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definition?
Fleshing out Bio Arts’ definition can be challenging. It is a very, very broad area where the arts and sciences overlap with creative experiments that communicate what it means to exist as a living being on this planet, on this ground, in this atmosphere, on this body, and so on. Bio Arts roams across the very boundaries we might try to categorise it within – technological, organic, hacking, nurturing, microbial, human, non-human. It jumps between many disciplinary fields, never staying long enough to make itself at home, as it often chases the tools and strategies that will evolve it into its next incarnation.
Bio Arts explores the variables for existence (the things a lifeform needs to live), and while these processes signify the essential aim of staying alive, they also expand towards the curious play of innovating different capacities for living. These inquiries delve into a spectrum of meaning that spurs life as truly liveable, hopefully to more well-being centred, environmentally positive and socially just effects.
Instead of fixing a definition or defaulting to the label by whether or not its materials are alive, let’s understand Bio Arts through the evolving ways we come to understand how life can be shaped. It would reveal more bountiful insights to have processes shape Bio Arts’ evolving definitions. Let’s wonder, “How does this living matter live by relating to its changing environment? – by relating to us? And in turn, how do we relate to it?”
deconstructing the criteria for expertise
Another reason Bio Arts can be difficult to define is because it may seem like we need to be experts in everything the field covers in order to correctly define it, which is more daunting because its history, aesthetics and ethics straddles both the arts and sciences. But, Bio Arts – just as with any art or knowledge form – should shape shift into different frames for perception, in order to be accessible to all. With this, those interacting with it through various languages, actions and visions can do so while informed by their own experiences, backgrounds and curiosities. This is what makes our relationship to the arts individually relatable and collectively interesting and meaningful.
Deconstructing the criteria for expertise when it comes to communicating information, whether that’s through the arts, sciences or other areas of knowledge transfer, can democratise the resources and frameworks for us to learn, think and act. Different from devaluing the vital and appreciated expert knowledge produced and conveyed by leaders of their fields, this stance instead emphasises the value of everyday experiences. These build up a more colloquial relationship to the subjects. It can offer space to hold counter narratives that mainstream interpretations of the discourse may not, potentially filling the data gaps of lived experiences that even ‘experts’ may miss.
provocations
As we move through our encounters with Bio Art projects, how do we not only experience the relational journeys they prompt between us and our nonhuman neighbours, but also document these interactions as archives of stories and truths? What are the boundaries between exploring hypotheses and experiments as stories, to presenting them as factual evidence within a framework of knowledge making? What kinds of power struggles have cultural and scientific production historically and socially contended with that may shape how we frame Bio Arts today? Some provocations to consider can include but are not limited to the frameworks for producing and archiving knowledge, as well as frameworks for solidarity with multiple perspectives, including those of non-humans.
There are socio-political challenges in producing and archiving knowledge, whereby Western institutions of knowledge have a long history of amplifying the sciences as neutral and objective, in order to justify race, class, disability and gender-based oppressions. In The Long Shadow Of Colonial Science (2021) by art historian and environmental humanities scholar, Sria Chatterjee, we are introduced to how botanical specimen collections have a long colonial history of violence. “The botanical sciences aided the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, organised by it.” She refers to the plant-based resources that were globally extracted by the British Empire and mechanised through imperialist trade, at the expense of the colonised Indigenous land stewards and the health of their ecologies. To learn from history and to contend with the potential for harm in systems of knowledge making – through their lasting legacies of extraction, exploitation and ideological distribution – how can we begin to shape the knowledge stemming from Bio Arts projects through ethical practices?
Looking to Bio Arts can provoke us to build relationships to a multitude of life forms, incorporating these experiences through differently scaled timelines, technologies, data, senses, and more. Scholar Melody Jue’s science fiction aligned strategy of conceptual displacement encourages us to reframe our normative understanding of an environment, material or cycle of processes by seeking to identify with them in contexts a bit more alien to what we’re used to. In her Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020), she asks, “How would ways of speaking about (x) change if you were to displace or transport it to a different environmental context, like the ocean?” (Jue, 2020:6), which we may take **to ask, “like the microbial?”
To what extent does knowledge making repackage, even appropriate, older and Othered culturally specific processes of making, as if they are new Western scientific innovations? The ethics of knowledge production must align with cultural histories. As Dr Max Liboiron, founder of CLEAR (an interdisciplinary plastic pollution laboratory using research methods that “foreground humility and good land relations”), highlights in their book Pollution Is Colonialism (2021), “you can’t have obligation without specificity.” This is to say solidarities must be specific to lived experiences and positionalities, and universalising experiences of oppressions as a collective ‘We’ actually decomposes the sincerity of solidarity. How could Bio Arts encourage us to hold multiple perspectives, while navigating where overlaps and frictions remain committed to the cause for more positive actions?