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William S. Burroughs wrote a number of mindfuck novels in the twentieth century, most memorably Naked Lunch, later adapted into an equally mindfucky movie about bug-powder snorting aliens by David Cronenberg. The author has become a cult legend among the postmodern lit set, and now a team of artists has decided to immortalize Burroughs with bio-art project straight out of one of his novels. More »
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Earlier today we talked about how the U.S. government is investing a ton of money into regrowing severed fingers with pig powder. This art project by California artist Tim Hawkinson, who is fascinated by the weirdness of human bodies, deals with the bizarreness of reconstructing severed fingers. Check out what Hawkinson has stuffed inside this gargantuan severed finger, below. More »
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Click to view The problem with bio-art is that it's often made of living tissue — and sometimes living tissue gets out of control. That's what happened late last week at a New York MoMA exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," where a tiny living jacket made out of stem cells had to be put to death for growing too fast and trying to burst out of its container. More »
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Using bacteria and harmless biological materials to whip up bio-art projects in your living room is not against the law, a U.S. district court determined yesterday. The decision marked the end of a four-year ordeal for artist Steve Kurtz, who was arrested in 2004 when his wife died and police arrived to discover petri dishes and other "suspicious" lab equipment in Kurtz's home. The equipment was for a show he and his wife had been prepping for a show about GMO foods at a Boston museum, but police confiscated it and detained Kurtz in jail anyway. More »
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Art professor Steve Kurtz's wife, Hope, died in her sleep in May 2004. When Kurtz called 911, however, the police saw petri dishes and a mobile DNA-extraction machine and called in the feds. Kurtz tried to explain that the high-school-level lab equipment was part of an art project he and Hope had been doing about genetically modified foods, but the FBI decided he was a bioterrorist. This case still continues nearly four years later, and a new direct-to-DVD movie, Strange Culture, uses Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan and other actors to unravel one of the scariest cases of science fiction dictating legal actions in recent history. We talked to the director, Lynn Hershman Leeson. More »
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It was the first time I ever went to an art show where the art had gotten unruly and climbed outside its frame. A Sunshine-looking installation by Philip Ross of plants growing inside glass tubes of water (above) had turned into a jungle of plants breaking out of their transparent prisons and in some cases actually knocking bits of the sculpture onto the floor. It was the perfect example of how bio-art works: created from living materials, it breeds and grows and behaves just as illogically as life itself. This was just one of the reasons I was fascinated by the recent BioTechnique art show at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. More »
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