Three definitions of bioart are analyzed in the paper: bioart—as a part of science art, as the creation of some new exciting artworks, and/or as the visualization of certain stages of biomedical and life science research. Bioart is an in vivo practice which produces “living artworks” and creates a new reality. It represents the dialogue between art, science and technology and between academic and amateur science. It promotes the dialogue aimed at rethinking the phenomenon of life. It (...) blurs the boundaries between natural and artificial and the limits of human manipulations with the fundamentals of life. (shrink)

Bioart is a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practices in contemporary art that involve the use of bio-materials (such as living cells, tissues, organisms) and scientific techniques, protocols, and tools. Bioart-works embody vulnerability (intrinsic to all beings) and depend on (bio)technologies that allow these creations to come into being, endure and flourish but also discipline them. This article focuses on ‘semi-living’ sculptures by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). TC&A’s artworks consist of bioengineered mammal tissues grown over biopolymer (...) scaffoldings of different shapes and require sterile conditions of a bioreactor and constant care in order to survive. The article explores how bioart-works are always already intertwined with multiple (bio)technologies and techniques of care and labour, forming specific feminist technoecologies that challenge conventional bioscientific and cultural imaginaries of embodiment and the relation between physis and techné. TC&A’s sculptures expose life as the non/living: the processual enmeshment of the organic and inorganic, living and non-living, and growth and decay. The article argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart mobilises philosophical inventiveness: not only does it problematise the entwinement of technology and biomatter and of culture and nature, but it also prompts us to rethink the ontology of life. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

It is possible today to determine, with some precision (according to the most recent studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology), the areas of the brain and the neural networks involved when an individual contemplates art, when feeling pleasure, or when judging about aesthetic experience. However, many questions remain open. First, the philosophical question about the subjective nature of this kind of judgments. Then, what happens in the mind (or should it be said, in the brain?) of the beholder when contemplating (...) art or judging in favor (or not) of the beauty of an object. And the ultimate question, if we have an aesthetic brain. Another issue that must be addressed is if bioart and especially neuroart can contribute to this analysis and if they can be effectively quantified as art. Thus, this brief essay seeks to provide some understanding about this questions but most importantly about the existence of an aesthetic brain, which may ultimately contribute to open doors to other problems of philosophy such as the hard brain-mind problem. (shrink)