Chapter Ten
Interrupted Reading: The Aesthetics of Metastasis
Pablo Baler
Before coming into being, things are nothing, and when they start being, they are still very much inside their nothingness.
—Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, maxim n. 231
Shifting Positions
Naked or in uniform, seated or walking, as a saint, a little girl, or a mythological character, the Reader is a recurrent figure in the history of art. Its wide and consistent appeal may derive from its power to evoke a fundamental conflict: the one between the private, almost secret act of reading, and the public status of texts, woven as they are into the vaster fabric of all master narratives.1
But this conflict between the private reader and the public text may not conjure up today the same ideas it did a generation ago when texts were seen, by structuralists and poststructuralists alike, as a mesh of conventions that were “always already written” and, one could say, always already read.2 The contrast between Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s Interrupted Reading (1865–1870) and Joel Peter Witkin’s work of the same title (1999) can offer us a glimpse into this historical shift by highlighting one salient strand of the aesthetic sensibility that has been emerging since the 1990s and that is already defining the twenty-first century. (See figures 10.1 and 10.2.)
At the most immediate level, a momentary distraction from reading what looks like a romantic novel (as in Corot’s painting), eloquently contrasts with an interruption that is actually a disruption, from reading what could be construed, in Witkin’s photograph, as a vademecum of “master narratives.” In Witkin, the agent of disruption is not a complete, breathing human being but parts of a human body that has been dismembered and whimsically reconstituted. Witkin’s Interrupted Reading is a twenty-first-century rewriting of both the recurring topic of the reader as well as a new take on the vanitas genre. In Witkin’s “vanitas,” the symbol of death is not a hollowed skull serving as reminder of the transitory nature of life or of the perpetually deferred promise of signification, but a mutilated cadaver whose reconfigured limbs, as a reconfigured syntax,3 stand for the possibility of alternative forms of meanings and beings.
The neoclassicism of Corot, pinned on “his ideal of the relation of man to nature, his pantheism which was at once Greek and Christian, and the cheer of his own heart”4 significantly contrasts with Witkin’s sensibility, defined by this exploration of alternate forms of existences beyond the merely human; and a search for meaning beyond the merely “natural,” his necrophilic pathos focused on both the stumps and the limbs, and his iconoclastic stance that nonetheless presents itself with the weight, beauty, and necessity of tradition.
The twentieth century was marked by a suspicion against all narrative constructions, including the fundamental narratives of self, meaning, and world.5 This postmodern “squinting” is informed by the progressive recognition that the visible narratives of literature and art, as well as the invisible narratives underlying culture, constitute not just fictions about this world but most profoundly that these worlds we came up with are the fictions that constitute us. Thus, the act of reading itself could prove to be a useful metaphor to talk about cultural changes in general and in particular to study a historical break that is starting to define this century, as the narrative underlying the ultimate fiction, that of being human, is being subjected to increasing radically interrupted, disrupted readings.
Cancer as Art/Art as Cancer
For the purposes of this chapter, in which biologies will be read as texts and texts as cultural narratives, I will inevitably resort to the notion of memes taken from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s seminal book The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins conceives these cultural units called memes in terms of the evolutionary model. Analogous to the biological unit of genes, memes perpetuate cultural phenomena through self-replication. This dynamic underlies both the replication of “master-memes” such as the idea of “progress,” “knowledge,” or “faith,” as well as “micro-memes” such as gestures, personal styles, or daily superstitions, and all cultural tics in between.6
From this perspective, besides the photographs of Joel Peter Witkin, I will touch upon the works of Slovenian transartist Polona Tratnik, Australian wet biology team Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, Australian performance artist Stelarc, Dutch filmmaker Floris Kaayk, and the New York–based digital imaging duo Aziz+Cucher. For even though they work in different media and bring with them different attitudes and ideas, their collective output can be seen as part of a compelling new narrative of an ontological shift that could be summed up in terms of a reconfiguration of Genes and Memes—that is, a reconfiguration of the units of genetic and cultural transmission. It should also be noted that all trans-genic artists could be considered trans-memetic as well, to the extent that a threat to our biological identity entails a fundamental threat to the broader cultural environment.
