original scientific article	UDC 111.852:7.038.531
received: 2011-07-04
BIOART ON THE VERGE OF AESTHETIC ONTOLOGY
María Antonia GONZÁLEZ VALERIO Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Circuito Interior Ciudad Universitaria,
s/n. C.P. 04510, México, D.F. e-mail: mariantonia@magonzalezvalerio.com
ABSTRACT
Bioart is a new art form with specific characteristics and aims. In order to state this, one should provide a definition of bioart that explains its novelty and the extent to which it differs from traditional art forms. Bioart is the essential form of expression of our techno-scientific epoch, bringing about an interaction of science, technology and art that requires explanation in order not only to understand it as a new art form but also a possible way for our techno-scientific epoch to develop a more appropriate means of artistic expression. The traditional philosophy of art, which has created various definitions of art over the course of the past decade, is not sufficient for analyzing the ontological consequences of bioart. Therefore, this paper explores the possibility of creating a theoretical framework that is drawn from the discipline of aesthetic ontology in order to examine the ontological implications of bioart.
Keywords: bioart, aesthetic ontology, art definition, transaesthetic, art and science
la bioarte sull'orlo dell'ontologia estetica
SINTESI
La bioarte e una nuova forma d'arte con caratteristiche e obiettivi specifici. Per affermare cid, bisogna fornire una definizione della bioarte che spiega in cosa consiste la sua novita e la misura in cui si differenzia dalle forme d'arte tradizionali. La bioarte e la forma essenziale di espressione della nostra epoca tecnico-scientifica, che da luogo a uninterazione tra scienza, tecnologia e arte e che richiede una spiegazione, non solo affinche possa essere compresa come una nuova forma d'arte, ma anche per dare alla nostra epoca tecnico-scientifica la possibilita di sviluppare un mezzo piu appropriato di espressione artistica. La filosofia tradizionale dell'arte, che ha creato varie definizioni dell'arte nel corso degli ultimi dieci anni, non basta per analizzare le conseguenze ontologiche della bioarte. Pertan-to, il testo presente esplora la possibilita di creare un quadro teorico, tratto dalla disciplina dell'ontologia estetica, al fine di esaminare le implicazioni ontologiche della bioarte.
Parole chiave: bioarte, ontologia estetica, definizione dell'arte, transestetica, arte e scienza
María Antonia GONZALEZ VALERIO: BIOART ON THE VERGE OF AESTHETIC ONTOLOGY, 327-334
The topic of the relationship and confrontation between art and science is still a commonplace, even now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, as we find ourselves in the so-called "third culture", in which the nineteenth-century paradigm that strived after specificity for the spiritual sciences - as opposed to those of the natural world - has been displaced in favour of a fertile interaction between the humanities and natural sciences. The exchange spectra and even fusion of these two areas of knowledge and production are manifold, e.g., biology, nanotechnology, cybernetics, etc.
The interaction of contemporary art with scientific and technological developments is increasingly becoming a means of conforming to the space-time in which we exist. Its most obvious sign is probably the hybrid world of design, in which technology, visual arts, economics, marketing and market strategy are combined with few obvious problems. Cybernetic art, digital art and net. art are also good examples thereof.
Transdisciplinarity has become a straightforward research approach, linked to heterodox, heteronomous and hybrid paradigms. Art and science are no longer conceived as autonomous fields taking place within the traditional divisions of modernity; the communication established between them can be thought of as transgressive and fluid, in which they move in a circular manner until reaching a probable point of indistinctness.
When it comes to questions of creativity at the intersection of art and science, those working in the field cannot dispense with the requirement to enter into collaboration with scientists. Possible examples of this are laboratories (e.g. INCUBATOR - Hybrid Laboratory at the Intersection of Art, Science and Ecology School of Visual Arts, in Windsor University), art galleries (Kapelica Gallery, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a platform on which the boundaries of the interrelation of art and science can be explored), artists (Stelarc - an Australian artist who works with the idea of cyborg-zombies and the technologically intervened human body) and universities (SymbioticA -artistic research activities in the life sciences at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, at the University of Western Australia).
