![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper examines a series of experimental art-science projects that attempt to resurrect dead or endangered forms of life. Focusing on works by Marguerite Humeau, Diemut Strebe, Pinar Yoldas and Svenja Kratz, each of which was developed in close collaboration with scientists, often in laboratory environments, the paper approaches art-science collaborations of this sort as a flourishing field of emerging and experimental art. It takes as its central onbject of concern the shared practice that has made recent art-science collaborations so productive: their mutual interest in reimagining the possibilities of life and the body in an era in which these can be so fundamentally re-engineered, which this paper examines this under the rubric of ‘speculative biology’. The multi-disciplinary art projects examined in this paper thus invite us to reflect upon the precarity of life, during a period that finds itself at the crossroads of a rapidly increasing series of extinction and climate change events, on the one hand, and an equally rapidly accelerating scientific and technological capacity to reengineer life and living materials, on the other.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An earlier version of this work was presented as part of Humeau’s graduating exhibition at London’s Royal College of Art in 2011. The earlier exhibition featured an earlier project in sonic speculative design, focused on the vocal chords of the prehistoric human ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus Afarensis), whose remains have been dated as approximately three million years old.
2. Footage of the ‘Opera’ can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNoNQzjSiKM. This piece was undertaken in collaboration with Julien Bloit, Ben Penna, Charles Goyard and Mitchel van Dinther.
3. This is one of the driving arguments behind the growing work on STEAM education and research (see, for instance Allina (Citation2017) and Colucci-Gray et al. (Citation2017). For a recent account of how this approach can fuel productive new approaches to such complex problems, see Hickey-Moody, Horn, and Willcox (Citation2019).
4. The emergence of ‘sci-art,’ in its various forms, has been the subject of considerable recent literature, including Irene Hediger and Jill Scott’s edited collection Recomposing Art and Science: Artists-in-Labs (Citation2016), Jennifer Johung’s Vital Forms: Biological Art, Architecture, and the Dependencies of Life (Citation2019), Lindsay Kelley’s The Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience (Citation2016), and Stephen Wilson’s Art and Science: How Scientific Research and Technological Innovation are Becoming Key to 21st-century Aesthetics (Citation2010).
5. The sixth instalment was scheduled to be shot in 2020. Filming is currently postponed due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
6. This video can be seen here: https://www.ted.com/talks/stewart_brand_the_dawn_of_de_extinction_are_you_ready?language=en
7. Some examples of recent book publications include Douglas Campbell and Patrick Whittle’s Resurrecting Extinct Species: Ethics and Authenticity (Citation2017); Rebecca Hirsch’s De-Extinction: The Science of Bringing Lost Species Back to Life (Citation2017); Ben Mezrich’s Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures (Citation2017); M. R. O’Connor’s Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things (Citation2015); Helen Pilcher’s Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction (Citation2016); and Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction (Wray Citation2017).
8. The practical and ethical challenges posed by the possibility of de-extinction are discussed in more detail in Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s ‘Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction’ (Citation2017), Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction (Wray Citation2017), and Douglas Campbell and Patrick Whittle’s Resurrecting Extinct Species: Ethics and Authenticity (Citation2017).
9. The acronym STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
10. For an account of Vacanti’s work in tissue engineering, and its intersection with the arts, see Oron Catts, Jennifer Johung and Elizabeth Stephens’ ‘DeMonstrable: The Ear-Mouse Twenty Years On’ (Citation2015).
11. The artist describes Sugababe as an application of the Theseus paradox at the molecular level, in which natural components are replaced with engineered ones: ‘We replaced natural DNA present in a living cell line from a van Gogh male descendant with foreign DNA of a living female descendant and natural DNA with modified variations, namely those genes and other components that are supposed to influence and enhance creativity.’ (Private correspondence with the artist.)
12. I am grateful to Diemut Strebe for sharing some of her recent reflections on this work in personal correspondence.
13. Footage of the performance can be seen here: https://pinaryoldas.info/The-Very-Loud-Chamber-Orchestra-of-Endangered-Species-2013
14. This case was the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s best-selling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, R. 2011.The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Sydney: Picador Books).
15. See, for instance, Catherine Waldby’s Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Citation2006).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Elizabeth Stephens
Elizabeth Stephens is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. She is the author of three monographs: Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press 2011), and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction (Palgrave 2009). Her Future Fellowship examines practices of experimentation as a site of collaboration between the arts and sciences, from the nineteenth-century scientific laboratory to contemporary experimental art.