Curator Forced to Kill Out-of-Control Bio-Art Exhibit

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:40:58 PDT

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.

The art piece was called "Victimless Leather," and according to The Art Newspaper:

The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened . . . Paola Antonelli, head of MoMA's architecture and design department and curator of the show, says she had to make the decision to turn off the life-support system for the work, basically "killing" it.
Ms Antonelli says the jacket "started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I've always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I'm here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown."

I'm glad Antonelli made the right choice. You've got to kill these things before they grow into the lady from Species and start killing impressionable young art student boys in the bathroom after weird alien sex.

MoMA Exhibit Dies [Art Newspaper]

Macrophages Squirming Along the Outside of Your Capillaries

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:00:04 PDT

This gorgeous, strange image is a highly-accurate visualization of what's happening inside your body right now. Macrophages, specialized cells that help keep your body in good repair by cleaning up debris, zoom around your capillaries, among other places. In this image, we've left the macrophages behind and are inside a cell watching proteins walk around on tethers to carry proteins or other materials elsewhere in the cell. This is actually a still from an amazing flick called "Inner Life of the Cell," made for biology students, and currently on display at a new show in New York called Design and the Elastic Mind. Want to see more weird biology art?

This is an image from another movie called DICER, about the eponymous enzyme which is responsible for clipping little pieces of RNA off of bigger chunks. Here you can see that it's about to clip off the chunk of RNA that it's clinging to. The little pieces of RNA help maintain proper levels of protein in your blood. What's amazing is that this toothpaste-looking chunk of enzyme is actually an incredibly precise instrument, only scissoring off the exact right amount of RNA that your body needs.

"Inner Life of a Cell" animation [London MOMA]

A molecular enzyme ruler [London MOMA]

io9: design and the elastic mind

Curator Forced to Kill Out-of-Control Bio-Art Exhibit

Macrophages Squirming Along the Outside of Your Capillaries