The interface between art and science generates space-times in different senses, beyond modernity and typical ideologies: it dislocates fixed and monadic identities, both national and individual; it deterritorializes and reterri-torializes, allowing the creation of new cartographies and concepts, and opens the possibility of non-human types of becoming (in the terminology of Deleuze). Thus, it becomes necessary to stop and think about the scopes and consequences of this interface. However, the problem first requires to be stated in theoretical terms.
In doing so, one has to mention the so-called death or end of art, which - following Hegel - authors of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Arthur Danto (Danto, 1997), have converted into touchstone for an explanation of contemporary art, its crisis and transformations. There is no doubt the twentieth century experienced such a radical change in art forms that it had to also be accompanied by changes in the theoretical approaches used to explain it. In that sense, aesthetics, art history, art theory and critics have had to reformulate their concepts and theoretical frameworks to meet the challenge posed by contemporary art. The definition of art, or even the identification of an object as an artwork - a task earnestly taken up by philosophy of art in recent decades - seems to falter every minute, prey to a relentless pounding produced by the change and proliferation of artists and movements that lead art beyond itself, cause it to transcend itself and thus allow it to escape any defining or delimiting attempt.
What art is today is apparently one of the most pressing questions faced by philosophical aesthetics, which, in turn, has also been compelled to change and become more flexible, in order to propose cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary concepts and theoretical frameworks that are both permeable and mobile. The aesthetic becomes the transaesthetic1 and this position is used to define an art movement that insists on breaking every possible frontier that has to do both with its self and with its other. A high prestige discourse in many contemporary societies, the platform of art has worked to propose social and political alternatives; but also to expose and make visible what would otherwise remain occluded.
The death of art as a moment in which art vanishes in a multiplicity of aesthetic objects can be understood not only within art history and the opening represented by the vanguards of the the early twentieth century, who initiated the dissolution of traditional aesthetic forms that has become a feature of contemporary art; but also as an infinitely open multiplicity of configurations of the real, from perspectives that initially appear as aesthetic ones. The hyper-aestheticization and hyper-visualization of modern societies are largely the effect of the death of art.
Art and the aesthetic in general are also put at the service of multiple configurations of the real in very playful terms - aesthetic creations that are literally "for nothing", that neither claim to be objects of millennial contemplation, nor ideological points of social transformation, but rather a sway of creation that enjoys itself and has repudiated nineteenth-century metaphysical claims. Far from being the secular place of repose of the sacred, art dances with nimble feet, laughing (for it is not with anger, but with laughter that one kills, says Zarathustra) at the spirits
1 I take the term from Polona Tratnik, who recognized that "According to the new structural and functional orientations of science and rt, which is additionally becoming strongly intertwined with science, contemporary aesthetics as a form of science and as a philosophical discipline related to art has been changing as well." (Tratnik, 2010a, 545)
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of heaviness that still hope for something to save us from nihilism; still tend toward the great; still believe in the great values and that art might appear as the "magician who saves." Art vanishes in its infinite multiplicity, in its foolish reproduction - for a form in which something ceases to exist by reproducing itself until it becomes anything, unidentifiable, dissolving the border, becoming commonplace, ceasing to be the other (the other of the real ... But was there ever such a fictional entity as heterocosmos?)
