bioart, zoeart, zoe, queer biopolitics

There were an amazing series of talks in the visual arts department at UCSD this week that make me very happy to be a student there. Yesterday’s talk was from Beatriz da Costa, who worked with Critical Art Ensemble on pieces such as Free Range Grain and Gen Terra. I would say, given that work, that she is one of the most well known bioart artists and has done much to develop and shape what is considered bioart. Recently she’s been exploring interspecies collaboration with a few projects, the main one being PigeonBlog, in which pigeons are equipped with small cell phone like devices that Beatriz and her collaborators developed, which contain pollution sensors and the ability to send out the pollution data in real time to a blog.

Her visit, combined with some research I’ve been doing into bioart, inspired me to post this to the Syapse Elist, whose topic is bioart this month. The discussion has been really fascinating and has taken place between a number of very established and respected bioartists, so I hope my comments are not too uninformed and naive, as a beginner in the bioart field…

Hello,

I’m an MFA student at UCSD who is very interested in “bioart”, but hasn’t done any yet, per se, and I’ve been very stimulated by the discussion here so far. I hope to add something interesting or at least useful.

There were an amazing series of talks in the visual arts department at UCSD this week that make me very happy to be a student there. Yesterday’s talk was from Beatriz da Costa. Recently she’s been exploring interspecies collaboration with a few projects, the main one being PigeonBlog. Maybe she’s on this list…

In her talk, Beatriz discussed her reservations about the term bioart, saying that she doesn’t think it is “the most generative term” that could be used, because it restricts the artist to a particular medium, that of biology. She asked why works using other mediums, but still concerned with issues of biology, should not be considered bioart. In addition she has worked on a new book which is about to come out entitled Tactical Biopolitics, where she apparently develops this argument more.[1]

Given the discussion so far of this distinction between zoe/bios, I was reminded of the beginning of Agamben’s book, Homo Sacer, where he discusses this distinction. There he discusses how the greek term zoe has no plural, and that the concept of zoe, “simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined- as merely reproductive life- to the sphere of the oikos, ‘home’”(2). In contrast, Agamben points out, Aristotle uses the phrase “bios politikos” for political life.(1)

So here we see the anthropocentrism arising from the original use of the words, where bios indicates a kind of human politics and zoe is “simple natural life” or “animal life, organic life” in the online eymology dictionary[2].

But maybe this is a useful distinction, in that it aligns bioart closely with biopolitics, and not just biology. It seems to me that much of Beatriz da Costa’s work and Critical Art Ensemble’s work has been engaged with the social and the political and an effort to shift popular attitudes about biotech towards a more critical attitude.

My own interest in bioart and biotech arises from my interest in queer politics and queer biopolitics specifically, thinking about the ways in which gender, sex and sexuality are regulated and constructed through scientific distinctions based on social codes. In this respect, I find Shannon Bell’s project with SymbioticA “Two Phalluses and Big Toe,”[3] to be very interesting in activating and exploring the concept of inbetweenness in the realm of sex, where she “construct[ed] and [grew] tissue engineered male and female phalluses as living art objects that show the internal and external female erection (the external clitoris, the internal urethral sponge, or what has been popularized as the g-spot) as a connective integrated whole comparable in size and stature to the male sex organ.”

My own work with SharingIsSexy.org has been exploring practices of gender and sexuality outside of male and female, in queer spaces of inbetweenness, but not using biology. Though I wonder, in Body Art, as closely related to or as a synonym for performance art, the artist’s or the audience’s body is the medium for the art itself, is that not a kind of bioart? Or a precursor? Performance was also referred to as Live Art, so that is an interesting similarity, or parapraxis, there as well.

Which leads me back to the idea of Vitality and parapraxis or the unconscious. Near the end of The Order of Things, Foucault ties the existence of an idea of man to the unconscious, saying “from the moment when man first constituted himself as a positive figure in the field of knowledge… it became possible, by this very fact, for an objective form of thought to investigate man in his entirety- at the risk of discovering what could never be reached by his reflection or even by his consciousness… the unconscious.” (326) In his call for us to move beyond, “man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end,” (387) Foucault sees psychoanalysis, as an investigator of the unconscious, or that is which beyond rational comprehension, as an important tool leading towards that epistemological space beyond man. This is part of how I understand Vitalism, as that which is beyond our current understanding. As a trained computer scientist, I don’t think that science claims to have a total description of the universe yet. I imagine we can all agree that there is still much to learn about biology, such as protein folding and how it unfolds, after genetic codes have been sequenced, based on various environmental factors, something Delanda discusses in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.

It seems that bioart is a continuation of long struggles for control over the body, over who defines the body and who controls, restricts or amplifies it with technology. So the drive for accessibility, the community research initiatives, biotech hobbyist kits and Body Hacking practices that Quinn Norton[4] talks about are, to me, a continuation of feminist struggles for bodily self-determination and queer struggles over the right to exist and the right to pleasure. For me, this is the essence of biopolitics, but it seems that in social movements in the US, the term biopolitics isn’t used much. But perhaps the bio in bioart is useful in that it implies a social and political engagement from the very inception.

Something else I’d love to discuss is the discussion I had with Ricardo Dominguez, who is currently doing work regarding nanotech[5], about the empirical, experimental demands of contemporary art versus the need and desire to create and disrupt mythopoetic systems, and how this plays out in bioart.

thanks,

dj lotu5
[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11473
[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bio-
[3] http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/residencies/residents2/shannon_bell
[4] http://www.ambiguous.org/quinn/bodyhacking.html
[5] see http://pitmm.net and http://bang.calit2.net