Page 56 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
as a process and not only as a model to reproduce, generates new opportunities about the integration of its behaviour in design. The contribution of disciplines such as biology, genetics, neuroscience, nano-bio-technologies and robotics in design and architecture is in fact relevant and it contributes to the emergence of numerous questions: how will the relationship between nature and biotechnology evolve? How will synthetic biology have repercussions also in architectural design and built en- vironment? How can we use biotechnology in order to transform architecture itself into a biohybrid, into an example of meta-living being?
Living or semi-living? Natural or engineered? Overcoming the Cartesian dualism through bioart
Bioart represents undoubtedly one of the most significant approach to critically ad- dress concepts such as organic manipulation or meta-life.
The term was originally coined by Eduardo Kac, during his performance “Time Cap- sule” (figure 1) which took place in 1997: using a special needle, the Brazilian art- ist grafted onto his left ankle a subcutaneous microchip containing a programmed identification number, integrated with a coil and a capacitor, all hermetically sealed in a biocompatible glass capsule. With this work, the artist aimed to link art not only to figurative aspects, but mainly to the representation of the radical embodiment between a human and a technological apparatus. “Time Capsule” can be considered as halfway between an event-installation, a site-specific work (where the “site” is con- stituted by the intersection between the body of the artist and a remote database) and a simultaneous transmission of biological and digital informations.
Kac during his whole career tried to use the tools of biology, technology and devices to establish an inter-species dialogic communication. The intersubjective experience between biological organisms and electronic devices is in fact crucial in his early ar- tistic research and the purpose is to use the concept of “telepresence” to build an interaction between bio-telecommunications, bio-robotics and human and non-hu- man users (such as animals, plants and computers), in order to investigate cognitive, biological and social aspects.
His more mature works anyway started to embed also transgenic applications, prov- ing to be able to absorb the biotechnological paradigm and to raise bioethical ques- tions about the legitimacy of transgenic practices while used for aesthetic purposes.
Another crucial example in bioartistic experimentations is the work of Australian re- searchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr.
Back in 1996 they coined the term “semi-living” to describe compound entities gen- erated with tissues extracted from complex organisms and kept alive by using tech- nology. This technique of tissue culture is commonly used for biomedical purpose, but in this case is employed to create conceptual prototypes of semi-living organ- isms, cultivated in bioreactors. Their works undermine the very concepts of object and subject, as the cultivated biomass is actually alive thanks to a nutritional suste- nance system, which prevent the non-living status.
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Architecture in a Petri dish: co-programming Meta-Life in design through biointegration and synthetic biology
Selenia Marinelli