Tissue Culture & Art Project, received second prize in the prestigious international competition VIDA 10.0, rewarding excellence in artistic creativity utilising new technologies and artificial life.

On behalf of the Tissue Culture & Art Project, SymbioticA’s Director Oron Catts received the prize at the VIDA 10.0 Awards Ceremony and Gala Anniversary, held in Barcelona on the 29th of November, surrounded by artists, critics and experts in the relations between art, technology and biology.

A pioneering award in this field, this is the first time VIDA awarded a prize to a work based on biotechnology rather than electronics. Artistic director of the VIDA awards, Daniel Canogar, explained that the work met with much discussion inside the jury. NoArk was awarded second place as it dealt with the concept of life, in a broader sense.

NoArk will be exhibited in 2008 at ARCO, the international contemporary art fair in Madrid, as part of VIDA’s 10th anniversary.

For more information and video visit:

VIDA 10.0       www.telefonica.es/vida

“Catts and Zurr, the artists of the Tissue Culture and Art Project, call the biomass that grows in NoArk’s bioreactor a semi-living or sub-life neo-organism. Because of its origin in tissue samples of various kinds, their “chimerical blob” still participates in the vast domain of living things. But it is orphaned, bereft of parentage or kinship, abandoned by the Linnaean classification system that depends on organismic coherence. Yet NoArk’s sub-life is incorporated into a novel dynamic system that becomes its living context: the social body that receives and responds to it. NoArk consists of a transparent vessel reminiscent of an eighteenth century curiosity cabinet, which houses both the bioreactor and a collection of dead and preserved animal specimens. These components rotate together on a turntable and relentlessly expose viewers to the ineffable quality of living cells, whose properties are so imminent to us yet so elusive. The cell is the basic self-organizing unit of life. Cultured in a medium, abstracted from life as we know it, it is transformed into a synthetic embodiment of life processes and their artificial replication. This technique of abstraction is familiar enough in the science lab – biochemist Stuart Kauffman called it “second life” long before the virtual world of the internet took up the name – but it is radically new as public display in the cultural domain. The semi-living thing we see in NoArk is afflicted by an excess of freedom to cross boundaries between definitions and taxonomies, just like the limitless tagging and cross-referencing that characterizes digital information. As long as the semi-living is on life support, its bio-information persists through time and space, and poses the startling question of how such information can be deployed in “first life.”