WHAT IS BIO ART MANIFESTO

• Bio Art is art that literally works in the continuum of biomateriality, from DNA, proteins, and cells to full organisms. Bio Art manipulates, modifies or creates life and living processes.

• In manipulating biological processes, Bio Art intervenes directly in the networks of the living.

• Life has a material specificity that is not reducible to other media.

• Without direct biological intervention, art made solely of acrylics, paper, pixels, plastic, steel, or any other kind of nonliving matter is not Bio Art.

• All art materials have ethical implications, but they are most pressing when the media are alive. We advocate for an ethical Bio Art: ethical with respect to humans and nonhumans.

• Some bioartists use living media to express human concerns, while other bioartists celebrate nonhuman organisms and our connections with them.

• Bio Art has no obligation to thematize topics that relate to biology or the living.

• We trust art audiences to recognize that because Bio Art is alive, all Bio Art has political, social, cultural, and ethical implications, whether or not these are made explicit by the artist.

•Bio Art challenges the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving, the natural and the artificial.

• This manifesto recapitulates and restates issues addressed in our work from the beginning.

2017

Eduardo Kac

Marta de Menezes

Marion
Laval-Jeantet

George Gessert

Benoît Mangin

Paul Vanouse