BIOTEKNICA is a not-for-profit artist collective founded by Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet in 2000. Its purpose is to investigate critically the ethics, aesthetics, and technological potential for new art forms that lie at the intersection of the arts and the biological sciences. BIOTEKNICA Highlights Include: BIOTEKNICA began as a media studies and interventionist art project, which projected its’ viewers into a future where designer organisms are generated on demand. The organisms produced by BIOTEKNICA are modeled on the Teratoma, an unusual cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, and nervous systems. Monstrous as this may seem, scientists today see the Teratoma as an instance of spontaneous cloning, and are conducting research on the Teratoma with the goal of developing future technologies. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and deep underlying complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity. Since 2004 BIOTEKNICA has adopted a critical participatory methodology bringing our theoretical specimens out of their virtual environment and into biological science laboratories. Serving as Research Fellows at SymbioticA: the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at The University of Western Australia, Willet and Bailey began growing living prototypes that serve as new representations of the BIOTEKNICA product line. Here they commenced research with tissue culture protocols in the production of artwork as pioneered by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, of the internationally recognized Tissue Culture & Art Project, and SymbioticA founders. In 2006, they returned to SymbioticA – and worked in collaboration with Catts and Zurr on a new project entitled Teratological Prototypes. The four artists successfully constructed and exhibited a complex functional laboratory installation for ISEA: Zero One San Jose in the summer of 2006. Most recently Bailey and Willet launched a solo exhibition called BIOTEKNICA: LiveLifeLab at the FOFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. With LiveLifeLab, Bailey and Willet conducted an ‘experiment’ of sorts (an art action) in which the two attempt to construct a functional tissue culture lab in the gallery, and continue their ongoing research into creating new living art forms for the duration of the installation. This work results from ongoing questions arising for artists working with specialized scientific protocols and confronts the problems of access – accountability – and specialization – that typically inhibit non-specialist engagement and understanding of the sciences. SSHRC
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Jennifer Willet & Shawn Bailey BIOTEKNICA SymbioticA Documentation Performance and Digital Photographs 2006 Photography Credit: BIOTEKNICA (Tagny Duff) |