Bio Art: Life Imitates Art. But What Happens When the art IS life?

Well, then the bio-art starts growing out of control and has to be killed by a lone hero.  Obviously.  That might sound like the script of "Little Shop Of Horrors: The Revenge", but it actually happened in New York this month.

The organic art in question was the piece "Victimless Leather", a tiny jacket grown from mice embryonic stem cells and kept alive by an external life-support system.  Yes, you read that right.  Artists, working with the SymbioticA research laboratory in the University of Western Australia, grew living tissue into the shape of a tiny leather jacket and cyborged it up with electrical parts.  Presumably to give Tom Thumb either a stylish biodegradable look or nightmares for life.

There's an important difference in attitude here - while Americans waste time on huge debates on the ethicality of using tiny clumps of non-sentient tissue, the Ozzies are just inviting random lunatics in off the street and saying "Here's some cutting edge biological technology, what do you think we could do with it?"  I'm fully in favor.  The mini-flesh-threads were designed to raise questions about human use of animals, and it certainly did  - even if only by adding the questions "What the hell are they doing with that jacket?" and "Seriously, the government pays for that?  Is that terrible or awesome?"

It went on to raise more urgent, "What are we going to do?"-themed questions when the experimental organic construct started growing far faster than predicted.  As experimental organic constructs are wont to do.  The ever-expanding embryonic apparel clogged up its own life-support system in what must have been the most horrible case of "I have no more room in my wardrobe" ever.

Since Bruce Willis was unavailable, the Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli was forced to terminate the exhibit's life support, killing the organism.  The inevitable movie version will likely feature far more explosions, close-shaves and at least one cunningly-applied fire extinguisher.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Bio Art Exhibit http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7834

SymbioticA Art & Science http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/node/96

Comments

[knoxvilledaniel]

If this is art, then I & a lot of other bachelors have valuable masterpieces growing in our refrigerators - & sometimes our dirty clothes hampers - all the time.....