Authors: Margaret Barković and Neva Lukić
Conference “Enhancement, Emerging Technologies and Social Challenges” IUC, Dubrovnik
10-14 September 2012
Bioart replaces the familiar tools of the fine arts with petri dishes, flasks, microscopes, and living cells taken from the laboratory, alluding to the evanescence of our natural world and the creation of the post human made possible by biomedical enhancement. The manipulation of life, or use of living medium in bioart produces a socially, economically, and politically charged dialogue that is often a direct consequence of the artist’s engagement in scientific discourse. Jalila Essaidi’s artwork, 2.6g 329m/s or “bulletproof skin”, focuses on the manipulation and enhancement of human life and the relativity of safety. The goal of the project was a to create bullet-resistant human skin by fusing human cells and transgenic spiders silk. This work balances precisely at the border between art and science, addressing a range of metaphysical questions that are a function of a cultural time space. Will it be strange for people to walk without transgenically enhanced skin in the future...? This type of work creates a palpable reality, calling for us to reflect upon the metaphysical consequences of biomedical enhancement. The aesthetic resulting from this twisted reality represents a global identity, creating a portrait that functions more like a mirror reflective of the entire human race, rather than a window into individualized artistic expression. Does the shrinkage of the world in Marshall McLuhan’s sense mean not only minimization of graphical distances, but also immediate intertwinement of our ideas, what in the end results with artwork which belongs to everybody? And even more, in this case, it is even closer to us because the artwork is the human skin itself..
The aesthetic of the human skin works to interrogate our position between relative human nature and the apparent evolution of the post human, the human with bullet-resistant skin, the human protected from his biggest enemy- himself. Essaidi’s work reveals an artistic concept playing with the expression of a timeless desire for invulnerability and immortality (if we just remember Achilles); the concept effectually calls for the manipulation of our own origins beyond the current constraints of evolution. An examination of artistic authorship reveals that it is a blend of a human desire for enhancement and the technological capability of realizing that desire. This artwork demonstrates the capability of bioart to question bioethics and provide introspection into the new author of the post human race: ourselves.The closer an artwork comes to questioning the concept of what is natural, the more it mobilizes us to question the balance of technopower over our natural world that has become the fuel for driving along a plausibly hazardous road to a biotechnological utopia.