Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience

Description

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.

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

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 *