Transgenic Art

What is transgenic art? How does it influence the landscape of contemporary visual art culture? What is the relationship between art, science, and life? This book focuses on important artistic developments brought forward by the use of genetic engineering techniques.
Aside from carrying out a critical analysis, all the artists who combine genetic material of different origins are identified and recounted. The book provides an interpretation of the creativity that inevitably involves the most significant aspects of social life, showing a radical cultural redefinition. The objective is also to indicate, through an unpublished documentation, the most significant changes that have emerged in contemporary art since the last decade of the 1900s.
Although limited in scope, transgenic art is an important field in the current cultural system which, when associated with other performative practices, compels us to review the actual meaning of “art”.

Is science the new art? Taking this provocative question as her starting point, art historian Ingeborg Reichle examines the fascinating responses of contemporary artists when confronted with recent scientific and technological advances. In the last two decades a growing number of artists has left the traditional art venues to work in scientific environments like the laboratories of molecular biology, robotics, and artificial life. From this new art forms like „Transgenic Art“ and „Bio Art“ have emerged. These art forms differ dramatically from traditional artistic approaches that explore life: they have crossed the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, and thus provoke passionate debates about the growing influence of science and technology.

This first comprehensive survey presents an informative selection of significant artworks in 294 color illustrations and provides a broad overview of this new and relevant development in art.

Artists like Suzanne Anker, Brandon Ballengée, Louis Bec, Guy Ben-Ary, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Catherine Chalmers, the Chapman Brothers, Jaq Chartier, Peta Clancy, Kevin Clarke, Critical Art Ensemble, Joe Davis, Marcel Duchamp, George Gessert, Peter Gerwin Hoffmann, Eduardo Kac, David Kremers, Steve Kurtz, William Latham, Edgar Lissel, Kazimir Malevich, Reiner Maria Matysik, Jon McCormack, Niki Nickl, Steve Miller, Simon Penny, Patricia Piccinini, Jane Prophet, Marc Quinn, Oliver Ressler, Ken Rinaldo, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Gary Schneider, Karl Sims, Pam Skelton, Nell Tenhaaf, Herwig Turk, K. D. Thornton, Stephen Todd, Gail Wight, Adam Zaretsky and many other artists are presented.

The essay argues that the Crakers—genetically modified human beings appearing in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy—should be seen not only as a result of techno-scientific brilliance and power struggle, but also as a product of artistic creativity. Starting with close reading of several passages which indirectly but effectively indicate that the Crakers should be regarded as a form of art, the essay then moves on to the consideration of probable predecessors of the kind of artistic creativity that the Crakers represent. One model for Crake’s artistic creation of human beings is seen in the avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth century which tried to combine art, technology and politics to create the New Man. The essay also focuses on the trilogy’s references to the more recent transgenic art, arguing that Crake’s artistic activity should be seen in the light of the criticism leveled nowadays at this form of art. Finally, Crake’s creative act is shown in the context of the classic works of literature which deal with a similar theme, namely Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells.

Das Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft war immer vielschichtig und ist heute im Zeitalter der Technosciences überaus prekär geworden. So erstaunt es nicht, dass schon vor Jahren zahlreiche Künstler das Arbeiten im Atelier gegen das Forschen im Labor eingetauscht haben. Seither begleiten Künstler die Transformation der modernen Naturwissenschaften hin zu den Technosciences seismographisch. Oszillierend zwischen der Technisierung des Lebendigen in den Biowissenschaften und der Verlebendigung der Technik innerhalb der Erforschung des künstlichen Lebens haben sich Protagonisten der Transgenic Art und der Artificial Life Art an die Aneignung von Methoden und Verfahren der Life Sciences herangewagt und immer neue Kunstformen entworfen.

