Episode 4 with Oron Catts

In the fourth episode of Symbiotopics, new podcast hosts Noortje and Gijs discuss everything surrounding BioArt, together with Oron Catts, one of the first artists that merged biotechnology and art. Often credited as one of the pioneers of BioArt, Catts has made semi-living sculptures to shine light on the issues arising from our anthropocentric approach to life. He founded the research institute SymbioticA, to enable other artists and researchers to use biotechnological resources. The Australian artist is interested in the concept of life, and how our cultural relationship with it is changing rapidly. With most of his works, he zooms in on the blurry overlap between life and technology, and on the way humankind is dominating nature. As a society, we have a tendency to expect perfection from nature as if it is a technological machine. In contrast, Catts enjoys it much more when the attempts to control living tissues do not work. A majority of his work is meant to celebrate the messiness of life, resisting human manipulation. Instead of forcing life, Catts prefers to discover where life complies and where it resists.

In the online call with the podcast hosts, Catts talks about tissue engineering from his desk in Australia. Tissue engineering allows humans to sculpt complex living materials in a way never done before. From a historical perspective, humans of almost all cultures imagined chimeras where humans and animals are merged, and suddenly this surrealist idea is now real.

Oron also talks about how the word life is problematic, as there is no scientific definition. While the minimal unit of life is often thought of as a singular cell, breaking up it’s DNA molecule would not be considered “killing”. Lastly, he points out that to eventually realize a symbiocene, we must recognize that systems do not rely on these hard borders between life and technology but more on flows.