Archive for the ‘oron catts’ tag
ARCO Madrid 2010 – Expanding the field
EXPANDING THE FIELD. Or, 8 good reasons to talk about new media (in an art fair)
Director: Domenico Quaranta
Lecturers: UBERMORGEN.COM, Marius Watz, Trevor Paglen, Oron Catts, Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky
ARCO Art Fair, Forum Auditorium 2, Hall 6.
February 18, 2010, from 12.30 to 2.30 p.m. and from 4 to 8 p.m.
Download the complete program.
SEMI-LIVING ART . Interview with Oron Catts
SEMI-LIVING ART . Interview with Oron Catts
Domenico Quaranta
Published in “Cluster. On Innovation”, n. 4 (Biotech), pp. 158 – 163. © Cluster 2004
Oron Catts, Finnish by origin, is one of the pioneers in the artistic application of biotechnologies. Majored in Product design, Catts founded in 1996 the Tissue Culture & Art Project, an artistic collective (of which both IONAT ZURR GUY BEN ARY are members) that engages tissue technologies as a means of artistic expression. In 2000 he was one of the founders of SymbioticA , where he is at present artistic director. Positioned in the school of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia (UWA), SymbioticA is a research laboratory lead by artists within a department of biological science, and it offers itself as a “porous membrane through which art and bio-medical sciences and technologies can mingle”.
Since its foundation SymbioticA has hosted and worked with artists such as Stelarc, Adam Zaretzki, Amy Young, Marta De Menezes and Andrè Brodyk, all of which are extremely interested in adopting the use of biotechnologies as a new medium of artistic expression. The Tissue Culture and Art Project adopted “biomedia” in a slightly more unusual way; instead of talking about the possible consequences of human gene and the genome mapping manipulation, it uses tissue technologies as a means of creating “semi living sculptures” through the grafting of organic and living materials on an artificial life support. It’s a dangerous choice because it involves life, that is then fragmented and manipulated, utilized as a medium and object of investigation in an artistic project. Examples of semi living are the worry dolls created during the project Tissue Culture and Art (ificial) Wombs, presented at Linz 2000: work that interprets the Guatemalan legend of the six anxiety dolls, that children tell their worries to before going to bed, in a series of seven (we’re not children anymore!) dolls created with biodegradable polymeric into which different tissue cells have been inserted; semi-living (enough to dance and grow faster with the help of music) are the Pig Wings that ironically make one of the most absurd promises of biotechnology come true, according to which in the near future we could make pigs fly, making at the same time the pink pigs probable “hosts” of our spare organs, a extra extension to grow in order to then offer to man. Semi- living, still, is a little ear (a fourth of real life size) made together with Stelarc, who intends to wear it as an organic prosthesis – completely useless and purely decorative- on his obsolete body.
Interview with Oron Catts (full version, unpublished)
Interview with Oron Catts (full version, unpublished)
Domenico Quaranta
DQ. Let’s start from the usual question: what do you think you’re doing, playing God?
OC. There are two ways to answer this question – one is that the concept of God is a human construct so actually the question can be read as “what do you think you’re doing, playing human?”
The second way of responding to such a question is that following its internal logic any form of manipulation of living systems is a form of playing God therefore this question can be directed to farmers, gardeners, chefs, people who are doing flower arrangement etc. In both cases you can see that this is not going to take us anywhere.
I believe that this type of response to our work stems from exactly the point that we are trying to raise through the work – that there is a immense discrepancy between our cultural perceptions of life and what can be done with life with the knowledge of modern biology and it’s application through biotechnology and biomedical research. This question can be relevant only as a starting point in the discussion in regard to the limits of manipulation of living systems by humans. However, using God as “a side” in this discussion is quite futile as no one seems to agree about who/what is his/her/its real representative down here.
