The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as Agents of Irony

Abstract

This is an examination of the performative aspects of the Semi-Living (and objects of Partial Live) grown by the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A). The TC&A, among a growing number of artists and collectives, is involved with the presentation of manipulated living systems in an artistic context. In contrast with art that deals with the representation of life through established artistic strategies, TC&A’s type of engagement with living systems generate an experience which is closer to live/performance art. The phenomenological experience of the audience (as well as the artists) is of major importance for the TC&A. In much of TC&A’s work the audience are ‘forced’ to actively participate in or be implicated with the alteration of the life cycle of problematised, technologically dependent fragments of life.