Die umfassende Aufarbeitung dieser neuen Kunstrichtungen stellt Künstler und Künstlerinnen wie Suzanne Anker, Louis Bec, Oron Catts und Ionat Zurr, Catherine Chalmers, Jaq Chartier, Kevin Clarke, Critical Art Ensemble, Joe Davis, George Gessert, Peter Gerwin Hoffmann, Eduardo Kac, Pamela Davis Kivelson, David Kremers, Steve Kurtz, William Latham, Reiner Maria Matysik, Jon McCormack, Steve Miller, Simon Penny, Jane Prophet, Marc Quinn, Oliver Ressler, Ken Rinaldo, Christa Sommerer und Laurent Mignonneau, Gary Schneider, Pam Skelton, Nell Tenhaaf, K. D. Thornton, Gail Wight und Adam Zaretsky und viele weitere Kunstprojekte umfassend vor.

Il brasiliano Edoardo Kac è stato tra i primi artisti biotecnologici ad applicare l’ingegneria genetica all’arte, dando avvio a quella che egli stesso nel 1998 ha definito Transgenic Art. Le sue creazioni di animali fluorescenti hanno turbato le coscienze e sono state spesso superficialmente reputate un’esibizione di mera spettacolarità al fine di emulare, non più solo a livello metaforico, il potere creativo di Dio. In realtà gli organismi fluorescenti che hanno conferito a Kac popolarità mediatica non s’iscrivono nella categoria della creatività volta a conferire nuovo prestigio all’artista-dio, secondo l’analogia imperante nel Rinascimento e nel Romanticismo, bensì in quell’estetica del dialogo di cui Edoardo Kac si fa promotore in tutti i suoi progetti artistici.

Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated transformation of Sugarcane variety 31 with two plasmid LBA4404
pB1121 constructs contain Gly I was studied. Calli was produce from basal meristematic spindle leaf segment from 4-5
months field growing plant of Isd 31. Calli of the variety Isd 31 was infected using three infection times such as 60, 90 and
120 minutes and 2mg/L of acetosyringone was used in infection medium. It was found that transformed calli from Isd 31
showed lower levels of regeneration response. GUS assay was done among randomly selected calli from 120 minutes
infection time and showed the highest results (98%) and the expression of these two gene was confirmed by the expression
gus reporter gene present in the construct. Regenerated plantlets that derived from transformed calli of sugarcane varieties
Isd 31 used as plant material for DNA isolation. The transformed plantlets produced bands of the expected size 600 bp
(primer set 1) and 960 bp (primer set 2) for the GUS fragment at the same position. No band was produced in DNA isolated
from the non-transformed sugarcane control plants. Thus the transgene was stably attached to the plant genome.

I made a sculpture of Uranus' castrated penis. Apparently, Cronus cut off his father's penis and threw it in the ocean, in the Peloponnesian Sea. He cut off his father's penis because his mother gave birth to a-hundred-handed titan, like a centipede human, and Uranus was so grossed out by the mutant with a hundred hands, that he kept that being, that person, his child, inside a cave inside of a castle. Even some people say he pushed it back up into his wife Gaia's vagina, at which point she told her son Cronus, " Why don't you go cut his dick off? " And he did. He sliced off his father's penis and he threw it in the sea, and from the foam and blood of the leaking, castrated penis of Uranus came Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. It's a strange myth. I didn't know really much about it. I had gone for the centipede thing because I thought, " Well, maybe I'll make a person with a hundred hands someday. " But every time someone chooses someone else to make a baby with, they're making a freak for their own pleasure. It doesn't matter if it's random recombination, it doesn't matter if it's based on love, it doesn't matter if this being is cared for, sent to a really nice preschool , or fed well; or fed a bunch of crap. What matters is reproduction itself is kind of like a freak show. You want people to see your display of fertility. You want people to see that you have the wealth to go ahead and procreate. You want people to see your child perform a piano recital. Anyone would be able to show off that your genes were worthy of getting to the next generation. It's really kind of sad. Breeding is narcissism. It's like your little mirror, right? I was in a meeting that was talking about the ethics of genetic modification, and they asked parents to raise their hand if they would be willing to pay an extra five or ten thousand dollars to have children with guaranteed perfect pitch, so that they would, you know, basically not need to pay for all those piano lessons. And most parents were like, " Yeah. " That's cheaper in the long run, and that's partly what they were thinking; but they were also thinking, " I'd like a kid who's a good musician. " But I do know when people go for genetic counseling, if they were offered not only to eliminate negative traits but to add positive traits, as long as you put a price tag on it, someone's gonna hit Buy It Now. It's the other side of the mountain effect, and it's what will drive personal genetic alteration.

