Biology, Biotechnology and Living Materials

Written by Dr Victoria Louise Geaney (Royal College of Art)

Artist-led or practice-led forms of collaboration are important, yet, as creative practitioners, we oftentimes grapple with seeing the holistic value that we, ourselves, can bring to collaborative praxes. Particularly given the shifting roles artists and designers can take on, and the fluctuating mechanisms in which collaborative assemblages operate. However, defining and understanding our intrinsic value is important to multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary forms of working – whether across disciplines or with new, emergent or sustained communities of practice. These collaborative ways of working are becoming increasingly vital when we consider approaching critical environmental issues, especially when set within the context of climate emergency and the Anthropocene.

As art and design-led practitioners, we understand the necessity for researching and developing less environmentally impactful modes of operating – employing methods and approaches which are responsive, generative and agile. We may work in practiceled and processual ways, with contributions to new knowledge bound in approaches rather than the outcomes. The VOICE Project offers a critical proposition to artists, reaching out as creative voices in order to work with technologies and communities around UN SDGs – understanding that each and every participant plays a role in collaborative and participatory practices, and promoting the importance of flattening hierarchies within these, across human and more-than-human ecosystems. Here, leaning into pluralities of stakeholders, perspectives and voices is key. The VOICE Project seeks to reveal the approaches, methods and processes of interdisciplinary ways of working, in order to share the findings, key learnings, opportunities and challenges with the next generations of future artists, designers, their collaborators, communities and change and policy makers.

As an Industry Project Researcher on the VOICE Project, part of my role is to map the methods and processes of the VOICE artistic-led projects, to reveal new insights into the inner workings of these forms of arts-led approaches. These methods will be shared in an opensource VOICE Methods Repository, in order to aid new generations of creative practitioners in understanding some of the ways in which to work and operate in interdisciplinary and community spaces, particularly towards eco-social and environmental goals.

Contextualising praxes from my own field, the examples I draw upon here emanate from biodesign, biomaterials and biofabrication, and are chiefly projects traversing the disciplinary fields of art, material or fashion and the sciences, rather than necessarily community themes. Artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr are pioneers of the bioart field, working across art and tissue culture and using their practice as a mode of critiquing, questioning and probing bioethical and political considerations around working with living systems. The artists operate as scientific practitioners or ‘artists in the laboratory’ – switching and challenging perceived roles and using subversive methods to highlight and invite conversation and debate around the utilization and instrumentalization of the animated materialities of living systems and tissue culture.

Victimless Leather Project - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientifc "Body". Part of the Tissue Culture and Art Project. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. (https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/victimlessleather/)

In this way, Catts and Zurr’s work can be viewed as providing a ‘voice’ or spotlight onto the biological systems they are working with, understanding the complexities and implications of working directly with life or the ‘semi-living’, as the artists term them. What is important, here, is the value of artists developing and leading their own laboratory practices, community-building and networking, and Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr were pioneers in leading SymbioticA – an artist-led and artist-run research space, from Perth, University of Western Australia, developing residencies for and building the next generation of bioartists and designers, globally. Embedding more deeply into textile practices, materials designer Natsai Audrey Chieza has a history of working in the laboratory across synthetic biology, architecture and materials design, with projects looking at biological and bacterial fabric dyeing, using pigments extracted and cultivated from soil. Chieza begun her experiments during her course on Material Futures at University of the Arts London, working at the Ward Lab at University College London. She then commenced as a creative-inresidence at Gingko Bioworks - looking at engineering S.coelicolor to increase pigment production in collaboration with Gingko scientists, and scaling up the process to produce dye effects on much larger sizes of fabrics.1

Normal Phenomena of Life garment (https://faberfutures.com/news/) Natsai Audrey Chieza, Faber Futures and Normal Phenomena of Life.

More recently, Chieza’s companies Faber Futures and Normal Phenomena of Life are further exploring the opportunities presented by microbes for fabric pigmentation – towards less impactful dye production due to reduction of harmful chemicals and eliminating the vast quantities of water typically required during textile dye processes. Chieza’s research shows the potential for materials-led co-creations with biological systems towards research, development and innovations for the fashion and textile industry, both in collaboration with scientists, as well as led by a creative practitioner. This highlights the value of design-led projects for environmental goals.

The last project I will discuss, which draws upon artist-led methods for collaborative, biotechnological explorations in cooperation with scientific and fashion and textile communities, is the work of Sputniko! (artist Hiromi Ozaki) and in particular, her project titled Tranceflora – Amy’s Glowing Silk, which was commissioned by Gucci, in 2015. Sputniko! worked with transdisciplinary communities, including scientists, engineers and Professor Sezutsu at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS) in Japan, weavers at Masataka Hosoo and fashion designer Masaya Kushino, to cultivate and weave a genetically engineered transgenic silk outfit with green and red fluorescent proteins, meaning the silk emitted a glow under ultraviolet light. This project shows the potential of synthetic biology for emergent areas such as biological wearable technology, the importance of speculative and applicative forms of creation and the ways in which interdisciplinary teams can assemble to create innovative and critical pathways for practice-led research.

Tranceflora – Amy’s Glowing Silk. Sputniko! Commissioned by Gucci for Gucci Art Gallery, Tokyo. Produced in collaboration with the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences (NIAS), Masataka Hosoo weavers, and fashion designer Masaya Kushino. (https://sputniko.com/Tranceflora-Amys-Glowing-Silk)

Overall, the work of Catts and Zurr, Chieza, Sputniko! and many others act to demonstrate how forms of artist-led praxes spanning (here) biotechnology and environmental concerns can offer contributions both processually and through their outcomes. The practitioners I share from my own field, highlight the ways in which the creative arts, design, fashion and materials practices can visually, conceptually and critically lead technological research into outward, public-facing spaces and, oftentimes, new and unchartered territories for the actors and actants involved.

1.https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/2018/04/11/creative-in-residence/