Natural material - what and why

what are Biodesign and Bioart and why should I care?

by William Myers

This emerging approach is often a response to the growing urgency to build and manufacture more sustainably in light of the climate crisis. In turn, this leads to unprecedented collaborations between designers and life scientists.

Differences between design and bio art There are differences between Biodesign and Bioart, and they have mainly to do with techniques and goals. Biodesigners most often emerge from training at a design school and their methods are shaped by a pedagogy that encourages hands-on experimentation, iteration, optimization, and a centrality of the needs of the user. Related to the latter, designers create interfaces, objects, platforms, or images that are directed toward others, meant to be distributed and experienced. In contrast, bioartists will often engage in similar activities including lab work and collaboration with scientists, but are generally more concerned with creating work that conveys an original aesthetic experience. They are also often deliberate about the cultural context from which their work emerges and how it responds to, contests, or otherwise relates to that context. In another departure from biodesign, the work of bioartists does not necessarily have to speak to or be usable in a meaningful way by others; accessibility is not a mandate. Often bioart is defined as art that uses living material as media, What unites them is what is driving them, which is the need to react to our shifting, collective definitions of what is natural, what is alive, and what constitutes an identity. They have embraced the humbleness that results from pondering the intricate interdependencies, resiliency, and devilish complexity of the biological world. They also find themselves in an environment in the climate crisis, where natural resources are spoiled and disappear at accelerating rates while our understanding of the biosphere and the human self, complicated by research into the microbiome and epigenetic effects, is hurtling forward. These conditions make for shifting, sometimes frightening, but fertile ground for creativity and radical experimentation. Keeping in mind the long history of wasteful mistakes, misunderstandings, and fear that have characterized the relationship between humans and the natural world. We are therefore wise to be cautious and to be skeptical about our own level of understanding, both personally and collectively.

The artworks, design prototypes, and speculative narratives emerging from these fields include proposals that rely on experimental technologies and prompt several questions.

What are the implications and likely outcomes of integrating living matter into the built environment or of artists having the ability to wield a tool like CRISPR Cas9 to invent a new form of life?

Do these experiments, demonstrating an embrace of biological matter long feared such as microbes as well as an eagerness to collaborate with specialists in the life sciences, amount to a paradigm shift in design and art practices, akin to how the industrial revolution witnessed an embrace of physics and chemistry? Or might this signal a return to a broader consilience, as seen before the Scientific Revolution, when architects like Christopher Wren were also scientists and artists like Francesco di Giorgio Martini were also engineers? If so, how does this change compare to other field-changing shifts in the trajectory of artistic and technological developments, from industrialization to the invention of photography? As answers to these questions unfold, space for cross-disciplinary collaboration and creativity prompted by scientific research will only expand, propelled by global imperatives such as the urgency to develop cleaner technologies and the evolving definitions of life and nature. This convergence of fields, as well as of the expert and the amateur that characterizes Biodesign, may ultimately be necessary to alleviate the negative impacts of the legacies of the industrial revolution; bio artists, meanwhile will progress in translating and responding to cultural shifts we do not yet have the words to describe.