Only humans have created a technoscience able to delete our own kind, and all others, from the face of the earth and if, as affirm the philosopher Hans Jonas, the responsibility is a correlate of the power, the magnitude of power must determine the magnitude of the responsibility. In the last decade, many artists have begun to work in the border areas of science and technology considering the need for a critical analysis in this field developed from extra-medical or extra-industrials criteria. This article examines the works of artists, made under bioart parameters, that impact particularly in the ethical sense of human behaviour toward animals and living things in general.
Most projects have been developed in scientific laboratories and have to do with the creation (generation of life), genetic mutation and hybridization, and the symbiotic relationships between animals and humans. Through them, the artists demonstrate their sense of responsibility and their ability to assume the consequences of their creations with the aim to open new ethical debates about science.

The Twentieth Century produced a remarkable progress in physics and biology, thanks to the support of new technical instruments, generally enlarging the horizon of scientific research. The genetic alterations are tolerated in those fields, such as medicine, where they are beneficial to man, whereas they provoke perplexity and anxiety in the artistic field, where the intervention on living forms, since it is not justified by a principle of utility, seems to fall into futile hedonism. After a brief review of the main theories on the relationship between ethics and biotechnologies, started in the 70s, we will analyse some transgenic works by the Brazilian artist Edoardo Kac, in order to, on the one hand, emphasize the ethical, philosophical and social value of these living forms of art, and on the other, clarify how the arrival of new technologies has influenced the transformation of traditional aesthetic categories.

Tekst był publikowany w: Digitalne dotknięcia. Teoria w praktyce/Praktyka w teorii. Red. Piotr Zawojski. Szczecin 2010, s. 29-42.
Odwołując się do rozważań Stephena Wilsona na temat relacji zachodzących pomiędzy sztuką, nauką i technologią autor stara się zaprezentować, w jaki sposób dziś dochodzi do łączenia praktyki twórczej z aktywnością poznawczą, traktowania nauki jako praktyki estetycznej i sztuki będącej praktyką badawczą. Doskonałym wyrazem takiej strategii jest działalność Christy Sommerer i Laurenta Mignonneau, którzy twierdzą, iż w ich przypadku "aktywność artystyczna staje się aktywnością badawczą, a dzieła sztuki, które tworzymy stają się projektami badawczymi poszerzającymi i badającymi status quo tego, co jest znane i komercyjnie dostępne". Cechą charakterystyczną wielu działań w obrębie sztuki nowych mediów cyfrowych jest autoświadomość i metakrytyczna postawa zarówno wobec własnych dokonań, jak i tego, co dzieje się w szeroko rozumianej cyberkulturze.

This book offers an original approach to avant-garde art and its transformative force. Presenting an alternative to the approaches to art developed in postmodern theory or cultural studies, Ziarek sees art's significance in its critique of power and the increasing technologization of social relations. Re-examining avant-garde art and literature, from Italian and Russian Futurism and Dadaism, to Language poetry, video and projection art, as well as transgenic and Internet art, this book argues that art's importance today cannot be explained simply in aesthetic or cultural terms but has to take into consideration how artworks question the technological character of modern power. To emphasize the transformative character of art, the book redefines art as a force field, in which forces drawn from historical and social reality come be to formed into an alternative relationality. Through discussions of such key avant-garde figures as Marinetti, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and Vertov, and innovative contemporary artists like Viola, Wodiczko and Kac, The Force of Art counters the pessimism about art's social function by recovering and redefining art's transformative role in modernity.

Partant du principe selon lequel l’art contemporain offre un lieu d’étude privilégié à l’analyse sociologique des nouvelles représentations du corps et du vivant, cet article propose de prendre le cas de l’art transgénique d’Eduardo Kac comme terrain d’analyse de la représentation du vivant propre aux technosciences. Intégrant les a priori épistémologiques propres aux biotechnologies, l’art transgénique constitue un modèle idéal-typique du paradigme informationnel qui s’articule autour de trois éléments principaux : la communication, la technoscience et la génétique. Afin de rendre compte de cette représentation informationnelle du vivant, il sera analysé les discours d’Eduardo Kac sur deux de ses œuvres majeures : GFP-Bunny (2000) et Genesis (1999).


