Publication details
Obrazy a biotechnologie/BioArt, reprodukce a medicína
| Title in English | Images and biotechnology/BioArt, reproduction and medicine |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The visual imagery of DNA has become a cultural icon and important part of our contemporary way of seeing and speaking about the human body. As Suzzane Anker and Dorothy Nelkin point out in their book called The Molecular Gaze. Art in the genetic Age (2004), molecular screening or modern imaging technology, has become a source of multiple metaphors and provocative visual images. In our cultural discourse, the gene has become a powerful and pervasive icon – an almost magical force. There are many artists and visual performers who use live cells, tissue, or genes to create, perform and re-program living things, and work with the specific visual imagination of the human body. They are part of a broader current of artists who are intrigued by DNA, genetics, and working with live tissues. BioArt and SciArt are not only imagination of the human body at the aesthetical level, but through their works artists stimulate the audience to face some existential questions. Some of the questions are disturbing; it is difficult or impossible to reach simple answers about the fact of human embodiment, the borderlines of humanity, or the in/separability the self, mind, soul and body. Taking advantage of critical social and visual theory (Hayles, Foucault, Mitchell, Flusser), this paper examines the narrative concerning the production of knowledge within interpretation of various imaginations of DNA, genom, embryos, and cultural production of transhuman taxonomies and classifications as well. Particularly, art works of Patricia Piccicini, Luis Bec and Heather Dewey-Hagborg will be analysed. |