Page 58 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
In one of their most famous artworks, the “Semi-living Worry Dolls” (figure 2), Cutts and Zurr used biodegradable polymers (such as PGA and P4HB) and surgical sutures, to which living endothelial, muscular and osteoblastic cells are subsequently incor- porated. They are placed inside bioreactors, that become an artificial womb where these semi-living grotesque entities can grow.
The semi-living (or meta-living) condition raises a very interesting perspective: cells and tissues, despite being able to grow and to live also outside the organism from which they are extracted, they easily lose the status of living subjects, as this quality is apparently linked to the physical body in its complexity and not also to the individual entities that constitute it. Tissue cells are in fact used in the scientific field in a utili- tarian way, without assigning to them an “agency” (Bandura, 2016) or a proto-agency that should be intrinsic to their status of semi-living beings. Instead, they are com- pared to inert objects.
In the case of Catts and Zurr artworks, technological mediation acts as amplifier of life, by reconfiguring the physical unity in the form of an extended body. For this reason, they affirm that we need to revise the current taxonomic system of Linnae- us, since it does not take into account the most recent biotechnological progresses which problematize the usual ways of understanding life, meta-life, species and the “natural” realm.
As is often the case, these examples show how artists react to cultural and scien- tific progress by critically elaborating it. Bioart aims to reflect on the continuum of life through the convergence between living, synthetic, biosynthetic and artificial realms. The dissolution of the binary distinction between what can be considered as “natural” and what is culturally understood as “non-natural” is decisive in this ap- proach. One important difference compared to other practices is that in bioart art matter is no longer painted or sculpted or enclosed into a digital dimension: it is a living biological entity. This opens to many problems about whether to base the taxonomic criterion of bioartistic “products” referring to the content (i.e. on bio-me- dia and bio-subjects) or to the methods and means used to create bio-artworks (i.e. bio-mediums). In fact, bioart represents an unprecedented situation in which “the medium is the message” – literally; the “bio” is both instrument and subject of the communication.
In order to overcome this issue, Jens Hauser introduced the concept of “biomediality” by referring to the intervention on living organisms or biological processes, whether they are technically manipulated or not, with inter-scale operations (Hauser, 2016). Biomediality is therefore understood as a practice whose main purpose is the direct intervention on the mechanisms of the living: by transgressing a formal or symbolic representation of life, it supports a phenomenological re-materialization through the interaction between the user/environment and the living or semi-living artifacts.
Hence, the bioartistic debate does not use technology just as a tool to simulate or to reproduce life using iconic images, but it uses devices in order to break into biolog-
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Architecture in a Petri dish: co-programming Meta-Life in design through biointegration and synthetic biology
Selenia Marinelli