Transforming and creating absolutely everything by all possible means seems to be one of the watchwords of the contemporary art world, that does not limit its scope of action to the delineations of traditional aesthetic objects, such as painting, sculpture, etc. Tratnik defines bioart "mostly through manipulation of living material, but also through an intervening discourse concerning biotechnology and the questions it raises." (Tratnik, 2008, 214)
In the absence of privileged aesthetic objects or topics, multiplicity seems to be unlimited. And here we are clearly seeing a process of secularization that may be briefly analyzed from the perspective of literature in which there is a secularizing movement represented by the first acceptance of the death of God and the birth of the subject: the divine order will remain in the background as opposed to the human order that finds its main foundation in the subject as an ontological and exteriological principle. When God becomes a mere guarantor of truth, of the adequation between concept and object, the first death of God takes place in modernity, when the central position previously occupied by God comes to be filled by the subject. It is the very moment at which the lives of ordinary human beings become worthy of being narrated rather than those of the gods or heroes who once enjoyed innate superiority. Little by little, the "hero" loses his divine attributes until he becomes human - all too human. But if the hero is humanized it is perhaps because the death of God is translated as an end to the need of the human to be covered with the divine mantle in order to be able to order the world (once the cogito ergo sum has taken place and the king becomes head of state, the gods flee, with Hölderlin, in times of penury).
With the madman of Nietzsche, secularization reaches its peak because God is dead and we have killed him, there is no up and there is no down, and characters that no longer can be referred to as "heroes" appear, such as Gregor Samsa or Clarissa Dalloway. The shadow of nihilism looms wherever the myth reappears with its full force; however, it is not any old "ass festival" (Zarathustra), but rather the manifestation of the realm of the sacred in the midst of so much immaculate secularization, cleaned by the positivist-oriented scientism, by epistemology and by analytical philosophy. The myth particularly reappears as art and is understood from the experience of the sacred - in Nietzsche, in Benjamin, in Heidegger, in Zambrano... As Vattimo states from this horizon: how to distinguish between art experience and religious-sacred
experience? The secularization of the disparagers of metaphysics becomes remythologization.
But contemporary art seems to resist this remythologization into which philosophy attempts to insert it. Art becomes trivialized, vanishes, becomes almost nothing, is reduced to its simplest expression: anything can be a work of art.
There are no privileged aesthetic objects or subjects either; if its means of representation has also been transformed, this implies a different classification of art. In his Poetics, Aristotle had already classified the arts in terms of their means of representation; from here it is possible to broach the question as to whether so-called "bioart" can be classified and considered as a different species.
Indeed, every time the discussion addresses the topic "bioart", the first thing theorists use to do is trying to classify it and delimit it, what art forms can be included within the bioart? Is it actually required a new sub-branch in the midst of so much artistic diversity that from a certain point of view appears already by itself as unclassifiable? Why should bioart deserve a different classification?
The manipulation of and intervention in living organisms for aesthetic purposes is not new. Dog breeds have undergone modification since early times; likewise with plants. But what does "for aesthetic purposes" mean here? In merely saying that bioart is something different because the manipulation that takes place is "artistic" or that it belongs to a "different aesthetic", nothing is actually being said. What happens is rather that we find ourselves confronted with one of the oldest discussions on aesthetics; but one that is nevertheless highly topical: where are the limits of aesthetics, where are the limits of art? How do we distinguish between art and non-art once the aesthetic parameter is no longervalid (and which, by the way, did not solve much in terms of the problem of the specificity of art either, beyond the mere notion of an arbitrary canon)?
We thus have, on the one hand, the problem that the classification problem of bioart is confronted with other techniques applied to the manipulation of living organisms for aesthetic purposes and, on the other - as regards the harsh problem of the definition of art -that to a large extent the debate has to do with the content of the representation itself, such that if the theme of a work addresses biological, medical, vital matters, it could be considered as bioart.