What connects these artists is the unspoken awareness that their destabilizing narratives are also threatening the world. If this tension—between fiction and world—could be arguably contended for all art, in particular since the Renaissance, what suddenly seems different is the fact that some of these private fictions are impinging upon and taking hold of the consensual world. What critics such as Arthur Danto have categorized as “the end of art” was in fact the end of representation and the beginning of instantiation and enactment, embodiments of our imagination.
Out of this group of artists, Stelarc’s work can be viewed as an early manifestation of this new paradigm. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of Stelarc is that he creates in the intersection of the biological, the cultural, and the narrative. There is one work in particular that could offer us yet another hint into this emerging ontological shift: Stomach Sculpture (1993; see figure 11.4). This work is a self-illuminating and beeping capsule shell that Stelarc introduced into his own meandering intestinal path. In Stomach Sculpture, Stelarc became, simultaneously, the body of the artist, part of the artwork, the artwork itself, the curator, the performance, and the venue for the performance—a gallery, a museum.
I remember discussing Stomach Sculpture back in 2000 with an unadventurous professor of art history who shall remain anonymous (in the field of art history, that is). I conveyed my interest in the aesthetic possibilities opened up by a work of art that is foreign to your body and that, at the same time, is displayed and expresses itself inside your body. This bow-tied professor, known for his dismissive attitude toward experimentation, swiftly replied: “Well, that’s already being done—it’s called cancer.”
Even if I still consider his sarcasm only slightly endearing, I have found the concept of “cancer as art” theoretically compelling. If one could define cancer as a reprogramming of genetic output leading to a proliferation that threatens the very foundation of its existence, then in a similar fashion, current art practices such as wet biology art, virtual immersive scenarios, or posthuman performance could be defined by a reprogramming of the most basic phenomenological referents—perception, body, self, subject, ethics, nature, culture, even time and space—as a threat to the basic category on which all cultural narratives are founded: that of Being Human. Coincidentally, in her 2002 essay “The Future . . . Is Monstrous: Prosthetics as Ethics,” Joanna Zylinska describes Stelarc’s work in terms that could be seen from this oncological perspective: “Stelarc’s performance of prosthetic selfhood . . . creates a space for an encounter with, even intrusion of, what is radically different from the self and yet what remains, paradoxically, in some sort of relationship with the self.”7 Here, a metaphorical sense of cancer is used to frame a cultural paradigm shift that has been trail-blazed by Stelarc since the 1990s.8
Stelarc’s long-term project to implant an extra ear into his forearm also involved, at one point, the cell-culturing expertise of wet biology artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. This team, based in West Australia, has also grown “semi-living” sculptures, by culturing cells on artificial scaffolds—as in the Semi-Living Worry Dolls project of 2011. According to Catts and Zurr, these near-living entities “blur the boundaries between what is born/manufactured, animate/inanimate, object/subject and further challenge our perceptions and our relations toward our bodies and constructed environment.”9
Catts and Zurr are also involved in the culturing of victimless food, as in Disembodied Cuisine Project (2003), where using tissue-engineering techniques they have grown frog skeletal muscle out of a frog’s cell line and then feasted on this semi-living steak with a couple of curators, the chef, and some volunteers at a gallery in France. As an eloquent curiosity, the duo relates the anecdote that the director of an animal-welfare organization approached them requesting to grow semi-living human steaks—and to throw a feast based on a steak grown from her own flesh.10 Beyond redefinitions of the conceptual boundaries of art as a social construct, moments like this could also be seen as flash-forwards of another blurring of boundaries—in this case the boundary between “politically correct” food production and deep-rooted, transcultural taboos.
