Can the recent revolution in BioArt revise human relationship to the planet?

One of the theories behind the origin of art implies that art evolved as a tool of spiritual, philosophical, symbolic, decorative, and functional documentation. Over the course of time, this tool transformed into a primarily visual aesthetic, a manifestation of beauty. However, with society deviating from perceiving beauty as a visual element to beauty as an abstract attribute, art also moved from its visual significance to a more cultural context. This subjective value has also influenced the existence of different styles and forms in art—from modern, abstract and pop art to digital works, installations, and sculptures—an integral tool for exchange of thoughts and expression. However, the congregation of art and science remains a surface-level integration. Even when both disciplines share intriguing similarities, the principles of science and philosophy of art often seem to repel in practice. However, the two worlds found a common ground, towards the end of the 20^th century, under 'BioArt.' The art practice employed live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, life processes etc. to create art from it. Though BioArt addresses scientific innovations and questions philosophical theories, it has widely been criticised, over the years, owing to its use of 'living forms' to create art.

While these debates and discussions continue without much resolve, the MIT List Visual Arts Center's new exhibition brings a new perspective to marrying science and art. Titled Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, the group exhibition invites people to reexamine human relationship to the planet’s biosphere, through the lens of symbiosis. With works by a new generation of practitioners within BioArt, Symbionts explores the collaborative potential of living materials. Curated by Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod, with research assistance from Krista Alba, Symbionts brings together 14 international artists whose works create an interdependent relationship between art and symbionts.

Probing into the uncertain past of BioArt and its optimistic launch to the NEXT, STIR extended curious questions regarding the art practice to American art historian, author, critic and curator of Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, Caroline A. Jones.

Sunena V Maju: Could you tell us a little about the artworks displayed for the exhibition Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere.

Caroline A Jones: The best introduction to these compelling works is in the catalogue essay Symbiontics: a polemic for our time. Here are some snippets: “Whether imagining a post-capitalist economy based on the value generated by soil-makers (Claire Pentecost’s soil-erg project) or enlisting those same critters to digest a human effigy made out of mycelia (Kiyan Williams’s Ends of Empire), the artists in this exhibition claim many collaborators as their teachers and fellow form-makers. They desire an art of multiplied authorship, destined for multi-species reception. As Jenna Sutela voices Donna Haraway, to be a one, you must be a many. […] In Symbionts, this history of vitrification gets complicated. Aquaria become wall works, hosting 'contaminants' such as algae, blooming luxuriously in aquatic media under a light adjusted for their metabolic comfort, pumping oxygen into the gallery and secretly humidifying its hydrographically-monitored atmosphere (Yi). Elsewhere, vitrines are carved into shallow tracks for form-making collaborators such as plasmodium, a social amoeba (Sutela). The mysterious cognitive capacities of this brainless navigator are foregrounded in the artist's maze, modelled on a mycologist’s mandala. Vitrines get embedded in the wall in order to foreground the chromatic stainings of bacterial and cancer cells, called out by differential bondings with pigmented chemicals that will eventually become chemotherapeutic agents (Campbell).”

And, I would add, 'vitrines’ assume orb-like shapes in the works of J Fan and Gilberto Esparza, highly symbolic of the ‘sphere’ that we live on and in. Each of these artists' orbs very differently suggest the microbial, chemical, and biological molecules that morph our bodies (Fan) and clean our ecosystems (Esparza).

Sunena: When art meets science, is there a fine line separating both fields from each other, art from science and an artist from a scientist? If so, where do we draw that line?

Caroline: Most people don’t realise that the word ‘scientist’ was devised in the 19^th century in emulation of the word ‘artist.’ Those doing chemistry, botany, medicine, astronomy and physics needed a capacious term that could separate their tribe from astrologers, preachers, and quacks. Moreover, art and science have firmly divided protocols of persuasion. Scientists must demonstrate every step and reveal data to claim positive assertions that can then be disputed by replicating their protocols (classic scientific method). Artists use aesthetic appeal, curiosity, and material invention and purposely conceal and reveal select aspects of their procedures, which are perhaps never to be repeated. One produces knowledge through elaborate protocols of accumulation, the other through material impact and cultural discourse. The line is not exactly 'fine'—it’s quite well policed—but it certainly is important and vital to the practitioners.

Sunena: While curating the art exhibition, what were the approaches you took to present BioArt as a prompt that reexamines human relationships to the planet’s biosphere?

Caroline: The artists in the art exhibition do not all identify themselves as 'BioArt' makers—but we felt that this millennial art world term needed re-invention in light of the science and art that have been made since 2000. Synthetic biology has continued to make incredible innovations possible (notably, the rapid production of mRNA vaccines and PCR testing procedures)—but at the same time, climate change is finally on everyone’s agenda and notions of the planet as a living entity (‘biosphere’) need to be forwarded. We cannot synthesise a planetary solution—we need above all to better imagine our entanglement and interdependence and very existence in a living envelope, and these artists are doing that.