The classic definition of bioart - provided by Eduardo Kac - delimits it from the means, in the sense that "Bioart must be clearly distinguished from traditional art forms that exclusively use digital media to address biological themes, as in a painting or sculpture depicting a chromosome or a digital photograph suggesting cloned children. Bioart is in vivo." (Kac, 2006, 19) This definition has provided a lot of food for thought since it clearly restricts bioart to a representation by biotechnological means. For a process to biotechnologically manipulate living orga-
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nisms is not enough for it to be classified as art - as is the case with the manipulations of dogs and horses. The definition would have to take into account other aspects and engage in more strictly aesthetic terms, i.e., not only to think of the issue on the side of the "bio", but also on the side of the "art", and face without hesitation the question of what it is that makes of "X" a work or a process of art? By setting out the problem in such terms, all that Kac's definition seems to care to establish is that bioart is alive. It can be objected that the claim is very narrow due to its being parasitic on the prior identification of the work as art. We could also enquire whether the activity of drawing out a lengthy discussion on the definition of art has any value for bioart.
One of the authors who most recently discussed the issue is Robert Mitchell, who took up the issue in his paper Bioart and the Vitality of Media in which he attempts to delimit the field of bioart. With regard to themes and modes of representation, Mitchell proposes a distinction between "prophylactic art" and "vital art", that is to say from those arts that use traditional means (painting, sculpture, etc.) and those that are biologically mediated through a biotechnological intervention. Though, the focal point of this distinction does not lie mainly on the theme or the mode but rather on the kinds of problems it generates, for example, ethical and ontological. He says: "The point of employing authentic biotechnology is that immerses gallerygoers within alternative biotechnological practices. Thus, rather than seeking to protect gallerygoers from the effects of biotechnology, the vitalist tactic seeks to use spectators themselves as a means - or media -for generating new biotechnological possibilities [...] the prophylactic and the vitalist tactics of bioart often seems to map onto a difference between 'representation' and 'presentation'." (Mitchell, 2010, 28)
This definition of bioart thought in contextual rather than "ontological" terms, according to Mitchell himself - that is to say, not from the means of representation but rather from the relationships it creates between the audience and biotechnology - has some advantages. It is not about an "objective" distinction of art in the sense that it does not begin with the attributes of the "object" in order to define it as if it were something static that can be described and understood. He rather thinks of it from a relational and dynamic viewpoint, in which the "object" is not on its own sufficient; that is also necessary to include its affects, the audience, the context, etc.2
From a wider viewpoint that posits the work as an event, setting aside the subject as agent and cause of meaning and the object as container of the aesthetic attributes, the work appears as a process of interaction and
specifically as a field in which biotechnology interacts with the audience.
In this sense, he excludes bioart from what he calls "prophylactic art". There seems to be no parameter that can effectively delimit bioart to generate a critical perspective on biotechnology or any other theme since any such delimitation would also depend on the content of the representation.
Classifying works according to their contents can be a fruitful endeavor when it is a question of identifying trends and schools, e.g., pop-art, op-art, the Renaissance madonnas, etc. Bioart is not something that seems to fit into a readymade classification of movements or schools - although undoubtedly these will appear as more proposals appear in this field. In any case, it concerns a new mode of being of art.
I do not intend here to thoroughly discuss the different approaches to bioart and the classification and delimitation theorists have expressed in recent years thereof3 because the essential is not - in my opinion - to be given in any definition. Instead I will think of it as a new mode of being of art. In that sense, the examples given by Kac and Mitchell will suffice as guidance for the current schems given in the discussions. Though, it is worth emphasizing that they both share the same view about something: the non-representational character of bioart, i.e., for both of them bioart is not about representing biotechnological issues through "conventional" means, but producing in vivo biotechnological processes for aesthetic purposes. There is much left to be said about the understanding of mimesis contained in these definitions. It is very limited, in so far as they understand mimesis as re-presentation, i.e., a sort of reproduction of the originally given; and in so far as bioart does not reproduce anything (does not copy any original) it cannot be defined in representational terms. But let us ask ourselves: could art ever been understood as the copy of an original or as reproductive re-presentation of what has previously been given? The in vivo argument is obtuse because we cannot pretend to think the creative possibilities of art over from their means of representation; even less can we draw a line between the art of presentation and the art of representation from such parameters. In any case, mimesis implies a creative and transforming activity.4
We must then further enquire as to the consequences and the scopes of referring to bioart as a new mode of being of art.