In a similar destabilizing spirit, the work of Polona Tratnik points to aesthetic and cultural appropriations of current possibilities in biotechnology, and beyond that it stretches Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the body as a permanent condition of experience in the world, toward a performance in which all bodies, organisms, and cells expand beyond their “skins” into the vaster “Flesh of the World.” The projects In Vitro and Transspecies (2008), for instance, involve the cultivation of hair under artificial conditions, transplantation of hair between species, and experimentation with stem cells. As Polona herself defines it, her art is “a comment on the interrelation of the individual with the microbiological ‘flesh’ of the World, thus challenging the limits of intimacy and privacy.”11 (See figures 10.3 and 10.4.)
In twentieth-century theoretical spinoffs of poststructuralist thought, “the Other” was never conceived beyond the realm of the Human; in other words, while all memes were reverse-engineered, and compulsively vivisected by, let’s say, postcolonial, or postfeminist approaches, the underlying nature of what can be considered “Human” remained, at some essentialist level, an unproblematic notion.12 The recurrent topos of monstrosity we find in these works—redesigned, misplaced, missing or deformed body parts, experimental beings, semi-living life forms, inter-species experimentations—should be understood not only as a comment on the aesthetic aspects of these changes pointing toward other forms of existence, but more relevantly as yet another metaphor for our own repulsion toward the “Ontological Other.”
J. P. Witkin’s unsettling images of dismembered and deformed human beings, fantasies of bestiality, gender-and-species-defying characters, and still-lifes arranged with corrupted body parts should not be seen, under a modernist light, as a revolt against tradition or as an attempt to shock us. There is something more and beyond in Witkin’s images than mere shock value. Terence, the ancient Roman playwright wrote, in the voice of one of his characters: “I consider nothing that is human, alien to me.” Expanding Terence’s dictum, Witkin embraces those aspects of the “human experience” that we generally tend to lock up, forget, think away, bury, or display as freak shows. And that generosity reveals an unpredictable dimension: by illuminating the blind spots of what is thought of as Humanity, Witkin winds up shedding a skewed light onto something that transcends the idea of a fixed human nature.
Aziz+Cucher’s highly manipulated photographs, which focus on the representation of the body in relation to new technology, also produce a response that has more to do with our repugnance of the unknown than with our aversion to the monstrous. Coincidentally, as in Tratnik’s work, in Azziz+Cucher’s images, skin also appears as a highly manipulated liminal space, forced to reveal the unstable limits of human identity and experience. In the series Dystopia, dating back to 1994, the duo recreates portraits—a traditionally recognized site of selfhood—by erasing all marks of individuality. Issues of identity, anxiety, transformation, mutation, and the increasing disappearance of the traditional boundaries between the organic and the artificial lay at the core of their production. The metaphoric dimension of Monstrosity as resistance toward this Other was also recognized by art critic Frazer Ward, who insightfully wrote: “Aziz+Cucher’s Interiors are metaphors for the abandon and the terror of the collapse of distinctions between human and non-human, the attraction and the repulsion of the dissolution of limits.”13 (See figures 10.5 and 10.6.)
If I had to put a date to this shift in art sensibility defined by the exploration of our bodies toward the unknown, I would say 1993. And the landmark, once again: Stelarc’s Stomach Sculpture. Duchamp’s urinal, the seminal gesture of twentieth-century art, was an attempt to introduce into an art show (in this case, the Grand Central Palace in New York), an object that on the basis of its foreignness had a deconstructing and metastasic power: deconstruction of the social conventions around which we construct the meaning of what art is, and a metastasic power that threatened a specific, historically bound construct of Art. In turn, I see this particular project of Stelarc, of introducing an art-object inside his body, as the seminal gesture of twenty-first-century art, because it turned the inside of our bodies into the site of artistic experimentation and it turned the introduction of a foreign object into the body as the deconstruction of the biological conventions around which we construct the meanings of what it is to have a body, what is a body, and eventually what it means to be human.
