Researching on neo-baroque I stumbled upon this statement:
If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism it is because the Baroque is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism. Delleuze, The Fold, 1993:110
My initial interest was on the crisis of property in digital cinema as a form of neo baroque. But the latter part of living beings in the organism incited my curiosity and searching how to relate this I found about Bioart.
What is Bioart? Curator Jan Hauser from the exposition L’art Biotech staged in Aix-en-Provence defines it by saying that
Bio Art is first and foremost an art of transformation in vivo that manipulates “biological materials at discrete levels (e.g. individual cells, proteins, genes, nucleotides)” 2005 – the last part of the sentence comes from the prominent bioartist Eduardo Kac
What started as a cientific experiment when soon gave rise to a movement that by incorporated biologists to create works that use live human and animal tissues, bacteria and living organisms as materials.
A brief description of the movement can be found in this article. For now I continue to explore the relation to Delleuze with a short excerpt of this study made by Anne Munster in 2005.
I think we can begin to ascertain an aesthetics for bioart that is not simply steeped in negation; that is, bioart is not genetic art, not digital art, not new media. Rather we can understand bioart as a practice propelled by a set of energies that gain their force from the work of the differential. We are then lead to another set of considerations: if bioart is produced through the differential folding of flesh, and its artefacts embody differentially inflected and produced flesh as contemporary embodiment, then to what extent does this respond to a ‘crisis in property’?
Returning to the quote by Deleuze, we have to then examine the status of bioart (and especially its parasitic relation with biotechnologies) as either an aesthetic that is generated in response to a contemporary property crisis or as part of the ongoing nature of that crisis. In working to transform and often to produce living things at the level of biotechnical manipulation bioartists engage (to pick up on the positive aspects of crisis invoked by Deleuze) ‘new machines in the field of the social’ and in fact discover, or at least call forth, new modes of living for the organism (to now paraphrase Deleuze’s discovery of new living beings in the organism’).
I have been studying recently about this change of perception from projection (unidimensionalty) to fold (polydimensionalyt). As Delleuze explains the concept is that we changed from reading on a plain screen to understand reality in a polimorfic way, in other words, we stopped reading in a plain paper to decipher the words in a origamic form.
Tim Murray applies this to electronic and new media arts, but Munster in her draft paper goes one step further to propose that even our human flesh has changed through art to a polidimensionality that is only achievable by the latest biotechnology.
I found this really interesting and for me it was inevitable to remember of David Cronenberg and the new flesh. From fiction to reality.