Context and reading guide
Summary
Bioart has emerged as a discipline that uses life and biotechnology as artistic materials, moving beyond mere representation to engage with living processes and semi-living entities. This practice brings together science, philosophy, and aesthetics, creating experiences that raise ethical, political, and ontological questions, particularly about what life means today. Its critical relationship with genetic manipulation and intervention in organisms reflects a tension between scientific utilitarianism and a conceptual reflection centered on living beings. Although bioart seeks to move beyond anthropocentrism, it remains involved in a reworking of that perspective, in which human intervention persists. Despite infrastructural limitations, significant contributions are being made in Latin America through interdisciplinary initiatives that combine theory and experimental practice.
Key ideas
- Bioart uses living organisms, biological technologies, and biotechnology as artistic media, creating aesthetic experiences that combine conceptual art, performance, and critical reflection.
- Bioart challenges conventional notions of life and proposes a relational, distributed view that moves beyond genetic determinism.
- A tension exists between human intervention in biological processes and the critique of human domination, in which anthropocentrism does not disappear.
- In Latin America, bioart is developing with limited resources but remarkable creativity. Interdisciplinary projects are expanding both theoretical and practical reflection on altered forms of life and hybrid ecosystems.
As is customary at Dialektika, we try to think through what calls out to us, but also through its boundaries, intersections, and territories, spaces that continue to open new dimensions for analysis even after they have been explored.
The vast ecosystem of contemporary thought abounds with phenomena that not only arouse our curiosity but also pose challenges at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Bioart is one of them and, I confess, it fascinated me from my first encounter with it. To discuss this field, its possibilities, and its tensions, we invited Amanda Pérez-Morales, a professor at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP).
Jorge González Arocha: To begin, I would like to ask what you understand by bioart.
Amanda Rosa Pérez-Morales: Bioart is a field of practices within contemporary art that, I would say, takes life itself, biological processes, and biotechnologies as its creative material. It has also commonly been understood as one of the avant-gardes of the twenty-first century because it shares their impulse to experiment with new materials, new technologies, and new ways of thinking about the relationship between art, science, and society.
If the avant-gardes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries incorporated photography, cinema, electricity, and industrial machinery into their creative processes, this other artistic practice devotes much of its attention to technologies developed since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, particularly genetic engineering, molecular biology, cell culture, microbiology, and other laboratory techniques. Although it has antecedents in the 1970s and 1980s, it is mainly since the late 1990s and throughout the decades of the twenty-first century that bioart has acquired an identity of its own and begun to establish itself as a field of artistic and theoretical research.
In bioart, life ceases to be merely a subject of representation and becomes the medium of creation itself
What makes it distinctive is that it does not work solely with traditional materials such as canvas, stone, or metal. It can work with bacteria, fungi, tissues, organs, cells, DNA, genetically modified organisms, or even semi-living entities. Perhaps this is one of the most profound transformations introduced by this form of art: life ceases to be merely a subject of representation and becomes the medium of creation itself. And those of us who undertake these explorations become a kind of alchemist, or mad scientist!
Although many of its works take the form of sculptures, installations, or video installations, I believe bioart’s strength lies in its close affinity with performance and conceptual art. I will venture to be even more radical: bioart is, above all, conceptual art, despite its figurative dimension. A meaningful experience is produced not only by the work’s visible form, but by the theoretical texts revealed through it and by the philosophical, ethical, political, and scientific questions that sustain it. It lies in what, in a sense, cannot be seen but is intuited from what can be seen, and which often provokes fear. In many cases, the true core of the work lies not in the final object but in the experimental process that makes it possible, and especially in what it does not show but suggests, above all on a speculative level.
Eduardo Kac, one of the leading artists and theorists of this movement and, formally, its founder, has identified several features that help us understand these practices. They include the use of organisms or biological processes as a constitutive part of the work, the presence of a robust conceptual framework, and the intention to move scientific knowledge out of an exclusively utilitarian sphere and into a space of critical reflection by considering scientific development through an aesthetic lens. Scientific experimentation thus ceases to serve only clinical, industrial, or technological ends and also becomes a creative practice, freed from some of the burdens carried by science. In other words, people often say that bioart “takes the laboratory into the gallery.” And that is precisely what it does. It is through aesthetic experience, then, that we gain access to ontological reflection.
