Art & Technology #17: Bio Art

This artwork is a project by American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Creating her works based on researches on interaction between science and art, the artist represents the appearances of the unknown “them” on the basis of DNA information extracted from hair, saliva, or the like collected from the public spaces including streets, parks, and public toilets. This kind of artworks in which living organisms and forms of life are the subject and medium of the work is called bio art.
The start of bio art by Dewey-Hagborg was in the waiting room for her therapy session. While waiting to go in, she caught a strand of hair pinched between the frame and the glass on the frame hung on the wall. She started to wonder whose hair it would be. Her interest expanded into a question, "How much of a person could I know by a strand of hair?," which soon became the subject matter of her artworks and studies.
The artist wandered around the streets to collect samples of cigarette butts, saliva on wasted gums, hair, and pieces of fingernails from everyday places by using latex gloves, tweezers, and pick up bags to prevent contamination. She brought this collection of human organic tissue to her lab to extract DNA from it, which was a step of a full-scale biological test. Through the process of melting protein in solvents, passing the sample through a centrifuge to separate DNA which was then amplified and segmented, and conducting electrophoresis on the DNA, the information contained in each portion of the DNA such as the color of the skin and eyes or the size of the nose was analyzed, combined as a predicted image, and output by a 3D printer.

The person who first established the term “bio art” is Eduardo Kac, an artist from Brazil. Kac created a fluorescent rabbit(GFP bunny) named Alba, who emits green fluorescent light when irradiated with ultraviolet rays in the dark, with French research institution Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in 2000. Alba is an albino rabbit deprived of the pigments of its body due to the distortion of the color information in its genes. Kac and the research team injected green fluorescent protein(GFP) extracted from a bioluminescent jellyfish into the rabbit so that it would seem fluorescent when irradiated with light of a certain wavelength. This “research” has been a process with an esthetic purpose rather than practical or academic purposes, and the first piece of art created by genetic code manipulation in a lab.
As seen from its prefix “bio”, bio art is a new form of art emerged recently, in which the subjects, technologies, and methods of bioscience are applied. Since its subject is life itself, bio art uses bioengineering technologies and methodologies on the subject matters or targets in the artworks that used to be not in the area of art, but only in the area of science. Though it is not the first form of art that encompasses science and art, bio art has been regarded as important since it raises moral issues that come up with human tinkering with life forms.

Media theorist Flusser asserted his views about living things in the 90s, saying, “Why is it that dogs aren’t yet blue with red spots, and that horses don’t yet radiate phosphorescent colors over the nocturnal shadows of the land?…We also, not coincidentally, have learned techniques that ultimately make conceivable the creation of plant and animal species according to our own programs.” As he predicted while presenting a new esthetic point of view on life forms, bio art emerged, and a service of providing pets of which genes are customized is not far away. Another kind of service is being provided regarding medical treatment based on gene analysis, in which the possibilities of genetic diseases are predicted and medicines customized for genes of each patient with genetic diseases are produced and prescribed.
Humans have become aware of new possibilities in and point of views about lives. Needles to say, the way of thinking described above that genes are thought as information and as modifiable accompanies vital and risky moral hazards such as genetic reductionism or anthropocentric egoism. We could imagine about possibilities through methods like art and be driven to our own destruction by crossing extreme lines, or make a mistake of being stuck in the past by fearing too much, as seen in the works of Heater Dewey-Hagborg, which show the distinctive shades of bio art by using biological views and technologies to study the meaning of DNA, the blueprint of life, in today’s social structure. ■ with ARTINPOST