Sunena: Is it too much interference in the natural process of the organisms when art adapts them through manipulating the code?

Caroline: This exhibition intentionally sidelines the BioArt of the late 1990s and 2000s, which was heavily engaged in mastering the code as its core paradigm. If early BioArt was about genetics as code, the current exhibition features a BioArt that is about epigenetics, as impact of environment, over time, on Earth.

Sunena: Do you think BioArt addresses or questions philosophical notions or trends in science?

Caroline: I very much hope so. For one thing, it is very very difficult to get funding for work on general ecosystems and symbiosis research. Science, particularly in a school dominated by engineering as is MIT, is oriented toward puzzle-solving and products. Science here is often instrumentalised to produce increments of human 'problems and solutions' that we want DNA-altered organisms to solve. I was quite conscious of speaking to the more marginalised scientists in my community who have devoted their careers to proving the absolute complexity of symbiotic systems in the wild, as is Penny Chisholm’s life-long devotion to Prochlorococcus, a piko-plankton she helped discover, name, and account for in the world’s oceans and oxygen.

Sunena: What message does the exhibition Symbionts extend, to start necessary discourses of current world problems?

Caroline: Symbionts proposes that humans shift away from practices of extraction towards more humble, symbiotic, relations of reciprocity. By understanding ourselves as part of an interlinked planetary ecosystem, and attending to art that pulses with these rhythms, we might learn to replace competition with collaboration and halt our anthropocentric drive toward species extinction.

Even at the dusk of an Anthropocene epoch, human beings volunteer to play administrators of the ecosystem. Symbionts—organisms of different species that are found together and that thrive through their interdependent relations—owing to its meaning renders the exhibition a voice to explicate the thought that 'we don't rule anything but we are a part of all the living, growing and dying together.' At Symbionts, Candice Lin’s Memory (Study #2), 2016 and 5 Kingdoms (Etching), 2015, aim to depict the taxonomic categories of five great phyla of life on earth. In Wolf Nation, Alan Michelson utilises mechanical imaging and video surveillance technologies to offer a potent filmic meditation that relates the present-day eradication of the red wolf to the violent displacement of the Lenape Munsee people. Also displayed at the exhibition are Nour Mobarak’s creations in polyphonic—visceral and intimate compositions where fungi becomes a collaborator.

Focusing her attention on the capitalist relationship to land, and to the soil, Claire Pentecost presents her work titled soil-erg. With a doctoral degree in biology, Špela Petrič ventured into her definition of BioArt by displaying Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis, the first iteration of a tripartite performance opus with which Petrič seeks to achieve 'plant-human intercognition.' Pamela Rosenkranz's She Has No Mouth, 2017, takes shape as a conceptually rich but materially simple work consisting of an LED-lit circle of perfume-infused sand. Miriam Simun’s multi-sensorial approach to art is presented at the exhibition through three works, Interspecies Robot Sex, 2022, The Sound of a Hive Giving Birth, 2022, and The Sound of a Bumblebee Refusing to Colonize an Artificial Nest, 2022.

Adding to more definitions and visual experiences of the 21^stcentury BioArt are Crystal Z Campbell’s Portrait of a Woman I and Portrait of a Woman II, 2013 and Friends of Friends (Six Degrees of Separation), 2013–14, which analyse the complicated legacy of the 'immortal’ cell line known as HeLa cells. Gilberto Esparza’s Plantas autofotosinthéticas (Autophotosynthetic Plants), 2013–14, consists of twelve microbial fuel cell (MFC) towers that filter local wastewater into a central nucleus where living organisms, such as protozoans, crustaceans, microalgae, and aquatic plants are sustained. Incorporating melanin, hormones, and bodily excretions ranging from urine and blood to semen, Jes Fan’s Systems II, 2018, reflects on biopolitical constructs. In a subtle white setting, Pierre Huyghe’s Spider, 2014, speaks of human relationship with the animal kingdom.

An active presence in music, performance, and visual arts, Jenna Sutela’s luminescent, maze-like works explore 'alien' forms of intelligence through artistic collaborations with bacteria, fungi, and the artificial neural nets of machine learning. While researching the intersections between Black life, ecology, and US society, Kiyan Williams employs soil as a primary material. For the exhibition, Williams uses this material along with architectural debris and fungi to shape Ruins of Empire II, 2022. Bringing another symbiotic clue to the pattern of the epoxy sculpture, Anicka Yi’s Living and Dying in the Bacteriacene, 2019, aims to be a reminder that algae are planetary symbionts. 

The exhibition, Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere commenced at MIT List Visual Arts Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 21, 2022, and will be on view till February 26, 2023.