Suzanne Anker

The Petri dish, like a Rorschach inkblot, or DNA’s double helix, has become a popular cultural icon. While denotatively, the Petri dish is a covered glass plate used in scientific laboratories, connotatively, it alludes to something brewing under investigation. In this real or imagined container a concept or a substance, if allowed to ferment, will sprout its hidden dimensions. From seeds, to politics, to toxic environments inside, such a dish brings forth a host of arresting results.

ISSN 1756-9575

Questions about the meaning of the human species have also raised the issue of its representation, and in this article the authors consider the role of bio-art in the production of the specimen as spectacle. Something we look both at and through, specimens have a long visual history that has recently become the subject of both artistic and scholarly re-evaluation. Here, bio-artist Suzanne Anker is interviewed by feminist science studies scholar Sarah Franklin, in an exchange that addresses the visual culture of specimen display and its significance to both art and social theory.

nker's essay, punningly titled "The Extant Vamp (or the) Ire of It All: Fairy Tales and Genetic Engineering." Considering representations of hybrid bodies by Patricia Piccinini, Janaina Tschape, Saya Woolfalk, and others, which evoke imagined beings of the past as a way to envision the recombinant creatures that may lie in the future, Anker shows how artists explore the social, ethical, and future implications of biological design and enhanced evolution.

Accompanying an exhibition of contemporary art in which depictions of marvelous creatures and fantastic narratives provide both chills and delights, the essays in Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination explore the meaning of this fabulist revival through the lenses of social and art history, literature, feminism, animal studies, and science.

From material processes to elusive patterns, artists and scientists seek models of explanation (Kemp, 2000). Sometimes illusionally evocative, sometimes rigorously formulaic, and at other times sculpturally bounded, these conceptualizing tools have historically linked art and science. Bring to the fore new technologies, digitally driven, and a vast array of alternative schemes become possibilities. High resolution images of cells, scanned helical DNA structures and synaptic neural connections can presently be viewed in real time. Add to the mix embodied transgenic life forms and fabricated animal models, and our conceptualizing tools expand the possibilities for dimensional invention. The accelerating dynamic between cultural and genetic evolution produces what can be termed a co-evolution between technical knowledge and living matter. And it is this co-evolution between technical expertise and animate matter we term technogenesis. 2 In other terms, technogenesis is the way in which the interactions between technology and biology impact our understanding of how nature exists, or would be, conceived and reconfigured in the future. But how do art practices and the life sciences rely on the efficacy of images? And what part do these images play in the acquisition, comprehension, dissemination and even funding of visual or scientific study? In what ways do images reflect the socio/ economic and cultural conditions of producing knowledge? Located somewhere between illusion, proof and cognitive projection, images, hence, become critical fictions operating within the cultural imaginary. They often traverse contested territories situated elsewhere on the axis between fact and fiction. These visualizing models, ubiquitously employed by artists, scientists, designers, corporate advertisers, journalists and politicians, clarify, mislead, aggrandize, stimulate and document. In brief, they are representations embedded in social structures, policy decisions and commercial ventures. As aesthetic devices such images perform their semiotic function activating thought and emotion by their salient powers of communication and circumscribed belief (Anker, 2004).

Chimera. 1. (a) A fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mytholo-gy having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. (b) An imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts. 2. An illusion or fabrication of the mind, esp. an unrealizable dream. 3. An individual organ or ...

Suzanne anker Suzanne Anker is an artist, theorist, and chair of the BFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she works at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She has been a guest curator at the New York Academy of Sciences and the ...