Bizarre Living Art Project Put to Death
When art, technology and science converge, sometimes things will go wrong — very wrong. An art piece ironically entitled “Victimless Leather” — a tiny living leather jacket created with embryonic stem cells of a mouse to grow into a stitch-less coat — was put to its death when it got out of control and began to outgrow its incubator.
Victimless Leather. Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
The work which combined ‘artistic practice with scientific research’ was fed nutrients by tube and expanded too quickly which clogged its own incubation system. The jacket was one of several works created as part of artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture & Art Project.
Merely 5 weeks into the art installation “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Paola Antonelli, curator of the show and head of MoMA’s architecture and design department, had to make the disconcerting decision to turn off the life-support system for the work which inevitably killed the ‘living creature.’
The jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat. That thing was never alive before it was grown.” Paola Antonelli said to The Art Newspaper.
Like something from out of a David Cronenberg film, TC&A’s concept for Victimless Leather — “A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific Body” — was to experiment in creating semi-living tissue to tackle the moral implications of wearing fur garments made from parts of dead animals as a replacement.
The ‘leather’ is grown out of immortalized cell lines which cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stitch-less coat like shape, a form of leather-like material.”
“This artistic grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise.” says TC&A. “An actualized possibility of wearing ‘leather’ without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.”
“Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings. We see our role as artists as one in which we are providing tangible example of possible futures, and research the potential affects of these new forms on our cultural perceptions of life. It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context.”
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
“As part of the TC&A project we are artistically exploring and provoking notions relating to human conduct with other living systems, or to the Other. This particular project will deconstruct our cultural meaning of clothes as a second skin by materializing it and displaying it as an art object.”
“This piece also presents an ambiguous and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving ‘a victimless utopia.’”
The Victimless Leather works was one of the main exhibits for the Design and the Elastic Mind installation, which started February 24th 2008 and runs to May 12th. The issue with bio-art is that it’s often made of living tissue. Oron Catts says his intention was “to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings.”
Paola Antonelli spoke to The Art Newspaper for a televised interview.
MoMa says that “Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations.”
“The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history — changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior — and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design.”
It includes objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices.
More Projects by Tissue Culture & Art Project
NoArk Project
The NoArk research project explored the taxonomical crisis presented by life forms created through biotechnology. NoArk takes form as an experimental vessel designed to maintain and grow a mass of living cells and tissues that originated from a number of different organisms. This vessel serves as a surrogate body to the collection of living fragments, and is a tangible as well as symbolic ‘craft’ for observing and understanding a biology that combines the familiar with the other.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
To create NoArk, cellular stock was taken from tissue banks, laboratories, museums and other collections. NoArk contains a chimerical ‘blob’ made out of modified living fragments of a number of different organisms, living, in a techno-scientific body.
“In a sense, we are making a unified collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms.” says TC&A.
“Like the cabinets of curiosity that preceded the natural history museum’s refined taxonomy so we hope that NoArk will be a symbolic precursor to a new way of approaching the made nature.”
View the video here.
Extra Ear 1/4 Scale
Exploring the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression, TC&A artists used tissue engineering techniques for the creation of Semi-Living entities.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
These are parts of complex organisms which are sustained alive, proliferate outside the body and are coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. These evocative objects are a tangible example of a new kind of object-being. TC&A are interested in the new discourses that surround issues of partial life.
A quarter-scale replica of Stelarc’s ear is grown using human cells.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
The ear was cultured in a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor which allowed the cells to grow in 3 dimensions. The project’s performance was concerned with the prosthetic.
The prosthesis is seen not as a sign of lack, but as a symptom of excess. Rather than replacing a missing or malfunctioning part of the body, these artifacts are alternate additions to the body’s form and function.
Pigs Wings Project
The Pigs Wings Project presented the first use of living pig tissue to construct and grow wing-shaped semi-living objects.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Using tissue engineering and stem cell technologies in order to grow pig bone tissue in the shape of 3 sets of wings, the Pig Wings installation presented the first ever wing shaped objects grown using living pig tissue, alongside the environment in which such endeavor could take place.
