As a child, art featured heavily in my life and my professional career began with a different direction. However, since joining the University of the West of Scotland, I have been reconnected with this dimension of my interests and, partly by chance and partly by design, my work has become immersed in some of the most avant garde art practices one is ever likely to find.
While aesthetics and creativity have been central to my life since beginning a PhD, the relationship between art practice and my ethical inquiries into body modification have been brought together only since around 2003. I launched an undergraduate course titled ‘Becoming Posthuman’ within which students studied how artists – live, performance, visual – have undertaken some kind of biological design process as part of their work. From 2005, I was guest lecturing at the Glasgow School of Art and subsequently at the Royal College of Art on the emerging concept of ‘bioart’.
While not all of my peers regard this concept favourably, it adequately captures how my present research articulates with art and design practice. In 2008, I became involved with FACT in Liverpool and Edited their most ambitious book ‘Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty’, which was connected to their 2008 Human Futures programme, an extraordinary year of exhibitions and performances.
Since then, I have become involved with a number of bioartists and biodesigners, often working as adviser to projects, most recently Gina Czarnecki’s solo exhibition at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. My own thoughts in this area are still progressing, but I have built up a number of texts that address the relationship between bioethics and bioart, along with arts role as a form of public engagement with science.
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