Polona Tratnik

In her series, K-9_topology, Maja Smrekar challenges anthropocentrism by linking biology and culture, particularly addressing the interaction between human and animal species. The artist builds upon recent scientific findings that when it comes to humans and dogs, domestication was, in fact, a mutual process. Not only was the dog mastered by humans, but dogs have also had an active role in “using” the human species to ensure a more comfortable survival. Both species coexist. She nurtured a puppy within the project Hybrid Family from the K-9_topology series. The artist refers to this process as the process of becoming, becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becoming m(Other). Deeply rooted in her own experience, when at the beginning of the 3rd Millennium, “the liberal capitalism finally struck hard into the newborn Slovenian economy,” as she writes in her blog. Her parents lost their business, house, cars, forests, meadows, and vineyards. Her father committed suicide; she found a way to resist by submitting herself to a “dog-human kinship relationship as a radical intimate action of ‘returning home’.” The process of becoming a mother is analyzed concerning the process of becoming animal. Furthermore, the process of becoming (m)Other is particularly examined about the unity between mother and child, as regards the notions of die Umwelt and Otherness. The process of becoming (m)Other is finally examined as a biopolitical statement or intervention with the investment of the artist’s body to regain the position of power, i.e. as an act of resistance to bio-power—the exercise of power over and through bodies.

Humans in the biotech era foster biotechnological research and engineering with ambitions to gain control over bodies and enhance them, to gain control over the rest of the living world and enhance the attributes of organisms in order to serve utilitarian objectives. Biotechnology is a political strategy to gain power over the living world and to make use of this conquest. Science is located in power relations and is therefore produced in the direction of economic and political power to the practical grounds of scientific research. Recognition of this point is extremely relevant for the comprehension of the work of Adam Zaretsky. Tratnik examines performative art of Adam Zaretsky, who stages provocative hands-on workshops in the public space and shares lab skills with the untrained. With doing that he succeeds to demystify the biotechnological procedures dealing with genetics, that usually take place in scientific laboratories. The products used in the laboratory milieu are in this case replaced with kitchen and household products, blood, excrement, executed animals. This way Zaretsky viscerally confronts participants with the actual questions arising from experiencing transgenic technology in a non-utilitarian manner.

The chapter deals with three species, the axolotl, Proteus anguinus, and Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, their habitats, and man’s relations with these animals, whose habitats are very different from that of man, but which at the same time inhabit the same planet on which we live together in interdependence. The author examines the human approach to these animals, which ranges from fear of the unknown, of the “power of Nature” and theoretical admiration, to the exercise of human dominance, whether in the form of heroic stories or biopower with regenerative medicine. All these attitudes were very current in the past times and many still are today. The author reflects on the question of how to conceptualize the relations between entities in non-anthropocentric terms. She questions the possible posthumanist perspective that leads to understanding functional living and nonliving systems as interconnected machines. Some species live in habitats in which man cannot live. For this reason, some animals remained uncomprehensible to humans, which blossomed human imagination. With the decline of mythical thought, human objective to conqest the world has increased. Considered as being alienated from the physical and mental world of man and consequently representing a domain that resists human subjugation, this generated fearsome relationship of man towards the unknown. In addition, in the modern era, humans approached the world with instrumental rationality oriented towards utilitarian goals. Accordingly, man’s relationship to other species and to the environment became anthropocentric and often based on unequal power relations. How has human understanding of the world and of other species changed today, when we have evidence of the ecological interconnectivity of all species and their habitats at our disposal?

Within the biotech era, art that addresses life issues and brings biological life into the artistic context cannot avoid using biotechnology as the technology that facilitates interventions into living matter. Art not only intervenes in the living matter in laboratories but aims to show and cultivate tissues and various living cultures in the gallery space. Galleries have turned from spaces for showing artifacts into event spaces, performances and workshops. In this context, the idea of growing living entities within the artistic milieu testifies to a performative turn, a shift from representational to performative modes of art. Due to the imperative to perform, art which addresses biotechnology requires the presence of living tissues and other living substances in gallery spaces or spaces meant to show art to the public. The author identifies three sorts of microperformativity carried out by biotechnological art in the sense of managing life at the micro level. The most original of these and specific to art that works with living organisms involves the real-time action of living microorganisms or bioengineered tissues within the artistic context in full public view. For this sort of performativity, the artist induces microorganisms or engineered tissues to perform by themselves for the audience. Tratnik examines the project CellF by Guy Ben Ary as an example of such microperformativity.

This book offers intriguing philosophical inquiries into biotechnological art and the life sciences, addressing their convergences as well as their epistemic and functional divergences. Rooted on a thorough understanding of the history of philosophy, this work builds on critical and ontological thought to interpret the concept of life that underscores first-hand dealings with matter and experimentation. The book breaks new ground on the issue of animality and delivers fresh posthumanist perspectives on the topics addressed. The authors embark on a deep ontological probe of the concept of medium as communication-bridging and life-bearing. They also take on the concept of performativity as biotechnological art. The book includes concrete, well-documented case studies and shows how certain narratives and practices directly impact ideas surrounding science and technologies. It will interest philosophers in art and technology, aesthetics, ontology, and the life sciences. It will also engage art practitioners in art and science, curators and researchers.