Bioart is conceptual art. A meaningful experience is produced not only by the work’s visible form, but by the theoretical texts revealed through it and by the philosophical, ethical, political, and scientific questions that sustain it
From the perspective of the philosophy of art, I would add another feature that I consider central and that, in my view, has received little attention in studies of bioart: its capacity to produce an aesthetic experience akin to the sublime. Venturing to be radical once more, I would say this capacity constitutes a primary intention, almost a necessity if the movement is to function artistically. This is one of the contributions I have tried to develop in my research over the last several years and continue to pursue, because it is difficult. I am not referring, however, to the Romantic sublime associated with the immensity of mountains, oceans, or the starry sky. I am thinking instead of a downward sublime, let us call it that, whose immensity is directed not upward but downward, not toward the grandeur of the cosmos but toward the unfathomable complexity of microscopic and unknown life.
In these practices, we encounter modified organisms, living tissues, interspecies hybrids, and unprecedented forms of existence that inspire fascination and unease at the same time. We feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of intervening in life, but also by our awareness of the risks that this capacity entails. This coexistence of wonder, terror, and moral positioning, so characteristic of the experience of the sublime, is in my view one of bioart’s most distinctive aesthetic features. I think of Longinus and the grandeur or power of the written word, of Burke and the inseparable attraction of terror when confronted with what threatens our existence as mediated by sympathy, and of Kant and the failure of the imagination before an immensity that exceeds us, even though this very failure reveals the superiority of our reason and moral judgment. I also think of Lyotard, for whom the sublime signals the impossibility of fully presenting the unpresentable. Bioart places this experience on the horizon of technoscience. We are overwhelmed not only by our ability to discover and create new forms of life, but also by the power, and the fear, awakened by those very creations. It is precisely the moral awareness of this power that transforms bewilderment into an aesthetic experience akin to the sublime.
To conclude this part, I believe bioart’s greatest contribution lies not only in its use of living organisms as artistic material, but in forcing us to reconsider a much deeper philosophical question: what do we mean by life today? This is the most difficult question in human history.
Jorge: At this point, a tension emerges that I think deserves further exploration. On the one hand, bioart seems to challenge a utilitarian understanding of science and life. On the other, it works directly with procedures that intervene in and transform organisms and biological materials. How do you understand this tension between utilitarianism, aesthetics, and life? Does bioart succeed in displacing biologism and evolutionism in favor of critical reflection, or does it inevitably remain trapped in the same logic of domination it seeks to problematize?
Amanda: Today, there is a tendency to justify still deeply anthropocentric discourses through supposedly collaborative and ethical activity. Ancestral cultures and other ways of approaching soil, organisms, or new materials are reclaimed, apparently from a position critical of capitalism and its neoliberal, optimistic version. That tendency is quite strong today. But despite this ethical, positive, and seemingly non-anthropocentric discourse, every bioartistic practice seems to me permeated by a powerful anthropocentric residue. And mind you, I do not consider that negative.
Even when these discourses are formulated from a non-anthropocentric sensibility, it is not always clear to what extent they genuinely succeed in decentering the human subject. In many cases, what persists is an expanded human figure, an agent who, although more aware, ethically oriented, or ecologically informed, continues to assume the capacity to intervene in, modulate, or redirect vital processes. Here I am reminded of Katherine Hayles. In her reflections on cognitive systems distributed across the biological and the technical, including bacteria, nonhuman organisms, and artificial intelligences, she shows how cognition ceases to be an exclusively human property and becomes a continuum traversing different scales of the living and the machinic. But she also argues that, even in this displacement, the point from which questions are articulated and problems posed remains inevitably human. Anthropocentrism therefore does not disappear. It becomes more porous, displaced, and reconfigured, but it is not completely overcome.
From this perspective, bioart does not seem to me to abandon the logic of intervention entirely, but rather to rearticulate it in aesthetic and critical terms. A clear example is Genesis. In this work, Kac takes a verse from the biblical Book of Genesis that formulates the idea of human dominion over nature and translates it into a synthetic DNA sequence. This code is introduced into E. coli bacteria and combined with genetic material associated with fluorescent proteins from a jellyfish, so that the text becomes an active biological agent within a modified living system.
What matters in this operation is not only the translation between theological and molecular language, but the fact that the critique of dominion is not conducted from outside biotechnology, but through its intensification. The work questions the idea of the genetic code as an absolute principle determining life, yet at the same time reaffirms the centrality of the human gesture that designs, introduces, and activates that code.
