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For thousands of years hybrid inter-species creatures have populated our imaginary. Today, 20 years or so after the appearance of the first transgenetic animal, they are created daily in laboratories. What used to be a myth has now become a reality.
At the junction of art and science, LIFE EXTREME intends to present new living beings created by man, beings no longer produced solely by “nature”. This is not a book-essay but a “poetic” proposition, a guide to new lives amongst the most astonishing that have appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
For this book, the artist Eduardo Kac – pioneer of “bio-art” and internationally recognized for his “transgenic works” like GFP Bunny (the transgenic rabbit with the fluorescent green protein) – has chosen to meet the philosopher Avital Ronell – a well-known figure on the American new philosophy scene – to have exchanges on these very controversial questions inspired by scientific actuality in the biotechnological field, challenging the limits of what’s human, its boundaries, its possibilities and questioning the fundamental distinction between the natural and artificial, nature and technology, and the human and the machine.
Kac and Ronell are both concerned with the emergence of new cultural practices. In LIFE EXTREME they collaborate at the intersection of a natural history of creatures made by humans, the living evolution and private life of creatures real but rarely seen. While the oldest living indexed in LIFE EXTREME dates back to the seventeenth century, many others were created in the twenty-first century. Gathered here for the first time, these plants and unique animals narrate a different history of life on planet Earth.
This world, at the limit of reality and the imaginary, is a world on the verge of existence, a fantastic world that tells us more about our reality than reality itself. Once more, what appears in front of us under the mystical mask of pure science and objective knowledge on nature reveals itself to be a political, economic and social ideology. “For me,” the artist explains, “it’s a question of moving the private space of the laboratory right into the centre of the social space by transforming the object into the subject”. |