With the concept of the open work, Umberto Eco addressed the poetics to which art turned with modernism. In the article the author analyzes the notion of the open work, the references relevant to this concept and the relations of this concept to similar concepts introduced by other scholars such as Roland Barthes. Scholars discussing the openness of art were deriving primarily from Paul Valéry, and they distanced themselves from the myth of the artist as a genius and from the concept of art as a vehicle for communication to transmit the truth and instead emphasized the performative character of art. Art on this track aimed at poetic use of its own media. The author argues that Eco’s definition of the open work comprises different dimensions of openness, i.e. the semantic and formal openness of the works of art, as well as the notion addresses the perceptual openness of the world. The author examines how the concept of the openness of art placed stress on the relevance of interpretation instead of the author’s intention and how it was part of a broader debate on interpretation and weak thought. By establishing autonomous poetic situations and exploring the means of art, art began performing philosophical discussions about itself, wherein, as the author argues, the notion of the open work is linked to the notions of the end or the death of art and denotes the dissolution of art into philosophy. Other sorts of dissolution of art which mean the death of art regard the dissolution of art into culture in a broader sense and its subordination to propagandist or political goals, which means art loses its autonomy. Finally, the author questions participatory art as a potential contemporary successor of the open work and argues that this mode of art, though it actively involves the participant, remains semantically closed.

The article presents artistic body interventions as tactics of minimal resistance to the governance over those bodies, i.e., resistance to the apparatuses that govern, control and manage our bodies, and those that also make our bodies sacred. This means the resistance to the apparatuses that separate my body from my own management. Giorgio Agamben calls for the strategy of profanation, for bringing back what was sacred to the use and property of humans. The author offers a thesis that the artistic acts that resist to the power over the bodies do not construct counter-apparatuses to the apparatuses of power, but they do challenge or even sometimes subvert the machines of governance over the bodies.

This book reflects on the phenomenon of biotechnology and how it affects the body and discusses a number of related issues, including visualization, mediation, and epistemology. The author offers a compelling thesis, arguing that the exploration of the human body has one ultimate aim: to gain knowledge of it and to conquer it. Exploration of body has an intrinsic link to power, since knowledge is constitutive for the power over the body. Ultimately the conquest of body means the power to intervene into life processes. The book breaks new ground with its study of body visualizations, from the Renaissance drawings to the medical imaging. In particular, it investigates their complex mediality. It also considers the extension and the reach of biopower that is now possible thanks to a wide range of engineering applications. The author originally questions the research approach by rethinking the relationship between mental and sensual examination. She takes into consideration the epistemological problem of the two modes of exploration: obtaining knowledge from empirical exploration and projecting that knowledge to the object of exploration.

Vilém Flusser is one of the first scholars to address the systems of technical media, as well as the biotechnological manipulation of the living world, in relation to the issue of programmability. In this regard Flusser questioned the position of the actor, the operator or perhaps the creator in these systems. If the functionary and the apparatus merge into a unit and apparatus has its program, what is the role the artist if he or she is not just anyone who is exhausting the options offered by the program? In the paper the functionary of the apparatus of the camera and the “creator” in the field of biotechnics are compared in order to establish the similarities in both “creative” practices of an photographer and of a biotechnological artist, as well as discuss the similarities with other artistic practices discussed by Flusser. The apparatus functions as “intelligent machine” thus it has certain power. The subject involved in the game of the apparatus is subjected to its structure. The question is, how to establish the critical stance, how to act against the apparatus. This transposes the notion of an artist as a supposed creator to the notion of an artist as the one who resists the structures of power.

Regenerative medicine requires living cells in order for it to work. The process involves a biologist entering the body, cutting into its flesh and taking away a part of it in order to return with an improvement. In other words, to optimize the body it first needs to be deconstructed. This process is demonstrated in the project ‘Hair in Vitro’. However, the fact that it is difficult to reconcile oneself with such a ‘disfigurement’ testifies to a certain sacredness surrounding the body in western culture, where its wholeness and completeness is still fundamental. Nevertheless, could one argue for the idea of an intimate, individual body; of an identity that is preponderantly distinguished and separated from the other world (especially if a human is to be acknowledged as being immersed in the world); where things reciprocally belong to each other in such a manner that they constitute the same flesh of the world? The genetic profile of an individual is actually a much more complex assemblage than a profile of just one species. Micro-organisms not only live as components of the body, but also traverse from it into the environment, and vice versa. An exchange of living substances is constantly taking place. The horny layer of the skin is thus something of a vibrant exchange market; it is a region of the dissolution of identity: interiority extends out to exteriority and exteriority goes into interiority. Concepts of interiority and exteriority become senseless here: the body and the environment are intertwined; the body disperses into the milieu, and the milieu spreads onto and into the body. With the deconstruction of the notions of the boundaries of the body and the body as a closed distinguished substance, the idea of the wholeness of the organism has lost a great deal of sense. The body should not just be considered as a multitude, but its notion should denote openness, exchangeability, traversabilty and permeability. Its structure is, in short, rhizomatic – the body is a rhizome. A body is a temporary locus of a particular organization of life. It is not a closed entity, but rather a drizzling identity. The delimitation of the body is constructed, and therefore where it ends up is drawn arbitrarily. Regenerative medicine derives from the notion of a body as a composition: a dissembling and re-assembling of bodies, as well as a restarting, delaying and slowing down of life processes. A performative installation with growing human organs such as ‘Initiation’ discloses this notion, positioning the observer into the dispersed body. A body dissolved in a milieu – a fertile yard – where human remains are given suitable living conditions for the afterlife; a platform of life where the life that once belonged to the body has emancipated itself. It thus becomes the living other of the body with which the self gets confronted. However, this life is also the body’s own identity.