Let us once again make use of Hegel's historic perspective to pinpoint the problem. The arts are not a peremptory system; their rise and fall corresponds with the development of the spirit. Hegel has provided the aesthe-
2	A good example of "vitalist art" would be Free Range Grain by Critical Art Ensemble, with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu, since it allows seeing authentically the involvement of the audience in biotechnology.
3	For a wider discussion about bioart definitions (Anker, Nelkin, 2004; Gessert, 2010).
4	For more references about the issue mimesis and representation, see González Valerio, 2010.
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tic with a historicist point of view, from which the arts can be understood not in terms of a presumed aesthetic autonomy but rather in terms of the bond and correspondence they have with the "spirit of an epoch." Certainly, a diagnosis of the spirit of an epoch - the objectification of a given present - is difficult.Nevertheless, we could enquire about some of the features that enable the rise and decline of certain arts. The efforts of R. Mitchell in his distinction of bioart have doubtlessly the good guess of linking bioart to the social characteristics that permit it.
Much has been said about the death of art (Hegel), on the one hand, and about the end of the mimetic epoch of art (Danto), on the other. In this context, it can be sustained despite the decline and, in my opinion, the almost inevitable disappearance of certain modes of being of art, i.e., not of streams, themes or objects, but modes of being. Evidently, the classical tragedy does not exist any more and if it does it is only as an anachronism or a token of bad taste. The same is true of neoclassical architecture. However what happens if a mode of art disappears?
Painting is a mode of art in the process of dying out. Beyond the conditions that permit that extinction, such as photography (a "faithful" and instantaneous picture of the "real") and video (motion pictures), we can say that given the hyper-visualization of contemporary societies and the empire of the image via light, the painting has almost no place, hardly appears in biennials, museums of contemporary art, etc. There are modes of being of art that disappear while others that emerge. From which directions can we think the emerging of bioart?
Biotechnology and techno-science more generally are both phenomena that transform all of the real or the all-real. Our epochality occurs largely transformed by techno-science, which generates specific conditions (Linares, 2008). Art could not remain unchanged. Much has been discussed about the influence of new technologies in the current artistic developments, but beyond the fact that art may make use of the technologic (and moreover, that it has always seized upon the developments in technique), what we are here interested in is being able to consider up to which point techno-science - being a distinctive characteristic of our epochality - would be linked to the appearance of a new mode of being of art, in which biotechnologically manipulates organisms for aesthetic and / or artistic purposes - and because of which to think that any work containing as thematic problems derived from biotechnology could not be classified in terms of bioart, but only the in terms of the manipulation of living organisms.
Needless to say, the great aesthetic-ontological reflections of the twentieth century have been overtaken
by these phenomena. I think particularly of Heidegger, the strife between world and earth, his examples of the Greek temple, the picture by Van Gogh, the poetry by Hölderlin ... Of course, Heidegger meditated long on technique and the technical occurring of being from the Gestell, but bioart does not fit neither in the Gestell, nor in the metaphysical-ontological claims of being the occurrence of the truth. But here is not the place to discuss further these proposals. It is necessary however to point out that from the topology and history of being it is necessary to reflect on contemporary art movements that seem to involve both the ontological as well as the aesthetic - and not all movements have this capability. That is to say, I do not think that the breakup of contemporary art and the theoretical problems it has generated necessarily become involved in something like that. If in front of the balls punched by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (Balones acelerados, 2005) or Damien Hirsts installations the pretended definitions of art seem to falter along with the classic aesthetic category of mimesis, they do not seem to require a suitable or appropriate onto-aesthetic framework. Finally, these type of transformations that have to do with the object and the theme of the representation in their definitory difficulties continue within the paradigm of art-whatever-and within art institutions, being theses either museums or streets.