Floris Kaayk’s “documentary” Metalosis Maligna (2006) seems intended from its conception to be read from the perspective of an aesthetics of metastasis. Kaayk’s “fictional information-service film” (as he himself calls this early work) reports about an infectious life-threatening disease in which metal implants, afflicted by a bacterium (Streptococcus metalomaligna), undergo a process of relentless proliferation that consumes the body of the patient from the inside out. At some point during the short film, we are presented with a pseudo time-lapse photographic record of a patient’s limbs being completely replaced by what the presenter calls “solid metal tissue.” In this case the attraction and repulsion toward the dissolution of limits refers to a surprising dissolution between the natural and the artificial.
Metalosis Maligna could be thus viewed as a sequel to Stelarc’s Stomach Sculpture. From this perspective, the capsule shell (built of implant quality metals) that Stelarc introduced into his own body could acquire in Kaayk’s film a life of its own, as implants proliferate in the form of a metallic cancer. In Kaayk’s case, however—as in Witkin’s and Aziz+Cucher’s—the ontological shift has more to do with the atmosphere created and the sensibility conveyed than with any actual reconfiguration at the biological or technological level. (See figure 10.7.)
For this video, Kaayk co-opts—even to an ironic degree—the style, grammar, soundtrack, pace, and brand of authoritative credibility of a BBC-type documentary—using classic camera movements, cross-dissolves, well-placed silences, suspenseful music, and of course, a British accent—as a comment on the performative dimension of knowledge; but more interestingly, Kaayk manages to smuggle through this patina of “reality” the story of the proliferation of the artificial as a threat to the very existence of the organic. Cancer itself could be thought of as a form of interrupted reading; yet one could identify in Metalosis Maligna another form of interruption, the one accomplished by the reconfigured routines of a prosthetic device: a graft-versus-host disease in which prosthesis (in synecdochical relation to technology) recognizes its host (the organic) as foreign.
There is indeed an underlying aesthetics to all these previously discussed artworks, endowed as they all are with a transformative power. With their subversive understanding of the limits of human identity, they challenge perception, affection, and intellection; defy our imagination; and push the boundaries of both ethics and aesthetics. But more relevant to the purposes of anticipating a defining feature of twenty-first-century aesthetics is the thrust of some of these works to enact their fiction not only into the stage of the art world but also onto the theater of reality. For the dissolutions of borders put in motion throughout these works (body/world, animate/inanimate, object/subject, organic/artificial, human/nonhuman) refer to a more profound and puzzling dissolution of limits, and that is the imminent dissolution between fiction and reality.
Intrusive Writings
In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” one of Jorge Luis Borges’s most-analyzed short stories, the Argentine writer conceived an ancestral society of literary demiurgi who invented Tlön, a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history: . . . with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy.14
In this story, Borges offers an idea that could be seen as one of his defining conceptual legacies: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”15 This seemingly paradoxical idea, that philosophy could find a more fertile ground in fiction (and vice versa), runs throughout Borges’s poetics. And in this story, one of the most astounding surprises is the materialization of fictional objects, the intrusion of the fantastic world into the world of reality. These are, in the language of Tlön, the ur: the objects produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The fictional Borges of the story relates witnessing one of these intrusions when from the belt of a man who “came from the border” a few coins had fallen, together with one of those fantastical objects:
a cone of bright metal, the size of a die. In vain a boy tried to pick up this cone. A man barely managed to raise it from the ground. I held it on the palm of my hand for a few minutes; I remember that its weight was intolerable and that after the cone was removed, the feeling of oppressiveness persisted. I also remember the precise circle it carved into my flesh. The evidence of a very small and yet extremely heavy object left an unpleasant sensation of repugnance and fear.16
“Repugnance and fear” seems to be a running theme brought up by the dissolution of limits in general, and in particular between fiction and reality: a repugnance produced by several works that have been popping up in the last two decades, particularly in the field of wet biology art.
