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BIO ART AS BIO POLITICS

WEEK 1

Arne Hendricks, ecologist and artist
What do Bioartists make?


2010–ongoing
Mixed media, including photography, sculpture, graphics


Arne Hendriks has spent nearly 20 years arguing that humans should eventually shrink to 50 cm to address Earth’s resource scarcity. 

“The artist’s most developed work to date is The
Incredible Shrinking Man (2010–ongoing), which consists
of an entire ecosystem of graphics, text, objects, and
performance, proposing the idea of shrinking humans
to an average height of 50 centimeters (1 foot 8
inches) and then envisioning the changes to our lives
this would pose. In this speculative world we would
consume roughly 2 percent of the material and energy
resources that we do today. At just 50 centimeters we
could hunt mice as big game, cater a wedding feast with
a single chicken, and arrange tours of old cities as giant
amusement parks, overrun with vegetation reclaiming
the land. In this world of terrific new abundance old
human skeletons could become fixtures in natural
history museums, akin to dinosaur bones: the detritus
of a species unfit to survive in its environment.”

   - BioArt Altered Realities by William Myers

It connects to the part of the book that says that mutations and corrections aren’t unnatural. Instead, it explores how different species can change their physical form to improve their chances of survival when faced with existential uncertainty.  

Two examples in real life (one from the article and one from my own common knowledge): 

- In an article about this piece, I learned that marine iguanas can shrink their BONES. It is a REAL biological phenomenon (the Dehnel phenomenon). 

- From my own knowledge, I know that women’s bodies are designed to slow down when there is a lack of caloric intake, which serves as a major benefit during pregnancy and childbirth. 
He’s really just saying that living things adapt to survive and that environmental pressures influence genetics, so why shouldn’t we try to correct our destructive dominance over the world? 
2017
Outdoor installation

Hendricks compares the human tendency toward exponential growth with the cancer cell’s ability to regenerate exponentially and independently.  The installation is below, titled "Asphalt Visualisation for KankerCel Utrecht.” 



Here, the lab is the nucleus.

The asphalt represents: 
- Angiogenesis: The process by which a tumor recruits its own blood vessels to grow. 
- Metastasis: The edges suggest a system that continuously reaches out to take over new territory.

The bottom photos show people laying the asphalt. Maybe this makes the statement that our social and economic DNA tells us that growth equals success, even when it becomes destructive.



I think in KankerCel, he’s trying to show that: 

  • Normal cells only grow when the body tells them to, whereas cancer cells tell themselves to grow, which leads to compounding growth. I think he uses this idea as a metaphor for society in the sense that capitalism allows systems to keep growing forever. 
  • Like cancer cells, capitalist systems create justifications for their growth, even when they harm the environment. It’s a means to an end with almost no interdependence. 


I feel like he’s saying that, since there are endless examples of corrective mutations, maybe we have to form our own mutation that allows us to limit our consumption. 







Is human exponential growth the same as
a cancer cell’s exponential growth?