This is one of bioart’s most complex philosophical questions: what conditions life and, from there, what do we actually understand by the living? One critical tradition has placed the genetic code in a hierarchical position as the authority that determines what we are. But there is another line of thought, associated with practices such as cell tissue culture, which maintains that life cannot be reduced to this informational logic. Instead, it must be understood in terms of conditions of emergence, maintenance, and relation: cells, tissues, media, environments, and processes of codependence.
From this standpoint, the question is no longer simply whether the code determines life, but how life is distributed across heterogeneous levels that cannot be fully ordered into a hierarchy, and in which technical intervention is not merely external but constitutive of their very configuration.
Jorge: When did you begin working in bioart? I have known you for years, and I remember that you were not previously involved with this subject directly.
Amanda: I think I would have to distinguish between two things: practice and theory. But in general terms, I could say it began formally and systematically because of several factors.
The first, and most decisive, is that I am a philosopher, like you, and several years ago I began working as a full-time professor and researcher at the Faculty of Visual and Audiovisual Arts of the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla. Among other subjects, I now teach courses related to bioart and philosophy. I did not come from an artistic background, by which I mean in practical rather than intellectual or academic terms, because I have devoted myself to the latter since my earliest studies. The only artistic practice I had pursued was literature, which has always been there as a first profession. But my environment led me to find a way of translating philosophical thought into artistic practices, or of bringing the two into contact. This was where bioart, a practice I had studied intellectually and theoretically for quite some time, emerged as an especially fertile field to explore on a practical level as well.
Bioart makes precisely that possible. I would even say it is one of the few contemporary practices in which text, whether a laboratory document, record, speculative writing, or even clinical language, forms part of the work’s aesthetic experience. I am particularly interested in this dimension because, as a fiction writer, bioartistic explorations have allowed me to continue developing this line. These texts may be philosophical and academic, as are many of those I have published since taking this turn, or even narrative, but they function as an extension or fold of the work itself. Thanks to everything I have learned from working in an arts faculty, I have had the opportunity to exhibit some of my bioartistic explorations in galleries and museums. On the theoretical side, I have consistently published academic texts and delivered keynote lectures, conference papers, and specialized talks in various national and international settings. My research has entered into dialogue with the work of artists such as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Eduardo Kac, Pei-Ying Lin, Maja Smrekar, and Ai Hasegawa, among others. I am also pleased to remain in contact with several of them. Although my work addresses a variety of problems, it all belongs to the same line of research: the development of an onto-etho-aesthetic reflection through bioartistic theory and practice, always through an agential approach and a postphenomenological method.
There is another, more biographical issue that has also been important: my proximity to illness. I have been surrounded by many people who have undergone cancer treatment. I think bioart allows us to consider pathogens, altered cells, and processes of degradation not only through a negative or moralized logic, but as forms of life or semi-life that are part of our ecology. It thus offers an opportunity to reconfigure experiences that are normally understood only in terms of loss or harm.
I think bioart allows us to consider processes of degradation not only through a negative or moralized logic, but as forms of life or semi-life that are part of our ecology
Jorge: Tell me a little about the techniques and styles of bioart. We have seen that its very definition is problematic, but I imagine that this difficulty also translates into different working methods.
Amanda: There are two fundamental movements that intermingle with each other and with many other artistic practices. The first is the treatment of DNA or genetics within the artistic field. Technically, we would be talking about genetic manipulation. The second is tissue culture, the so-called wet culture, which consists of cultivating cellular tissue in environments other than those in which it would naturally be found.
I would add a third variant that seems equally significant and deserves separate mention: work centered on illness and the virus as entities of analysis.
We have, for example, the work of British artist Anna Dumitriu. She traces the history of illness, care, and microbiology, with a particular interest in the nineteenth century and the history of infectious diseases. She uses microorganisms, bacterial DNA, and biological materials in textile works and jewelry. There is also the work of Mexican artist Berenice Olmedo, who works with medical prostheses.
Within this line connected to the microbiological universe, there is also Dulbecco’s work. He is a Costa Rican scientist and bioartist who uses animal cells, viruses, fluorescence microscopy techniques, and visual programming approaches to explore aesthetically the biological processes underlying health and illness. His work is interesting because it can be read in a biopoetic key, in which biological entities are not merely objects of study but active participants in producing the work. He himself says that he creates relationships of co-agency between the living and the technical, a “we” that displaces the classical distinction between observer and organism.