The installation of living tissue engineered pig wings was animated using living muscles. This work presented some serious ethical questions regarding a near future where semi-living objects — objects which are partly alive and partly constructed — exist and animal organs to be transplanted into humans.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Questions TC&A hoped to raise were “What kind of relationships we will form with such objects? How are we going to treat animals with human DNA? How will we treat humans with animal parts? What will happen when these technologies will be used for purposes other then strictly saving life?”
Disembodied Cuisine Project
In attempt to grow frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for potential food consumption, a biopsy was taken from an animal which continued to live and be displayed in the gallery along side the growing “steak,” as the installation culminated in a “feast”.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
The idea and research into this project began in Harvard in 2000. The first steak TC&A grew was made from pre-natal sheep cells — skeletal muscle — using cells harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born.
This piece dealt with the interaction between humans and other living systems and probed the uneasiness people feel when someone ‘messes’ with their food.
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
In relationships with the Semi-Living of consumption and exploitation, it’s essential to note that it was about “victimless” meat consumption.
Cells from the biopsy proliferated the ‘steak’ in vitro continued to grow and expand, while the source — the animal from which the cells were taken — was healing. The work presented a potential future in which there will be meat (or protein rich food) for vegetarians and the killing and suffering of animals destined for food consumption would be reduced.
By making our food a new class of object/being – a Semi-Living – we are risking the creation of Semi-Living objects as the new class for exploitation.
Semi-Living Worry Doll
The Tissue Culture and Art Project is an on-going artistic research and development project into the use of tissue culture and tissue engineering as a medium for artistic expression.
Semi-Living Worry Doll. Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Semi-Living Worry Doll. Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
Semi-Living Worry Doll. Photo Tissue Culture and Art Project
The Tissue Culture & Art project (TC&A) utilizes biologically related technologies — mainly tissue culture and tissue engineering — as a new form for artistic expression to focus attention and challenge perceptions regarding the fact that these technologies exist, are being utilized, and will have a major effect on the future.
In collaboration with SymbioicA (The Art and Science collaborative research lab) at the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, and The Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
The research and development of “Victimless Leather” was conducted in SymbioticA: the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia and in consultation with Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan from the School of Anatomy and Human Biology as well as Verigen, a Perth based company that specializes in tissue engineered cartilage for clinical applications.
Visit the MoMa website to see the online exhibition.
Sources: Metro, The Art Newspaper, MoMa, and Tissue Culture and Art Project
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It’s fascinating to think about the advances of this type of science. It could progress so quickly any day now
I agree with gary – this stuff makes you think about all the possibilities and advances that we’ll make!
Gary and Peter, fascinating, yes. But it poses some very serious concerns … how to judge when things are crossing the boundaries. There are many pros and cons.
Even though there is some good use of some of it, it feels very weird anyway and unreal to me. Normally I love development, but I’m not so sure about this… Maybe I’m just getting OLD…? *giggles*
As soon as I saw the word ‘giggles,’ I knew it had to be you, Lifecruiser
It does seem very surreal. I’m on the fence myself. There are so many directions this could turn, and basically, that’s what these installations were targeting to achieve, thought and awareness.
Thanks David
It’s not often easy to find information, but I spend much time searching and researching to do so.
Deborah you find some fascinating stuff to write about and I don’t know how you do it on a regular basis. There is not another blog like this one out here. Or at least I have not found one like it. You must have written some dynamite papers when you were in school!
Just discovered this site. You do some pretty amazing articles. Great job. Keep up the good work.
I agree with Deborah. Everything has its pros and cons. It’s fantastic and it’s also dangerous.
This is disturbing to say the least, but at the same time fascinating and in the long run beneficial to us. So to all scientists – please, do your research but don’t force me to look at it
Thanks Conner, glad you find things that you enjoy here
Thanks for your input, Smile
In the long run, yes, there are many positive directions this can take, Web. The question is where do you draw the line?
I just have to say…WOW. A living coat?! Interesting art/science project and I wish I could understand all the mechanics behind how that would even be possible. I like the controversy it brings up, and the idea (from an art perspective) was a great one.
Ironically, much of the attention drawn to this entire concept and its controversies has been by their own art project getting out of control, Anika.
Those are some pretty wicked pics above. Ive never seen anything like some of them. Glad I found this site. Will have to keep checking back for some new crazy stuff…