Of microbes and machines: How art and science fuse in bio-art

There is science in art – the alchemy of paint, the binary codes computing away in a camera, the expressive anatomy in portraiture and sculpture.

There is art in science – the artistic precision of the scalpel, the cool aesthetics of the laboratory, and the intimate observations undertaken by scientists to discover new materials and microbes living unseen in the world.

Bio-art, an artistic genre that took hold in the 1980s, solidifies, extends and enriches this organic relationship. According to the artist and writer Frances Stracey, it represents: “a crossover of art and the biological sciences, with living matter, such as genes, cells or animals, as its new media.”

Bio-artists might use and incorporate imaging technologies within the artistic space; bringing living and dead matter into the gallery. They draw upon biology metaphors to imbue artwork with healing and wounding propensities.

In BioCouture, for example, fashion, art, and biology are weaved together, blossoming new materials into existence. As author Suzanne Anker has noted, “Donna Franklin and Gary Cass have invented dresses made from cellulose generated by bacteria from red wine.

Suzanne Lee composes ‘growing’ textiles produced by sugar, tea and bacteria to fashion jackets and kimonos.” Lee makes jackets out of cellulose produced by bacteria in baths of green tea and sugar.

Bio-art includes the skins and cells of celluloid and digital video, the membranes of sound, and the liquids and fluids of body parts and eyeballs.

To take another example, in Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, a “chemical alphabet” is used to translate poetry into sequences of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium.

When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, the poetry constitutes a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign protein in response.

Writes Bök: “I am, in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem —one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes…”

Scientists and artists work together in what become teeming new spaces of co-creation. Together, they often set Bio-art within current debates and concerns about what constitutes life, what counts as a sentient being, and who gets to determine what lives are saved, exploited or destroyed.

Bio-art draws together the hopes and concerns of scientists and artists as we hurtle into an age where human life and everyday living seems to be undergoing radical and sometimes dangerous transformations. As author Sheel Patel suggests in relation to Bok’s work: “If a living cell can be cultured to spit out and produce novel poetry, could we eventually live in a society where humans are no longer needed to produce new thoughts, and works of literature?”