Dulbecco. Cellular Entities III (2023). Mixed-media digital composition based on photomicrographs of human cells obtained through live-cell fluorescence imaging. Audiovisual bioart: Cellular Entities III.
There is also the work of Pei-Ying Lin, who developed a kind of cookbook with recipes and performative dining experiences in which participants consumed dishes presented as though they contained viruses or harmless microorganisms. I feel the work’s speculative hypothesis is that, if we cannot eradicate viruses, perhaps one way to coexist with them would be to develop resistance by incorporating them into our diet.
Pei-Ying Lin. Virophilia (2018–2020). Multimedia installation comprising a speculative cookbook, video, participatory performances, and dining experiences with edible virus-inspired dishes conceived as an integral part of the work. Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2018. Performance at Arti et Amicitiae during Museum Night 2018.
Finally, I would say that, in terms of infrastructure, bioart can be divided into hard bioart, which includes laboratories, genetic manipulation, cell culture, and the modification of living entities, and soft bioart. In contrast to all the practices mentioned above, which would be forms of hard bioart, the latter encompasses taxidermy, fungal cultures and sculptures, certain domestic bacterial cultures, microbiota and microbiomes, the cultivation of Penicillium through rotting fruit or food, and the use of plants fitted with sensors for sound experimentation, among other practices.
Jorge: Where would you place bioart’s ethical boundary? Is there a clear boundary? I am interested in how you approach this from your dual position as a professor and critical theorist, but also as an artist who works with these materials and procedures.
Amanda: The boundaries are very unclear, precisely because of the dual articulation of its discourse. This ambiguity has become even more pronounced under current policies governing proper conduct.
In Joe Davis’s Microvenus (1986), developed at MIT and in its molecular biology laboratories, the artist encoded information in bacterial DNA. It was one of the earliest explorations of using genetic material as an information medium, an idea that would later become central to research in synthetic genetics and biological data storage. Another work is ¡Arriba! (2017) by Paul Rosero, who cultivated a cacao seed in Antarctica. The project was supported by the Antarctic Biennale and sponsored by Pacari, an “ethical and approachable” chocolate brand that is also a company seeking growth and expansion in a global market. There are many other examples, but let us mention these two for now.
From an ethical perspective, projects of this kind create an ambivalence around their funding. On the one hand, they expand the field of knowledge, generate unprecedented collaborations between art, science, and technology, and imagine possible futures for life. On the other, they depend on costly infrastructures and institutional or corporate interests that may shape the research and its meaning. Two questions arise at this intersection: what does bioart actually do with these resources, and which futures become legitimate when companies and institutions decide which forms of life and experimentation receive funding and which do not? But then, these things also tend to happen in many artistic environments.
We should also emphasize the less dark side of this practice, which is strongly focused on communicating scientific knowledge. Reading an article about genetic manipulation is not the same as entering a laboratory or watching a video that shows how the process is performed. There is also an entire line of bioartistic development that works with biomaterials. These practices recover ancestral cultures and other ways of making, and they can contribute to ecological and environmental care.
But as a theorist, I must reiterate that bioart demonstrates that any attempt to eliminate anthropocentrism completely is a fiction. We can sustain an ethical debate and understand that we cannot subjugate other entities or consider ourselves the absolute center of the world. These processes also show that nothing is entirely under our control. I cannot completely control how a taxidermied specimen will turn out, much less a fungal growth or a genetic manipulation. Nevertheless, I do control how the entity I am cultivating comes into being or begins to behave. That is the manipulation of life. Bioart therefore shows that any discourse seeking to eliminate an anthropocentric position altogether is inadequate. Again, I think of Barad. She distinguishes between anthropocentric domination and the anthropocentric epistemological condition. We must avoid the former. We have no right to subjugate the Other. But we cannot completely eliminate the latter, because we are a species trying to survive with few natural faculties for doing so.
I am interested in thinking about the persistence of the organic even after death.
Jorge: What does the bioart landscape look like in Latin America and, above all, in Mexico, where you live?