When Art Recreates Life: A Sociological Analysis of the Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac

In order to address the new representations of the body and the living in the age of biotechnology, this article adopts a sociological analysis of the transgenic art of the artist Eduardo Kac. Based on a discourse analysis of the artist’s explanation of two of his keys artworks, GFP-Bunny (2000) and Genesis (1999), it is argued that the representation of the living emerging from these artistic projects rests on three major elements (communication, technoscience, and genetics), which constitute an informational representation of the living.

Mit der Artificial Life Art und der Transgenic Art, wie sie Künstler und Künstlerinnen wie Christa Sommerer und Laurent Mignonneau oder Eduardo Kac projektieren, scheinen uns heute erneut Topoi der tradierten Kunsttheorie zu begegnen. Die Tatsache, dass gegenwärtige Künstler und Künstlerinnen Verfahren der Gentechnik und Biotechnologie als künstlerisches Werkzeug und Medium projektieren und einsetzen, reiht deren Arbeiten ein in eine lange Tradition des kunsttheoretischen Topos vom "Künstleringenieur." Doch im Gegensatz zu diesem Topos, der darauf verweist, qua Newtons Mechanik „lebendige Werke“ zu schaffen, geht es heute um die Produktion von neuen organischen Lebewesen nach ästhetischen Gesichtspunkten, ermöglicht durch den direkten technologischen Zugriff auf den Träger der Erbsubstanz, die DNA.

Yiannis Melanitis (Athens, 1967), is an independent artist and associate professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts. At the moment he is working on the development of a humanized butterfly with scientific elucidations and technical collaboration from Stamatia Matina Papagiannarou (MSc Molecular/ Universitätsklinikum Mannheim). Yiannis Melanitis's gene will be micro-injected into the butterfly named Leda Melanitis (the Common Evening Brown of the Containing group: Melanitini, Linnaeus 1758).The gene of the artist will be inserted in the genome of the butterfly which shares the same name. In this interview Yiannis Melanitis will explain the project better.

Synthetic biology is an area of biological research that combines science and engineering. Here, I merge the principles of synthetic biology and regulatory evolution to create a new species with a minimal set of known elements. Using preexisting transgenes and recessive mutations of Drosophila melanogaster, a transgenic population arises with small eyes and a different venation pattern that fulfils the criteria of a new species according to Mayr’s Biological Species Concept. The population described here is the first transgenic organism that cannot hybridize with the original wild type population but remains fertile when crossed with other identical transgenic animals. I therefore propose the term “synthetic species” to distinguish it from “natural species”, not only because it has been created by genetic manipulation, but also because it may never be able to survive outside the laboratory environment. The use of genetic engineering to design artificial species barriers could help us understand natural speciation and may have practical applications. For instance, the transition from transgenic organisms towards synthetic species could constitute a safety mechanism to avoid the hybridization of genetically modified animals with wild type populations, preserving biodiversity.

Frameworks for ethical review of scientific research are well established and documented; however, many interdisciplinary artists and art institutions are unfamiliar with these policies and procedures, as well as the potential benefits this process offers within emergent areas of collaborative research. In this paper, we will examine currently established models for ethical review of scientific research as they would apply to interdisciplinary fields. Using the Canadian system as a basis for discussion, a practical overview of its guiding principles, conducts, application processes, terms of approval and liabilities will be presented. Issues covered will include tissue culture, animal use, genetic modification and transgenics. Relavant highlights will be presented from the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (PRE), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canada Council of Animal Care (CCAC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Examples of contemporary artworks will be explored as specific case studies in relation to the ethics review process. Proper navigation of these processes may offer guidance to artists and institutions that engage controversial subjects, use scientific facilities, or attempt to gain access to funding traditionally oriented to scientific research.