From our friends at We Make Money Not Art comes news of another fake biotech website, called BIOTEKNICA, and their lab full of horrors, which is a mirror into modern companies and the practice of growing and manipulating teratomas.
This group is different in that the hoax website was just a launchpad for an art-installation laboratory, complete with real teratoma cell culture:
Bioteknica is a fictitious biotech corporation that projects its viewers into the future, where within a virtual laboratory designer organisms are generated on demand. The mock organisms produced are irrational and quite frightening. They are modelled on the Teratoma (comes from a Greek term meaning roughly “monster tumor”), a cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, teeth, and vascular systems. Monstrous as this may seem, teratomas are genetically identical to humans, making them key in cloning research. Several biotech companies have been working with teratomas for years, although public awareness of this is slight – for now.
Until 2003, Bioteknica was a purely multimedia production. During the summer of 2004, the artists further enhanced the slippage between fiction and reality by working with tissue culture protocols in the production of artwork as was pioneered by Tissue Culture & Art Project. With their assistance, Bailey and Willet practiced utilizing existing tissue culture technologies towards developing a series of “soft” sculptures. The organic sculptures were both fabricated from store-bought meats, and cultivated in the laboratory utilizing tissue-engineering technologies.
The Bioteknica Laboratory Remix is a complex functional laboratory installation – built to sustain cellular life within the gallery environment.
We’re not sure exactly what their message is, but you’ve got to respect artists that use sterile technique for their craft.
More from Willet and Bailey’s Bioteknica Laboratory Remix…