Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience

by Lindsay Kelley

Overview

What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach.

Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350270947
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/24/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.45(w) x 8.45(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Lindsay Kelley is a practicing artist and Associate Lecturer at the School of Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Australia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: What is Food?

1. Subject P: Embodying Home Economics
Home economics origins of public amateurisms now active in bioart engagements with food and eating

2. Chicken Heart Soup
Early tissue culture work in laboratories and speculative fiction; the animal body in pieces

3. Domestic Computing
Kitchen as laboratory, recipe as data point, woman as computer

4. Semiotics of the Kitchen: Feminist Food Art
Locating a performance politics of food and eating in feminist art of the 1970s

5. DIY Coke
Industrial interventions, kits, and critical approaches to processed food

6. Meat Culture
In vitro meat and the victimless utopias of the Tissue Culture & Art Project

7. Public Amateurism
Critical Art Ensemble's Free Range Grain and the risks of learning in public

8. Cookbook
The cookbook form as political critique

9. Carnal Light
With Eva Hayward. Eduardo Kac's GFP Bunny, invisible jellyfish bodies, and somalumenal encounters

10. Digesting Wetlands
Natalie Jeremijenko's Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, molecular gastronomy, and the human microbiome imaginary

11. Plumpiñon
Recipe for reciprocal capture among people, trees, and starvation foods

12. Dysphagiac
Eating without swallowing: feeding the tube

Editorial Reviews

Bioart Kitchen plays with the industrial food system – taking familiar products off the shelf and making them strange. Chicken soup, Coke, peanut butter, canned food and corn syrup will never taste the same. Kelley's collection of recipes brings feminist sensibilities to home economics – showing how the kitchen has long been a space of subversion, performance and innovation.” —Eben Kirksey, Australian Research Council Fellow, University of New South Wales, Australia and author of Emergent Ecologies (2015)

“This fascinating tome mixes appliance lore, technological food scares, feminist fists raised in protest, artists' pot lucks and the Neiman Marcus cafeteria into its eclectic “menu”! Read it, study it, learn from it. This important read adds to a growing shelf of books that show how earlier feminist art set the stage for younger artists today engaged with social justice, food and eating.” —Linda Mary Montano, performance artist based in the USA

From the Publisher