Art between Synthetic Biology and Biohacking:
 Searching for Media Adequacy in the Epistemological Turn

The creation of lifelike appearances is an ever-recurring historical feature in art. Since the earliest anthropomorphic statues, myths of vivification surround artefacts made by the artist’s hand, the animation of malleable matter stands in a long pictorial tradition, and from the 19th century, the biological metaphor is continued in the discussion of the artwork itself as an organism. By means ofform, material or process, a touch of aliveness is staged, ideally favouring an empathic mind-set to bolster reception, aiming at involving the viewer viscerally.Art has imagined, represented and mimicked, then simulated and – quite recently – manipulated living beings and systems for real.

Contemporary artists who enter the labs or create their own to employ biotechnology are particularly ‘close to life’, but the new discipline of Synthetic Biology is particularly well suited to upgrade art historical paradigms of ‘creation’. In parallel, the democratization of lab tools leads to their appropriation by tinkerers and tactical media activists who apply the critical potential of open source culture from the digital age of Media Art to DIY biology and biohacking.

This paper discusses the notion of media adequacy with regards to materials and strategies today, as the trendy discipline of Synthetic Biology aims at designing living systems from scratch, DIY biology seems to become the next pop culture, the ‘happy hacker’ is preferred to the ‘evil engineer’, and as art is increasingly linked to knowledge production und dissemination, within the larger scope of an 
epistemological turn: artists not simply translate what we know, but how we know what we know.

Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based curator, author and arts and culture critic with a background in media studies and science journalism. He focuses on the interactions between art and technology, as well as on trans-genre and contextual aesthetics. He has curated exhibitions such as L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003), Still, Living (Perth, 2007), sk-interfaces (Liverpool, 2008/Luxembourg, 2009), the Article Biennale (Stavanger, 2008), Transbiotics (Riga 2010), Fingerprints… (Berlin, 2011/Munich/2012) and Synth-ethic (Wien, 2011). Hauser organizes interdisciplinary conferences and guest lectures at universities and international art academies. He obtained his PhD at Ruhr Universität Bochum with a dissertation on biomediality and art, and is currently holding a research position both at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and at the Medical Museion/Faculty of Health Sciences of the University of Copenhagen. Hauser is also a founding collaborator of the European culture channel ARTE and has produced numerous reportages and radio features.