Pratiques de l’artboratoire : artistes en résidence à SymbioticA (Perth, Australia)

Abstract

Far from merely democratizing scientific research, the artists in residency at SymbioticA (Perth, Australia) use the laboratory as a studio or workshop and organic substances as artistic material. The long experimental processes that they carry out lead to artistic reconfigurations. Besides fuelling the ethical debates over animal experimentation, their works transgress aesthetic codes and transfer the experimental paradigm to the field of artistic creation. Essential to their projects, challenging the idea of a finite artwork, are the notions of unpredictability and hybridity. The intersections between science and art are multifarious, ranging from the drift from imaging to image and to the imaginary, to the overlapping artistic and biological perceptions of composition. The collaborations open up onto an artistic phenomenology in which gesture and manipulation foster images and metaphors while scientific techniques blend with craftsmanship. They allow a materialisation of the chimera triggering considerations on the notions of care and the posthuman.

Keywords

• Bio-art
• artistic residency
• pattern
• chimera
• specism
• tissue culture