Author Archives: jharrower

REVITAL COHEN

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Cohen creates speculative design projects that engage with art, technology, and biology. The projects “draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of new technologies. The resulting design proposals do not provide answers, but they make complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable.”1

Life Support, 2008
For this project, Cohen imagines augmented animals that assist human health. In one scenario, a genetically modified sheep acts as a living dialysis machine for a human with kidney failure. Every night blood passes between human and sheep; the sheep’s healthy kidneys filter the blood before its returned to the human. In another scenario, a mechanically modified greyhound assists the breathing of a human with respiratory problems.

Life Support diagram
Life Support

See Cohen’s website.

1 Regine Debatty, “Life Support — Could Animals be Transformed into Medical Devices?” We Make Money Not Art (July 1, 2008) http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/07/now-that-im-back-to.php#.VHvnPmTF8VF

MARION LAVAL-JEANTET and BENOIT MANGIN

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Laval-Jeantet and Mangin — known as the collective Art Oriente Objet — play with the boundaries between species.

May the Horse Live in Me, 2011
In this performance piece, Mangin injects Laval-Jeantet with horse-blood plasma. To prevent an allergic reaction to the foreign fluid, Laval-Jeanet prepared her body through a series of small-dose injections of horse immunoglobulin. Laval-Jeantet also dressed for the occasion in horse-hoof stilts.

Laval-Jeantet describes the experience of her trans-species blood transfusion: “I had the feeling of being extra-human. I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous, and very diffident, the emotionalism of an herbivore.”1

Artists’ Skin Culture, 1996
Laval-Jeantet and Mangin combine their skin cells with those of a pig to grow small sheets of skin that they then tattoo with images of endangered species. “These trans-species totems are ultimately and ideally grafted onto compliant art collectors, who can then make these art bodies literally part of their own.”2

Artists's Skin Culture

See Art Oriente Objet’s website.

1 Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), 224.
2 Sk-interfaces exhibit

KATHARINE DOWSON

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Dowson creates portraits of the brain and vascular system using laser-etched glass.

Memory of Brain Malformation, 2006
Dowson recreates a blood-flow x-ray of her cousin’s brain. The x-ray reveals a tumor that is later removed.1

Memory of Brain Malformation, Katharine Dowson

My Brain and My 3D Heart, 2013
Dowson references MRI scans of her brain and heart to create 3D printed versions of those organs. She then casts the organs in glass.

My Brain, My 3D Heart, Katharine Dowson

See Downson’s website.

1 Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), 192.

SUSAN ALDWORTH

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Aldworth layers hand-drawn images onto the documents of medical science. Her work humanizes the dehumanized images of pathology; she reveals the subject in our maps of anatomy.

Cogito Ergo Sum 3, 2006
Aldworth combines fMRI scans of her brain with expressive imagery.

Cogito Ergo Sum 3, Susan Aldworth

See Aldworth’s website.

JAMES AUGER and JIMMY LOIZEAU

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Augmented Animal, 2001
Auger and Loizeau imagine technologies that assist squirrels in finding food, protect rodents from predators, and help dogs adapt to the restrictions of domestic life. In one scenario, a dog’s tail communicates her emotional state with the help of LED text. Phrases like “I’d like my dinner” or “I really love you” appear when the dog wags her tail. In another scenario, a squirrel records the GPS location of a buried nut using a device attached to his wrist. When he needs to retrieve the nut, a red light flashes on the wrist device indicating the exact location of his stash. A third scenario gives night vision goggles to a rodent, helping her avoid predators who hunt in low light.1

Augmented Rodent

See Auger’s website.

1 Paola Antonelli, ed., Design and the Elastic Mind (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 35.