Biomaterials Presentation Nov. 23, 2007.

Art as a Public Policy Medium
By Lori B. Andrews

The legal aspect
In our days we don’t have many rights, talking about genes when they leave our body.

There is a case where a doctor patented the cells of a patient and a Court decided that the patient didn’t have property rights of his own cells.

Other scientists think that if we modify people with the gene to photosynthesize, then we could get the energy that we need from the sun, like plants, and then we don’t have to "waste money and time to get food".

How the artists "working" with biological sciences can help society:
-With his work the artists can confront the social implications of biological choices.
-Also can help to understand the limitations of biotechnologies.
-Artists can help to develop policies for dealing with biotechnologies.
-And finally, they can confront larger issues of the science role and the role of art in our society.

Artists can use the work of researchers, manipulate the content and give it a different interpretation.

BioArt in the representational level (example)
Anthrax Clock, by Hunter O´Reilly.

Biological Phenomena (examples)
Living paintings, by Al Wunderlich.
Paintings from bacterias, by David Kremers.

Summary
There are artists trying to show this kind of biotechnology as an attractive, safe and valuable thing, but in the other side, we can see works that demonstrate the capacities of biotechnology and also shows the limits (For example, Catts and Zurr, and If Pigs Could Fly).

The publication Art Press suggested the “possibility that these artists (that encourage the biotech) are being manipulated by technicians and multinationals; that they’re serving to legitimize practices that our cultures otherwise find it hard to accept, and they are not necessarily conscious about this".

Still is not possible to say if Bioart will become a new school of art or a way to criticize our society, but it´s clear that is shaping the public discourse about genetics.


Art and the body
"Artist" Orlan manipulates her body by having repeated plastic surgeries in art galleries. http://orlan.net/

Jana Sterbak draws with a pen filled with HIV-seropositive blood and anticoagulants.

Jack Kevorkian created the Thanatron, this machine allows clinical patients to kill themselves under his supervision.

Marc Quinn created Self, a sculpture of his head made with nine liters of his own frozen blood, which for Quinn represents the fragility of the body.

Susan Robb built a tower of urine, which she collected from 400 artists around the world. It has 2.5 meters height.

Art and the Body
Conclusion
Biotechnologies have opened the way to new artistic visions of the body, resulting in a growing convergence between science and art.

Genetic Analysis
Kevin Clarke uses the specific genetic code of the persons to photograph them.

Dui Seid believes that DNA is people’s portrait of their ancestry and probably his descendents. He made a work with the title “Bloodlines”.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle also is an "artist" who works with DNA. For him DNA reveals that the old categorizations based on the color of skin have no meaning, the real identity is in the DNA.

Paul Vanouse created the Relative Velocity Inscription Device, a multimedia installation to question the veracity of DNA sequence.

These artists, and some others, are predicting that in the future we all will have the same genes.

(See also the work of Aziz and Cucher)

Some of this works have been created because there is the possibility that in some years all the companies will ask for DNA tests to those who wants to get a job, and if in your genes is indicated that you have, for instance, propensity to get cancer, then they won’t give you the work.

Artist as Creator
Artists are not only working with artificial scenarios, some of them are actually creating and modifying genes.

Joe Davis (MIT) is putting secret messages into DNA.

Paul Perry fused his own blood cells with a cancer cell from a mouse, producing a new type of cell.

Arlindo Machado asks if in the future our real genes would mean less than our artificial additions. "Will we still be black, white, mulatto, Indian, Brazilian, Polish, Jewish, female, male, or will we buy some of these traces at a shopping mall? In this case, will it make sense to speak about family, race and nationality? Will we have a past, a history, an identity to be preserved?"

The impact of genetic manipulation (Survey)
42% of potential parents said they would use genetic engineering on their children to make them smarter.

43% to upgrade them physically.

A third of people wanted to "touch" their children genetically to make sure they had an “appropriate” sexual orientation.

Controversies
“Artist” Gunther von Hagens presented in 1998 presented an exhibition called The Human Body World, and consisted in two hundred preserved human corpses and body parts. He was prosecuted and convicted.

Rick Gibson made a sculpture "to show the place of humans in society and how we treat human beings". He used a woman’s head, and hung two fetuses in the head as earrings. Also prosecuted and convicted.

Anthony Noel-Kelly took bodies out of the Royal College of Surgeons (Great Britain) to make copies of body parts and sell them, one of this “artistic creations”, according to Noel-Kelly it´s valued in 6,200 Euros. He was convicted too.

In this area, what art can do, is explain us how biotechnologies work, we can emphasize the limits of these technologies and the likely social impacts. Artists can encourage the social discussion that is necessary to adopt social public policies for biotechnologies.

Author´s Conclusion
"We can use life-science art to think about the ways in which people can control the technology, rather than the technology controlling the people".


Liberating Life from Itself: Bioethics and Aesthetics of Animality
By Dominique Lestel

Humans live with this idea: eat or be eaten, reproduce or disappear. And that’s why humans have always manipulated living organisms to their advantage, for aesthetic, affective or symbolic reasons.

The question is not what humans can do, but what are we authorized to do. That’s the ethical question.

Manipulating Life
Since the Neolithic humans are modifying life, at the beginning we just designed beings but now we domesticate animals and change their or our capabilities and aesthetic.

Evolution and Human manipulation of animals
Many persons believe that humans don´t have the right to manipulate animals for pleasure or to get material benefits.

There are groups that believes animals should be considered as persons with rights, but Lestel says that this argument is weak, because the notion that animal life should not be disturbed does not match with humans interested in the evolution of life.

She says that immobility is a form of passive suicide, that’s why she says that is ethical manipulate life for living.

In the artists case, she says that they are authorized to express their opinion about biotechnologies without many of this ethical issues, because they can represent biotechnology without doing it in reality, this enables artists to speak more freely than scientists.

Lestel´s Conclusion
Humans should take their fate, and living organisms in general, into their hands. The idea that humanity should be free to act as it chooses does not mean that every human should choose his or her destiny individually. Humans need to liberate life from itself.