The conflict between poiesis and mimesis, between “creation” and “representation” that played out during the historical avant-gardes was still, despite some good intentions, a rhetorical debate. Even those palpable creations of “concrete art,” “action performance,” or “ready-made interventions,” which attempted to enact a vision into the world, as opposed to represent the world, can be found today in beautifully bound books or cordoned up in well-guarded galleries. But from representation to creation to instantiation, the idea of art practice as intrusion into the consensual world has already been brought into theoretical consciousness in the mind of bio-artists such as Polona Tratnik, Catts and Zurr, Eduardo Kac, or Michael Burton, among many others.
In the “Manifesto for the Next Art” published in this anthology (see Chapter 2), Polona Tratnik writes: “Art can no longer function as a metaphor. There is no distance between art and reality. Art is a real thing.”17 The exploration of ontological possibilities brought up by bio-poetics is both a rhetorical and a concrete gesture, as the results of articulated imagination leave a palpable mark on the material world. The unavoidable connection between the two paradigms explored in this chapter (ontological curiosity and the instantiation of the fictional) is significant, because who or what we are in the gradient of life, and where the frontiers of reality lie in the continuum of perception, are organically interrelated questions.
As cognitive scientists have persuaded us, abstract meaning is deeply rooted in our bodies: All meaning is directly dependent on our biology. In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, cognitive theorist George Lakoff exemplifies this by resorting to the simple concepts of “in front” and “behind” to show that these concepts only make sense for a being with rear and frontal sides and not, for instance, for a pluridirectional perceiving sphere floating in some medium (let alone in a virtual medium where even the laws of physics can be reprogrammed). The same can be said for all spacial relations: center, periphery, contact, far, upside down, et cetera. Lakoff writes: “Our bodies, brains, and interactions with our environment provide the mostly unconscious basis for our everyday metaphysics, that is, our sense of what is real.”18 But today, resorting to biotechnological techniques, artists are creating new biological forms of life in the laboratory. Advances in biomedical technologies such as tissue engineering, xenotransplantation, and genomics promise to render the living body a malleable mass.
The recognition that reality and representation are not two separate dimensions, but that reality itself is representation, informed our postmodern condition all the way back to Cervantes’s perspectivism. The twenty-first century, however, is not only absorbing this consciousness but is also turning it inside out by giving fictional projections the ontological status of reality. Exposing the discursive nature of reality has been liberating; however, recognizing that all discourse could participate in the ontological status of reality imports a form of responsibility. I would like to contend, however, that it is not an ethical responsibility.
Bio-artist Ionat Zurr reassures us that her biological experimentations are done with “care,” as in the killing of the Semi-Living Worry Dolls.19 The same with Eduardo Kac, who lets us know his transgenic chimerical works, like the fluorescent rabbit, are done with “love.”20 But then again, these ethical concerns attached to aesthetic projects present an apparent anachronism, as it imposes a long tradition of both Judeo-Christian and secular humanism onto a form of art that is clearly pushing its way into new, uncharted territories. It is not too far-fetched to forecast a more abstract expressionistic, or even actionist stage for bio-art in which ethically self-conscious artists such as Kac and Zurr will be outshone by ethically experimental artists, or better yet, artists for whom ethics is a thing of the past. Someday an artist with the exploratory spirit of Joel Peter Witkin, the impulsive energy of Jackson Pollock, or the orgiastic violence of Hermann Nitsch might recur to life itself as a medium, and the public resistance, once again, as always, will be a testament to a limited historical horizon of expectations.
Resistance of this nature could easily come from bioethicists like Paul Root Wolpe, who recently said in a TED presentation:
For the first time in the history of this planet we are able to design organisms, we can manipulate the plasms of life with unprecedented power, . . . and it confers on us an enormous responsibility which is not just the responsibility of the scientists and ethicists. . . . It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future.21
Wolpe recognizes the power of the ontological shift sketchily drawn in this chapter, but he is prescribing a “human”-centered moral paradigm into this posthuman thrust. It is not an issue of ethical responsibility: It is a responsibility of the imagination. It is a literary responsibility. Once unpredictable organisms, forms of perception, and metaphysics start to emerge from the primordial soup of life, imposing an ethics underpinned by the residues of our ingrained humanism will be also a thing of the past. If this last idea could be considered a hyperbolic simplification, at least we have to acknowledge the challenges of maintaining a human-based axiology when bestiality, genetically engineered cannibalism, trans-species erotica, necrophilia, mutilation, or the fetishization of monstrosity are seen as expressions of potential living, or semi-living entities. Ethics, far from gravitating toward philosophy, will drift away toward an unpredictable field: fiction.
