Skip to content
1981
Volume 22, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 1477-965X
  • E-ISSN: 1758-9533

Abstract

The article discusses two bioart projects that bring the symbolically core human substances of blood, sweat and tears into technologically mediated relationships with plants and fungi to explore human kinship with other species: Tarah Rhoda’s (short for ‘blood, sweat and tears’) and , and Saša Spačal’s . The article analyses the art projects through the lens of the molecular gaze and different perspectives on kinning, bringing anthropological conceptualizations of kinship together with Haraway’s pathways to connect with other species. How can bioart use technologies to explore interspecies kinship through a molecular gaze? And may such artworks contribute to the toning down of human exceptionality in the face of a precarious future? We find that artworks providing a molecular gaze on interspecies biological processes may risk a decontextualized approach to complex relational processes but may also create new visions of filiation even with biological organisms imagined to be genetically distant from humans, thus spurring awareness of the fragile interrelationships among species.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/tear_00121_1
2024-06-06
2025-02-07
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Abi-Rached, Joelle M. and Rose, Nikolas (2010), ‘The birth of the neuromolecular gaze’, History of the Human Sciences, 23:1, pp. 1136.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Adamiak, Marzena (2022), ‘Being otherwise: On the possibility of a non-dualistic approach in feminist phenomenology’, Technoetic Arts, 20:1, pp. 1125.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Anderson, Kay and Perrin, Colin (2018), ‘“Removed from nature”: The modern idea of human exceptionality’, Environmental Humanities, 10:2, pp. 44772.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Anker, Suzanne and Nelkin, Dorothy (2004), The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bates, Tarsh (2014), ‘Performance, bioscience, care: Exploring interspecies alterity’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 10:2, pp. 21631.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Berrigan, Caitlin (2014), ‘Life cycle of a common weed’, in E. Kirksey (ed.), Multispecies Salon, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 16480.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Carsten, Janet (2003), After Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Costa, Beatriz da and Philip, Kavita (2008), ‘Introduction’, in B. da Costa and K. Philip (eds), Tactical Biopolitics. Art, Activism and Technoscience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. xviixxii.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Dooren, Thom van, Kirksey, Eben and Münster, Ursula (2016), ‘Multispecies studies cultivating arts of attentiveness’, Environmental Humanities, 8:1, pp. 123.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Franklin, Sarah (2016), Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Gilbert, Scott F., Sapp, Jan and Tauber, Alfred I. (2012), ‘A symbiotic view of life: We have never been individuals’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 87:4, pp. 32541.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Haraway, Donna J. (2007), When Species Meet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Haraway, Donna J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. High, Kathy (2011), ‘About the project’, Blood Wars, https://vampirestudygroup.com/bloodwars/index.html. Accessed 23 August 2023.
  15. Jones, Amelia (1998), Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Kirksey, Eben (ed.) (2014), Multi-Species Salon, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think, Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Krpan, Jurij (2020), ‘Biotehna + Vivarium: Towards the aesthetics of artificial life’, in E. Berger, K. Mäki-Reinikka, K. O’Reilly and H. Sederholm (eds), Art as We Don’t Know It, Espoo: Aalto Art Books, pp. 18290.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Landecker, Hannah (2007), Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Larsen, Tord (2010), ‘Acts of entification. The emergence of thinghood in social life’, in N. Rapport (ed.), Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Classification, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 15478.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Lie, Merete (2012), ‘Reproductive images: The autonomous cell’, Science as Culture, 21:4, pp. 47596.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Linn, Olga M. and Ostoic, Suncica (2019), ‘Curatorial perspectives on contemporary art and science dealing with interspecies connections’, Technoetic Arts, 17:1, pp. 7994.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Mackenzie, Louise, Turkmendag, Ilke, Burr-Raty, Isabel, Hunter, WhiteFeather, Jarvis, Charlotte, Simun, Miriam, Tapio, Hege and Zaretsky, Adam (2020), ‘Body shopping: Challenging convention in the donation and use of bodily materials through art practice’, Technoetic Arts, 18:2, pp. 27997.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Mitchell, Robert E. (2010), Bioart and the Vitality of Media, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Petrič, Spela (2017), ‘Confronting vegetal otherness: Strange encounters’, Spela Petrič: Life in the terratrope, 6 January, https://www.spelapetric.org/#/strange-encounters/. Accessed 9 January 2024.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Rhoda, Tarah (2014), ‘BS&T’, Tarah Rhoda, http://tarahrhoda.tumblr.com/post/154264789426. Accessed 29 August 2023.
  27. Rogers, Hannah Star, Halpern, Megan K., Hannah, Dehlia and Ridder-Vignone, Kathryn de (eds) (2021), Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology Studies, London and New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Rose, Deborah Bird (2022), Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Rose, Nikolas (2007), The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Schneider, David (1968), American Kinship: A Cultural Account, Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Simard, Suzanne W., Perry, David A., Jones, Melanie D., Myrold, David D., Durall, Daniel M. and Molina, Randy (1997), ‘Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field’, Nature, 388:6642, pp. 57982.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Spačal, Saša (2021), MycoMythologies: Patterning, pamphlet shared at exhibition Re:Tune, Zone2Source, Amsterdam, 7 March–29 May 2021.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Spačal, Saša (2022), ‘The library of fallen tears’, Agapea, https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/the-library-of-fallen-tears. Accessed 29 August 2023.
  34. Spačal, Saša (n.d.) ‘Myconnect’, AGAPEA, https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/myconnect. Accessed 20 May 2024.
  35. Strathern, Marilyn (1992), After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Vanouse, Paul (2020), ‘Labor: The post-anthropocentric body “at work”’, Performance Research, 25:3, pp. 3237.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Vaughan-Lee, Emmanuel (2021), ‘Finding the mother tree: An interview with Suzanne Simard’, Emergence Magazine, 3 May, https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/finding-the-mother-tree/. Accessed 30 August 2023.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Woolf, Virginia ([1921] 1993), ‘Kew Gardens’, in S. Kemp (ed.), Selected Short Stories, Bungay: Penguin, pp. 4652.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/tear_00121_1
Loading
/content/journals/10.1386/tear_00121_1
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test