But something different happens with bioart. The manipulation of living organisms using biotechnology not only opens moral, political and legal debates, but even ontology-aesthetics seems to be directly appealed to.
With the normalizing society, power took possession of life, but today bio-power is even more strongly at work since "regenerative medicine as the knowledge-power [is] opening a new horizon for bio-power." (Tratnik, 2012, 18) When eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism incorporated life and living processes, it caused a revolution whose echo still resonates in our present. The means and modes of representation, though, used to be traditional; painting, music and poetry dedicated to the breakup of the canon and the death of poetics -as suggested by Victor Hugo - were still art in the metaphysically understood highest sense - perhaps higher than ever. Undoubtedly, life, just as understood by artistic and philosophical romanticism coupled with the death of God, was to break many of the classical concepts and would make imminent the appearance of aesthetic ontologies, as in Hegel and Nietzsche. But life was here an object of representation, on the one hand and, on the other, mimesis physeos. Life is now both the mode of art and the locus where art happens.5 Romanticism could never imagine up to what point life could imply so radical
5 But the way in which life is incorporated into art nowadays will and must evolve; it will be possible to manipulate life in a larger scale. For example, Joe Davis foresees that: "In the course of time, artists will find themselves engaged in much more ambitious projects. Their involvement with the techniques of molecular genetics and molecular biology can be expected to increase as the technology itself, understandings of genetics, and, now, human genomics also advance. Soon, works of art will be created at the scale of many genes, even whole genomes." (Davis, 2 0 06, 262)
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a revolution in the field of art. With bioart, it seems that there is nothing left of the old paradigms, there is no beauty6 (sometimes, the feelings bound up with bioart are of repugnance; for example, the images of Polona Tratnik's project Hair (Tratnik, 2010c) cause disgust in the audience due to the close-ups of operations to remove hair from donors); there is neither embodied sense, nor significant form; in any case sometimes it allows a reading of a surplus of everything, in which the question what-for seems to skirt the reflection - what-for the fluorescent rabbit by Eduardo Kac? (Kac, 2000)
But if ontology-aesthetics is appealed to directly, it means that thinking of bioart from aesthetics is in itself not sufficient; and neither suffice the considerations from its mobility, heterogeneity, heteronomy, flexibility and hybridization, as suggested by the term "transart" coined by Tratnik (Tratnik, 2010b) to refer the art that exceeds contemporary determinations. The panorama of reflection from the ontological perspective has to do with the aforementioned secularization and with the techno-sci-entific world view, which are not social phenomena that describe an epoch, a certain present with its characteristic tinges, but rather different kinds of reality (or the Geschick of being), and wherein something like bioart has its place. Once again, Hegel provides the tone; for, within his system, the issue is not to accompany the art movements with the historicized data of a determined present, but to bring movements in art into sync with those of the spirit.
In bioart, life appears in its highest grade of secularization. Just as literature is enworlded until it narrates the less extraordinary, causing also the disappearing of the sacred - whose last redoubt emerged in the romantic
poetry (nature is a temple... Baudelaire), visual arts also co-present today with the disappearance of the sacred in life, no longer seen from the viewpoint of the artist (Nietzsche) but from that of the techno-science.
What happens when that which is alive loses every semblance of sacrality and when any teleological consideration is obnubilated?
If techno-science has permitted the manipulation and intervention of living organisms for scientific and pragmatic purposes, its peak is represented by bioart, in which such manipulation no longer is justified by the search for something better - for example, more knowledge about agricultural improvements - but it rather concerns the pure uselessness of art. Contemplation of the beauty inherent in nature has vacated its place for the creation of the live art, in vivo, to occupy it.
