“It’s now a reality”, Jens Hauser announced at the 2003 Biotech Art exhibition, “artists are in the labs. They are intentionally transgressing procedures of representation and metaphor, going beyond them to manipulate life itself. Biotechnology is no longer just a topic, but a tool, generally generating green fluorescent animals, wings for pigs and sculpture moulded in bioreactors or under the microscope, and using DNA itself as an artistic medium.” To challenge the validity of singular and fixed species at this “evolutionary crossroad” of genetically engineered mammals and organ transpeciation, Transgenic artists have intervened into biogenetic technology in roles first imagined by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Through the microinjection of DNA with cells containing green fluorescent protein into a rabbit zygote, Eduardo Kac was able to genetically engineer GFK Bunny. Using living tissues, Zurr and Catts created ‘partial life sculptures’ at SymbioticA including frog-steaks and even flying pigs. In their collaboration with Stelarc, SymbioticA has also grown a 1Ž4 scale replica of his ear made out of human cartilage cells, implanted upon Stelarc’s arm in 2010.
Following the launch of The Humane Genome Project, Patricia Piccinini chose silicon, acrylic and fibreglass, rather than human and non-human tissue to produce The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP) and Lifeforms with Unevolved Mutant Properties (LUMP) – genetically mutant babies engineered to look like pink-skinned tumours or, in her words, “a cute grotesquery”. As controversies raged over organ xenotransplantation and interspecies breeding, Piccinini created a human sow suckling a litter of 'pigren'. This year she produced a controversial skywhale, part-human, part-whale, able to take flight. As Kac explains, “Transgenic Art is, a new artistic terrain and art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism – to create unique living beings.” Yet this can only be done, he stresses, “with great care … and above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture and love of the life thus created.” By focusing upon the bioethics of transhumanist genetics in relation to this Transgenic Art, this lecture will examine how these artists also engage in the nurturance and reciprocity of transgenetic and transpecies creations, rarely addressed in genetic biotechnologies, to consider how they are not rejected, unlike Dr. Frankenstein's "modern prometheus" but are incorporated into our posthuman evolutionary era.

Fae (Fay) Brauer is Professor of Art and Visual Culture at the University of East London Art and Digital Industries. She is also Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at The University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Her books are Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (2013), Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Degeneration and Regeneration in Modern Visual Cultures (2013), The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (2009) and Art, Sex and Eugenics, Corpus Delecti (2008). Presently she is preparing the books, Regenerating the Body: Art and Neo-Lamarckian Biocultures in Republican France; Symbiotic Species: The Art and Science of Neo-Lamarckian Evolution in the Solidarist Republic, Feminizing Muscle: Body Trouble in Visual Cultures, and Unmasking Masculinity: Imaging Hysterical Men in Republican France. She is also editing the books, Building the Body Beautiful: Modernisms, Vitalism and the Fitness Imperative; Bloody Bodies: The Art and Execution of Dissection, and Vision and Visionaries: Psychology, Occult Science and Symbolism.