Another metaphor that circulates in posthuman theory as a way to grasp the shift toward this ontological otherness is the metaphor of prosthesis, which is taken to its extreme in Catherine Hayles’s essay How We Became Posthuman. Thinking of the body itself as a prosthesis, Hayles writes: “The posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.” 22
If exile is both our origin and our destiny. . . as bodies, as species, as living beings, if Nothing is our ultimate point of reference, we could even take Hayles’s idea a step further (or a step back) and think of life itself as a prosthesis we learn to manipulate. Once again Terence, the Roman playwright, comes to mind; for “I consider nothing that is human alien to me” reveals this underlying thrust of art from the caves of Chauvet to the walls of Banksy.
To the question “What is the function of art?” we have answered for centuries that art offers us a deeper understanding of who we are or who we could be in the world. We can talk all we want about the qualitative leap from Romanticism to Postmodernism, but the fact remains that even if there was a progressive deconstruction of the self and of the subject from, let’s say, 1890 to 1990, from Corot’s painting up to Witkin’s photograph, the underlying concept of “human” at the most basic biological level was still an unquestioned master narrative.
The shift I have been trying to articulate is the result of a different thrust: an exploration of what it is, what it means, and what it would entail to depart from notions of an invariant nature of life—a prospective nostalgia of ontological potentiality. We are at the brink of a paradigm shift, and we seem ready to rephrase Terence’s dictum to include the alien as that which we consider ourselves part of—rephrasing his line as: We consider nothing to be alien to us. For we participate in an existence that transcends the limits of the merely human and extends beyond, toward all species: the living, the semi-living, and the non-living—and one could even say that we participate in an existence that extends beyond existence itself toward nonexistence, toward the secret nostalgia for the yet-to-be-recovered nothingness.
Notes
1. The concept of “master narrative” implies, in postmodern theory, the untold narratives that are embedded in culture, justify specific cultural dynamics, and function as the condition of possibility of all other narratives. Religion always makes a good, readily graspable example of master-narrative due to the way in which it is discursively conceived—as a set of stories—and virulently permeates the life of the individual and replicates both trans-culturally and trans-historically.
2. Rewording the concept of the “always already written” Roland Barthes insightfully describes the Text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 146.
3. The connection between reconfigured limbs and reconfigured grammar can be already found in the etymology of the word prosthesis, which philologically can be traced back to its grammatical origin as meaning “addition of a syllable to the beginning of a word.” Quoted in Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 1. The Prosthetic Impulse is a perplexing and comprehensive anthology of essays—unavoidable reading to those interested in the evolution of the emerging theoretical field of “bioculture.”
4. C. M., “Corots in the Art Institute,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 18, no. 8 (1924): 99–102.
5. As expected, the self-conscious use of “reading” as a theoretical metaphor can be traced back to post-structuralist theory. In this sense, it is interesting to see Foucault’s passing reference to this in his famous 1967 presentation “Of Other Spaces,” in which he said: “As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description . . . that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places.” (Italics are mine). Found in http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html, accessed Jan 15, 2012.
6. The irony of recurring to a scientific frame of reference to help sketch what may be conceived (only in my mind) as prolegomena for a post-deconstruction skepticism is not lost on anybody, but one can only hope that the narrative offered in this chapter destabilizes such master-narratives as “knowledge” and “progress” beyond the localized, mechanical “knowledges” and “progresses” offered by the hard sciences. Moreover, I aspire to take contradiction beyond the confines of the trope to the level of a poetics, so one should also appreciate the beautiful irony warranted by the fact that this trans-memetic manifesto comes to you packaged in the most culturally distilled format: the book.
