The Tissue Culture and Art Project

Tissue culture technology seems to promise us (among many other things) an illusion of a victimless utopia. TC&A argues that this technologically mediated victimless utopia is but a transformation of explicit violence into a hidden implicit one on a much greater scale. As urban Western culture seems to find it hard to stomach images of real violence (as opposed to cinematic and constructed simulated violence) its obsession with ever growing meat consumption has inevitably created increasing amounts of victims from the natural environment to other animals and humans. There is a shift from ‘the red in tooth and claw’ of nature to a mediated nature. The victims are pushed further away; they still exist, but are much more implicit. For example, parts of the living are fragmented and taken away from the context of the host body (and the mere act of fragmentation is violent) and are introduced to a technological mediation that further ‘abstracts’ their livingness. By creating a new class of Semi-Being, which is dependent on our technology for survival, we are also creating a new class for exploitation.