ON TOPIC
Art Imitates Life—
And Sometimes Creates It
The ‘bio art’ movement is tearing down the
divisions between art and life sciences
By Neel V. Patel
Managing Editor
The Bio Art Lab at SVA.
Image courtesy of SVA.
“You’ll have to check out the Venus flytrap clones we’ve been using,” Suzanne Anker tells me
as I’m peering into a turquoise fluorescent jar with a miniature purple octopus squished inside.
It’s lifeless and still, and yet it exudes a strange lively glow that makes it seem to exist on a kind
of spectral plane on par with those wildly vivid illustrations of stars, galaxies, and nebulae NASA
sends out every few days. It’s less biology and more chemistry, but the more I stare into the jar, the
more I begin to think that’s the point.
SciArt in America February 2015
5