7. Joanna Zylinska, “The Future . . . Is Monstrous: Prosthetics as Ethics,” in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, ed. Joanna Zylinska (London: Continnum, 2002), 231.
8. One could argue since the 1960s, if we view Stelarc’s early performances under this same light. In any case, for a detailed account of the evolution of Stelarc’s thought and work, one need look no further than the next chapter in this anthology, “ALIVENESS & AFFECT: ALTERNATE ART & ANATOMIES” (see Chapter 11).
9. This is taken from http://artandtech.osu.edu/colloquium/html/catts.html. For technical details of the process of creating semi-living entities one can visit the Tissue Culture and Art Project website: http://tcaproject.org/. Catts/Zurr explain the concept of the semi-living in the manifesto of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), which was set to explore the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression: “We are investigating our relationships with the different gradients of life through the construction/growth of a new class of object/being —that of the Semi-Living. These are parts of complex organisms, which are sustained alive outside of the body and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. These evocative objects are a tangible example that brings into question deep-rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self, and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment. We are interested in the new discourses and new ethics/epistemologies that surround issues of partial life and the contestable future scenarios they are offering us.” Found at the Tissue Culture and Art Project, http://tcaproject.org/projects/worry-dolls, accessed January 8, 2012.
10. This anecdote is taken from “Food for Thought about the Future,” written by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, http://www.experimenta.org/hot/melbourne/9mesh.swf, accessed January 19, 2012.
11. This quote was taken from Polona Tratnik’s In Vitro/Transspecies website, accessed January 19, 2012 (http://www.ars-tratnik.si/in_vitro_transspecies.htm). For a clearer understanding of Polona Tratnik’s philosophy, see the following website, which includes both her works and her writings: http://www.ars-tratnik.si/index.htm.
12. This statement, of course is screaming to be qualified. Since evolutionary theory offered a long-term view of our species and is a departure from any perspective proposing an invariant human nature, the malleability of “our” nature has become a major strand of philosophical thinking, all the way to Deleuze’s vindication of the animal “other” as a privileged dimension toward which writers and philosophers should strive. As Alan Beaulieu writes in “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought”: “By virtue of this original and subversive (should not every philosophy be subversive?) position, Deleuze and Guattari promote an anti-humanistic line of thought that favors the processes of desubjectivation, depersonalization, and differentiation that have the capacity to find and express the forces of an inorganic life in an unfamiliar environment.” Alan Beaulieu, “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, no. 1/2 (2011): 72.
13. Frazer Ward, “The Technology We Deserve,” Parkett 60, December 2000, 192.
14. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can be found in Borges’s book of short stories, Ficciones. All quotes translated by me from the original Spanish. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 434.
15. Borges, Ficciones, 436.
16. Borges, Ficciones, 442. (The italics are mine.)
17. See Polona Tratnik’s “Manifesto for the Next Art,” Chapter 2 in this collection.
18. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17.
19. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s artwork aims at exploring cultural and ethical issues of life manipulation. This can be observed, for instance, in the Semi-Living Worry Dolls, the first tissue-engineered sculptures to be presented alive in a gallery context. Referring to this in an interview conducted in the context of “21st Century: Art in the First Decade” at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Zurr said: “We don’t want to hide the fact that there is an inherent ethical problem here with us actually messing with life; therefore making the death of the artwork, which will happen anyway at one point, a public thing so other people can actually view and to a certain extent participate . . . , is very important.” The show at GoMA took place between December 18, 2010, and April 26, 2011. This interview can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bibp4clI5A, accessed January 17, 2012.
20. The coinage of the term bio-art is attributed to Eduardo Kac, who, regarding ethical issues of bio-art, wrote: “[Transgenic Art] must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created.” (Italics are mine). This quote can be found on his website, http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html#gfpbunnyanchor, accessed January 12, 2010.
21. Paul Root Wolpe: “It’s Time to Question Bioengineering,” TEDtalks, http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html, accessed October 12, 2011.
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