What is the image of the world that corresponds to this epochality? It would have at least two fundamental features: the conversion of the real into image (the hyper-visualization and hyper-aestheticization of contemporary large cities) and the manipulation and intervention of the real using technological means. If, as Hegel points out, art is the most intimate of the people, then we find in bioart the image of this world, a pristine token of the opening of the real, in which once again the aesthetic is the summit of the theoretical and the practical, because it is marked by the game of freedom.
If ontology-aesthetics is being challenged, what is still is missing is to take charge of the bioart in this sense, to think of the dislocations of the real occurring from there, the configurations of spaces-times, the modes of being. For the time being, it suffices to indicate the road.
6 In any case, it is worth to mention the efforts of Sixto Castro, the Spanish aesthetician, who is the main upholder of the paradigm of beauty in art, a position that deserve to be taken into account from the challenges that bioart opens (Castro, 2009).
María Antonia GONZALEZ VALERIO: BIOART ON THE VERGE OF AESTHETIC ONTOLOGY, 327-334
bioumetnost na robu estetske ontologije
María Antonia GONZÁLEZ VALERIO Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Circuito Interior Ciudad Universitaria,
s/n. C.P. 04510, México, D.F. e-mail: mariantonia@magonzalezvalerio.com
Poseganje v žive organizme in manipuliranje z njimi ne predstavljata novosti. Bioumetnost je oblika umetnosti in vivo, za katero je značilno manipuliranje z živimi organizmi in poseganje vanje v estetske namene. V bioumetno-sti se prepletajo umetnost, znanost in tehnologija. Pričujoči prispevek zagovarja tezo, da prav ta prepletenost, ki vključuje manipuliranje z živimi organizmi, predstavlja novo umetniško obliko, ki jo je treba problematizirati, če želimo razumeti njene ontološke in estetske posledice. Ker bioumetnost ne postavlja pod vprašaj samo definicije klasične in tradicionalne umetnosti, ampak tudi to, kako konfiguriramo in razumevamo realnost (naravo in kulturo), njene posledice presegajo meje filozofije umetnosti.
Prispevek predlaga estetsko ontologijo kot okvir za obravnavo bioumetnosti, saj je iz tega vidika mogoče analizirati umetnost v širšem pogledu, ki vključuje tako estetska vprašanja, kot so definicija umetnosti in estetska sredstva, kot tudi ontološke probleme, kot je konfiguracija prostora in časa.
Izhodišče za nadaljnjo obravnavo je klasična Heglova teza o koncu umetnosti, saj ne podaja samo sredstva za razumevanje umetnosti kot estetskega problema, temveč tudi v povezavi z zgodovino in razvojem duha. S tega vidika zagovarjam trditev, da je bioumetnost umetniški izraz tehnološko-znanstvene dobe in da jo je treba obravnavati kot specifično posledico prepletanja umetnosti, znanosti in tehnologije.
Prav tako analiziram dve različni definiciji bioumetnosti: klasično definicijo, ki jo podaja Eduardo Kac, in sodobnejšo definicijo, ki jo ponuja Robert Mitchell. Ob tem zagovarjam stališče, da nobena izmed ponujenih definicij ne zadostuje za razumevanje bioumetnosti kot pojava, ki ustvarja prostore in čase v različnih pomenih, onkraj moderne in tradicionalne ideologije, ki dislocira fiksne in monadične identitete, vključno z nacionalnimi identitetami in identitetami posameznikov, deteritorializira/ponovno teritorializira z ustvarjanjem novih kartografij in konceptov in odpira možnost nečloveškega postajanja (v terminologiji Gillesa Deleuza).
Prispevek se zaključi z ugotovitvijo, da če bioumetnost ne predstavlja zgolj nove umetniške oblike, ampak tudi čedalje bolj prisoten način življenja umetnosti, potem je estetska ontologija najbolj primerno teoretično izhodišče za preučevanje in pojasnjevanje bioumetnosti.
Ključne besede: bioumetnost, estetska ontologija, definicija umetnosti, transestetika, umetnost in znanost
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