Oron Catts
SEMI-LIVING SCULPTURES [engl.]
How far can a body be fragmented until it is no longer a body? How long can life be stretched out until it is no longer life? Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project has been exploring such questions concerning the “semi-living” since 1996. The project details life forms in an intermediate state, the outcome of cultivating body parts under artificial conditions. The “undead” of synthetic biology is long an integral component of what we generally define as life. In a certain way alive and most certainly not dead, these “entities” are no longer part of the body they originally belonged to. Definitions are rendered even more complicated by the idea that, like a slime fungus, they could constitute a new body or even migrate and join other bodies.
Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and a curator at the forefront of the emerging field of Biological-arts, whose work addresses shifting perceptions of life. Currently he is Director of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. Having background in art and design, he was a Research Fellow at the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, and worked with numerous other bio-medical laboratories around the world. www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au www.tcaproject.uwa.edu.au www.tca.uwa.edu.au