culture and Technology, Craftsmen House, North Ryde, 1999, p 34.
35 Christa Sommerer and Laurent
Mignonneau, website ‘Index’. Accessed 20 November 2004.
http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~christa/index.html
36 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (trans.), University of Missesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1987, p 249.
37 Roy Ascott, The Shamatic Web: Art
and Mind in Emergence. Accessed 10 August 2002.
http://www.rhizome.org/ds./pages/ascott.html
38 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From
Illusion to Immersion, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p
306.
39 ibid., p 308.
40 George Gessert, ‘Notes on Genetic
Art’, Leonardo, no 3, 1993, p 205.
41 ibid.
42 Eduardo Kac ‘Transgenic Art’ 1988.
Accessed 15 January 2002.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journal/LEA/
43 Eduardo Kac, ‘Transgenic Art Online’
in Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle (eds), Data Made Flesh: Embodying
Information, Routledge, New York and London, 2004, p 259.
44 Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, Julie
Rose (trans.), Continuum, London, 2003, p 49.
45 ibid., pp 49–51.
46 Kac, op. cit., p 259.
47 Grau, op. cit., p 297.
48 Tissue Culture and Art, ‘Short
Manifesto’. Accessed 31 August 2004.
http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/atGlance/manifesto.html
49 Stuart Bunt and Oron Catts,
‘BIOFEEL-SymbioticA’, BEAP-02: The Exhibitions, exhibition catalogue, BEAP:
Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of
Technology, Perth, 31 July –15 September 2002, np.
50 Extra Ear — 1/4 Scale. Accessed 4
August 2004. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/extra/extra_ear.html
51 Stelarc, ‘From Psycho-Body to
Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities’, David Bell and Barbara M Kennedy
(eds), The Cybercultures Reader, Routledge, New York, 2000, pp 561–2.
52 Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, ‘The Art
of the Semi-Living and Partial Life: Extra Ear — 1/4 Scale’, Technoetic Arts:
An International Journal of Speculative Research, no 1, 2003.
53 Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p
249.
54 Catts and Zurr, op. cit.
55 ibid.
56 Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, ‘The
ethical claims of Bio Art: killing the other or self-cannibalism?’, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art and Ethics, vol 4, no 2, 2003 and vol 5, no
1, 2004, p 169.
Bartlem, Edwina . "Immersive Artificial Life
(A-Life) Art," in Backburning: Journal of Australian Studies no 84,
Helen Addison-Smith, An Nguyen and Denise Tallis (eds), Perth, API Network,
2005. ----- Originally published in Backburning: Journal of Australian Studies
no 84, Helen Addison-Smith, An Nguyen and Denise Tallis (eds), Perth, API
Network, 2005.
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