Flesh Machine and Mutant Bodies: Lab-Grown Life in Australian Feminist BioArt

 This paper will examine recent works in Australian feminist bioart—by Nina Sellars, Svenja Kratz and Tarsh Bates (amongst others)—which reflect critically and creatively on the relationship between life and technology at the start of the twenty-first century. It will consider the contributions these works have to make to recent scholarship in feminist science studies, and particularly Australian feminist science studies. The work of the labbased artists examined in this paper asks important questions about what it means to care for organisms we usually try to eradicate (like candida), or how we might include within the anatomical imaginary bodily matter that has traditionally been excluded from it (like fat), or how to recognise the people and animals now reduced to immortal cell lines in petri dishes, the ghosts of the modern laboratory. This paper will examine the central role mutant bodies and lab-grown life occupy in Australia feminist bioart, as hybrid semi-living techno-organisms, and argue that mutation here is deployed as a critical and creative methodology by which to intervene in the contemporary rhetoric and practice of bioscience.