At last something really new: bioart

I never knew of this before: art that messes with life itself. Hey, when it comes to cloning, breeding, DNA, etc. shouldn't art get there along with science. Who would you have design a new human being: an artist or a scientist? Here the skinny, from the NY Times:

In a certain part of the art world, the story is recounted like a slowly unfolding nightmare: On the afternoon of May 11 last year, Steven Kurtz, a respected artist and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, called 911 to report that his wife, Hope, 45, was not breathing. The police arrived to find Hope Kurtz dead, and in a hallway they found something else - a biological lab, with an incubator, centrifuge and bacterial cultures growing in petri dishes. Windows nearby were covered with foil, and on the shelves sat books like "The Biology of Doom" and "Spores, Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax." The F.B.I. was called in. Agents in white biohazard suits scoured the house. Subpoenas - citing sections of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act - were issued to Mr. Kurtz and other members of an art group he and his wife helped found, the Critical Art Ensemble. And in the summer of 2004 Mr. Kurtz was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of mail and wire fraud, accused of illegally obtaining two of the bacteria samples in his lab, crimes that could send him to prison for up to 20 years.

While the bare facts of the case lent it the contours of a doomsday episode of "CSI," information that emerged later changed the picture considerably. Medical examiners found that Mrs. Kurtz's death was not suspicious; she died of heart failure. As artists, she and her husband had long worked openly with biological and chemical agents, which they used at exhibitions around the world, including a 2002 show involving genetically altered plants at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. Most significant, the bacteria cultures in Mr. Kurtz's lab were determined to be essentially harmless. One is used in high-school science experiments and is available on the Internet for educators to buy.

But federal prosecutors have continued to pursue the case, which could come to trial later this year. In the process, they have transformed Mr. Kurtz into an unlikely art world martyr-hero and shone a spotlight on an emerging art movement that blurs the lines between art and science - especially the science of genetics and biotechnology - and also the lines between art and activism. Called bioart or wetware by some of its practitioners, the field is growing rapidly in the United States and Europe, and it is producing bizarre and sometimes disturbing work that seems sprung right from the pages of Philip K. Dick or Koji Suzuki, except that the science involved is not fiction.

In many ways bioart represents a logical next step in contemporary art, which has eagerly embraced new approaches and nontraditional materials: video and computers beginning in the 1960's and 70's, digital technology and the Internet in the 90's.

But bioart can credibly claim to have made a more revolutionary break with tradition. Instead of finding ways to represent and distill life using paint or marble or pixels, the artists use life itself - bacteria, cell lines, plants, insects and even animals - as the medium to ask the questions that art has always asked. In ways that art has not been in a long time, the work can feel genuinely subversive, even dangerous.

Certain aspects of this kind of living art have been around for a long time. Some bioartists credit the photographer Edward Steichen as the founder of genetic art: in the 1930's at the Museum of Modern Art he showed a collection of giant, alienlike delphiniums he had mutated using selective breeding and chemicals. Biological elements have also played a part in the body-art movement and in some well-known contemporary work, like the lifecycle-behind-glass gross-out of Damien Hirst, in which maggots hatch, become flies, feed on a rotting cow's head, then die on a bug zapper. (That piece was bought by the collector Charles Saatchi in 1990 for what was said to be less than £100,000, and is now believed to be worth more than 10 times that amount.)

During the last decade the field has grown largely because of the very advances in biotechnology - genetically altered plants and animals, cloning, mapping of the human genome - that the artwork often addresses. In many cases the artists work alongside scientists in their labs and use the same technology being used in cutting-edge research. Joe Davis, for example, considered a father of American bioart, has worked for years as an unpaid research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the biophysicist Alexander Rich, who discovered a rare form of DNA that could hold clues to human diseases.

Occasionally the work is playful, verging on silly - serenading a strain of E. coli bacteria with Engelbert Humperdinck's greatest hits to see if that causes increased antibiotic production. (It appeared to.) Other artists are simply trying to find new ways to do old things - creating portraits on leaves or in swaths of growing grass by using photosynthesis. But much of the work is provocative and, depending on your Brave New World tolerance, disturbing: creating "victimless" meat by growing tiny steaks from biopsied frog cells and then eating the steaks; using bone cells from pigs to grow wing-shaped objects, a play on the "when pigs fly" trope; coaxing cactuses into sprouting humanlike hair; growing tissue in a petri dish that could theoretically be marketed as a hymen replacement. ("The hymens are to be distributed as soft sculptures only, not intended for human application at this time," states the Web site for that project, www.vivolabs.org.)

The five-member Critical Art Ensemble has for many years pushed the art deep into the realm of activism, questioning the activities of the biotechnology industry and even proposing what they call "fuzzy biological sabotage" - such as releasing strange-looking genetically mutated flies into offices and restaurants around biotech-company plants to sow paranoia or releasing rats near fields where genetically altered plants are being tested so that they invade and destroy the test samples. "The fuzzy saboteur has to stand on that ambiguous line between the legal and the illegal (both criminally and civilly)," states the position paper of one of the group's projects. (Through his lawyer, Mr. Kurtz declined to comment for this article.) Other projects included a 2001 exhibition in France in which the collective and another artist, Beatriz da Costa, allowed visitors to take home a sample of genetically altered E. coli bacteria, an act forbidden by the University of Washington's biosafety committee when the exhibition was shown in Seattle. The artists described the bacteria samples as benign, but the nature of the work made the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York so nervous in 2002 that the exhibition of the project there was postponed and then allowed to be shown only to visitors who signed consent forms.

