I’m in Manhattan’s West Village, at the Bio
Art Lab housed in one of the School of Visual
Art’s buildings. After examining the octopus
and a slew of other invertebrates and crustaceans stacked and jarred in other colored liquids, we move on to looking at luminescent fish
and clones of other types of plants (including
the flytraps). At one point, Anker, the head of
the lab and a veteran artist in her own right,
shows me a set of leathery skins culled from
bacterial molds. “It’s cloth,” she tells me. “The
idea is one day, perhaps instead of stitching together these cotton-based or polyester- or woolbased materials or whatever, you’re using bacteria to grow clothing. You could put a culture on
a mannequin, actually grow a jacket.”
Bio art uses organisms or tissue—living, or at
least having been alive at some point—in artistic works and installations. The range of what
falls under bio art is very broad—and up for
reinterpretation—but in practice it can mean
anything from the use of plants or bacterial
cultures as a part of an installation to the outright genetic engineering of a particular species
of animal such that the organism itself acts as a
living installation.
I’m a bit speechless when she tells me this.
My first instinct as journalist is to follow up
with questions about how feasible something
like that would be, how you would market bacteria-made clothing, the safety issues involved,
the logistics, the manufacturing and commercialization process, everything!
The Bio Art Lab at the School of Visual Art
(SVA) is the first and, as far as anyone seems to
know, the only lab of its kind—a place where
student artists use laboratory tools and techniques to create bio art. Anker is a pioneer of
the field, having begun her own endeavors in
bio art in the eighties.
And just as quickly, I remember: this isn’t a
technology startup. Anker is not trying to sell
the new product that will change everything we
know about so-and-so. She’s an artist, and so
are her students. The idea behind these works is
not to acquire more knowledge for a particular
field or subject or to develop things that will
improve people’s lives.
“I look at bio art with a greater overview than
other practitioners,” she says. She views it a
tri-part system. The first category contemplates
the iconography of molecular imaging and deals
with instrumentalized vision—like what one
sees through microscopes or surgical cameras.
It looks at how those tools have created a new
way of viewing living organisms, the human
body, and the world.
The point is to get people to think differently
about something, as good art is supposed to.
To that effect, the bacterial mold-cloth works
amazingly well, whether it has feasibility or not.
One installation that really sticks out in memory is a large, Amazonian plant encased in glass,
with a set of plastic tubes that extend from
holes in the glass out to an oxygen mask. “One
of my students created this as a response to our
changing world,” Anker tells me. “In the future,
when everything goes to hell and we’re out
of natural oxygen, someone will basically use
something like this as their own oxygen tank.
You breathe the oxygen the plant creates and
provide for it the carbon dioxide it requires.
Sling it on just like a backpack.”
That’s what these so-called ‘bio art’ works are
doing. Using scientific concepts to stretch the
notion of what the world is and what it could
be.
The second category is, to Anker, based on
the idea that living systems are the result of
information—which, in our case, is DNA. The
same way computer software is built through
code, we are the expression of DNA’s building
blocks put together in such a way as to produce
our weird faces and strange laughter. “It’s the
way in which living matter—and matter itself—
is reconfigured by numerical code. Art as information.”
The third category is for the wet lab techniques. “Working with organisms, dead or alive,
and altering them or commenting on them,” she
says.
The goal of all three, she says, is “to raise
Again, questions come to mind. And again I reawareness of the fact that we live in a biological
member: the work represents an idea about the world. age.”
6
SciArt in America February 2015