Amanda: It is somewhat limited in terms of the scientific infrastructure available for more complex bioart practices, but by no means infertile creatively. When one considers access to laboratories, sustained funding, cutting-edge technologies, or even specific cell organisms, the gap is evident. Materials such as HeLa cells, the so-called immortal cells used across many lines of biomedical research, are scarce and highly regulated. Their use also entails a powerful ethical and material tension because these biological resources circulate in finite quantities through institutions. Assigning them to an artistic project is neither automatic nor unrestricted, but depends on very specific authorization frameworks.
Generally speaking, there are two main routes for gaining access to these kinds of materials and procedures. The first is the academic-institutional route, as in my case, where the work is undertaken in partnership with universities, laboratories, or research centers that already have established protocols for biosafety, ethics, and the handling of biological material. This route allows bioart to operate within formal scientific frameworks, but it also entails continual negotiation with the logic, timelines, and priorities of biomedical research.
The second route is external funding through grants, research funds, or support for artistic and transdisciplinary projects that can cover supplies, materials, and, in some cases, access to specialized infrastructure. This model, however, brings limitations of its own. As I said, it may be conditioned by criteria of feasibility, expected outcomes, and evaluation frameworks that do not always suit the experimental, uncertain, or speculative nature of the movement.
There is another very important feature: the strongly theoretical, reflective, and even pedagogical character of bioart in the region. Within this framework, biomaterial development projects stand out, such as those led by Edith Medina, whose work explores the production of living materials and processes of hybridization among biology, design, and material speculation.
It is also worth mentioning institutional initiatives such as the Art + Science project at UNAM, coordinated by María Antonia González Valerio, which has spent fifteen years bringing together researchers, artists, and philosophers interested in the intersection of scientific practices and aesthetic production.
Our work with the BioArt Laboratory in Puebla belongs to the same horizon. It is a project I co-coordinate in collaboration with the faculty where I work, BUAP’s Department of Physiology (MFD Adelina Castillo Sánchez), and its Faculty of Biological Sciences (Biol. María Rosete Enríquez).
Turning now to bioartistic practices themselves, we have marvelous work such as that of Edith Medina, a pioneer of the movement here. There is also the remarkable work of Gilberto Esparza, who brings robotics and ecology together through hybrid systems that interact with polluted water and living organisms. He creates devices in which the technical and the biological are assembled as forms of experimental ecology.
The same is true of Jaime Lobato. His work is consistently articulated through assemblages of living systems and technological devices that make it possible to observe and modulate biological processes in real time, including through sound experimentation. Many others, not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America, are doing interesting things. Southern Chile has several projects that even include residencies. In Argentina, we have the master Joaquín Fargas and his own intersections between art and robotics, as well as the work of Sabrina Merayo, who incorporates living lamps and soil as elements that reveal matter’s ecological and relational dimension. What I mean is that, despite these limitations, the bioartistic work being developed in Latin America is truly remarkable for its capacity to innovate, whether or not sufficient resources are available.
Following the line of certain bioart works developed in Latin America, my own practical work belongs to what I prefer to call bioartistic explorations. I use the term precisely to emphasize that these are exercises somewhat at the service of what I consider the core of my research, namely the theoretical and philosophical possibilities this movement offers when approached through postphenomenology. Yet this conceptual reflection has inevitably led me into a practical dimension, where the subjects I want to explore lie in realms we usually associate with negative moral charges, such as illness, the virus, or traumatic death. I am interested in cultivating diseases or viral material in biotextiles, as well as exploring DNA and cultivating the microbiota and microbiome of deceased people and family members. I have also been interested in cultivating natural landscapes from a fungal and bacterial perspective. I often include report-texts.
Another line I am passionate about is taxidermy and the preservation of parts from animals that have suffered traumatic deaths or died from illness. I am interested in thinking about the persistence of the organic even after death. In a sense, I find in it a form of consolation less metaphysical than the idea that someone who dies remains present only as a soul or spirit. The material persistence of the body is also a form of presence and, perhaps for that very reason, a form of consolation for all of us who remain on this side a little longer. Within this line, I feel a particular affinity for working with birds, snakes, fish, cattle, and certain insects.
I must acknowledge that all of this has been, and continues to be, a major challenge for me. It is difficult. Difficult in every possible respect. It requires me to move into areas such as science, medicine, and experimental artistic practice, none of which are my primary fields of training. But then, it is a way of doing theory and making art in which many of our certainties enter into crisis. That is precisely why I find it so profoundly interesting. So profoundly powerful.
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