It is largely because bioartists have begun to acquire the kinds of knowledge and technical abilities to pull off such daring projects that the work, in a jittery post-9/11 world, has begun to draw more attention from law-enforcement agencies and the safety and ethics committees of universities. Some say that the Kurtz case is making that scrutiny only greater. "It's made my life at M.I.T. biology certainly more tenuous than before," said Mr. Davis, whose esoteric works include a project in which he encoded a 60-character fragment of a Greek text by Heraclitus into the white-eye gene of a fruit fly. Of the Kurtz case and its implications, he said: "The head of my department talked to me about it. My colleagues have talked to me about it. People just want me to be really careful."

Despite the Kurtz case's beginnings in fears of bioterrorism, federal prosecutors describe it in court papers now as a relatively narrow one, having little do with the implications of bioart and more about simply whether Mr. Kurtz and a friend also under indictment, Robert E. Ferrell, a geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh, defrauded that university and a Virginia biological-supply company. The case alleges that at Mr. Kurtz's request, Dr. Ferrell used his university account to get the two bacteria samples, which are sent only to labs that meet certain requirements. Then he mailed them to Mr. Kurtz for use in an art project that was to examine the involvement of the United States in germ warfare experiments. (Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor the supply company has pursued civil fraud cases against the men.)

But the case, which Mr. Kurtz's lawyer, Paul J. Cambria, describes as a disturbing overreaction on the part of the government, has raised serious questions that, perhaps fittingly, cross the boundaries of bioart into science. For example, many scientists say that living samples like the two in question are frequently shared among institutions and researchers. If the two men are found guilty, they say, it could have a chilling effect on collaborative research. Among bioartists, the case has provoked soul searching about the kinds of standards they should be held to regarding safety and ethics, two unlikely areas for artists to be pondering. In a book of essays now being compiled, "Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts," Ruth West, a bioartist at the University of California, San Diego, asks whether the Critical Art Ensemble should be required to abide by all the same extensive rules as a biotech lab. "Or should they be allowed a 'poetic license' which extends to the release of transgenic bacteria into people's home and the environment?" she writes. Those kinds of questions have already illuminated a deep divide between practitioners like Mr. Kurtz, who see art as a way to challenge the power that government and business hold over science, and others like Mr. Davis at M.I.T., who say they think such activism might make for provocative political discussion, but not necessarily good art.

Members of the ensemble complain in one of their books that bioart that divorces itself from political questions is essentially just another curio to feed the cultural world's "market for novelty." "Corporate and state culture," they add, "could not ask for better public relations work."

But Mr. Davis, while critical of the case against Mr. Kurtz, said in an interview that he disagreed with that view, and added that when artists are dealing with materials as powerful and complex as living bacteria or transgenic organisms, that gives them a kind of responsibility they have never had before. And their status as artists, he said, should not give them any more license to make a point that could have dangerous implications. He mentioned a 1999 project by the British artists and activists Heath Bunting and Rachel Baker in which they offered to mail anyone who wanted one a "superweed" kit capable of producing a genetically mutant weed that would be resistant to herbicides. (It's unclear whether the kits actually worked.) "I don't understand why they weren't arrested," said Mr. Davis, who added, "Suppose I'm against gas stations. Does that give me the right to walk around them with a pack of matches?"

As biotechnology advances and bioart grows - several American universities are establishing centers for the art - it will undoubtedly become more difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And as artists are given ever more advanced tools for making their work, questions about how far the art can be pushed will only become harder to answer. Already, there are artists like Adam Zaretsky, an eccentric even in the eccentric world of bioart, who profess not to understand why everyone gets so worked up by its practical and ethical implications. Mr. Zaretsky, who has worked at M.I.T. and San Francisco State University and describes himself as "between academic gigs," has had numerous run-ins with university ethics and animal-use committees, which he describes as "rent-a-priests." In one case, he was not allowed to stage a project at San Francisco State called the "Workhorse Zoo," in which he sealed himself in glass room for a week with albino frogs, mice, flies, microscopic worms and an actively growing yeast culture - in other words, a group of typical scientific test subjects - and ended up eating some of the frogs, fish and mice as any predator desperate for a meal would. (The project ended up being staged at the Salina Art Center in Kansas in 2002.) Mr. Zaretsky says, mostly seriously, that no matter how many curbs are placed on them, biotechnology and bioengineering will end up transforming life as we know it, and in his view their tools are too powerful to be left in the hands of business and government alone. Artists should be able to use them, too, as a kind of canvas and paint to create ever more ambitious living works, à la Dr. Moreau.

"I'd like to see humans with the necks of giraffes; I'd like to see a thousand-legged dog - a dog crossed with a millipede," he said. "I'm all for things getting really, really weird."

ME TOO. The weirder the better. I want to see a perfect fuck object bioengineered. More than one vagina or penis or butthole, more than two tits, more than two hands, more than ten fingers -- maybe a crfeaure that is male on one side, and female on the other side, the duo-sex fuck object. Gross? Weird? Well, it's going to happen. It's the next step of evolution: when we become not only the propagators of life, but the designers of new life forms. And since sex and porn is the stuff that always drives new technologies, the competition for the perfect fuck object will be fierce. That's where the first biofortunes will be made.