Giving (Real) Life to Art

With its slanted skylights and attic atmosphere, the room adheres to the idea of an artist's loft. The space has a creative calm, and art literature is strewn around - a Caravaggio exhibition invite here, a Venice Biennale catalog there. But it doesn't take long to realize that the 11 resident artists here are different from the norm. There are no easels, kilns or sculptor's busts. Next to room 222 protein facility, in the University of Western Australia's school of anatomy and human biology, visitors to SymbioticA, an arts and science research lab, are greeted by the sign: make absolutely sure the door is locked. Visitors beware: there are things in here to make your hair curl - literally. SymbioticA director Stuart Bunt, a neuroscientist specializing in recording the visual systems of fish, is preparing for the arrival of a dozen or so international biotech artists for an exhibition in September - including a Japanese artist attempting to get through Customs a quantity of light-emitting, genetically modified moss. "The things they need to set up are not the typical things you need in an art gallery," Bunt explains. "People say, I want three bales of hay, or I want six ounces of some obscure protein which feeds whatever thing they're growing."

But the core of their activity, and what has brought SymbioticA to world attention, is the semi-living tissue culture works of artistic director Oron Catts, 37, and his partner Ionat Zurr, 34. Since SymbioticA opened in 2000, they've grown animal cells into Petri dishsized sculptures of wings, dolls, even hamburgers. For this, the blue-lab-coatgarbed artists use the tools of science: culturing their easily contaminated cells under sterile hoods, feeding them on nutrient solutions, and coaxing them to grow along polymer scaffolding in womb-like bioreactors. Their expertise is sought the world over - last March, Catts was invited to speak at London's Tate Modern - while their creations, or "babies," have appeared in the pages of the New York Times. While Catts self-deprecatingly describes their skills as "somewhere between being a gardener, a chef and a bartender," collaborator Bunt says: "I don't think there's anybody now who knows more about the practical aspect of tissue engineering of small organs than Ionat and Oron." Being able to consult daily with tissue-culture leaders such as burns surgeon Fiona Wood makes Perth their perfect laboratory. "It's an unusual convergence of both people and place," explains Bunt, "in that Perth has less cultural resistance to new things, as well as being more of a big village."

With amazing reach. For proof, audiences need look no further than the doodling robotic arm of meart, at Melbourne's Australian Centre of the Moving Image until Sept. 12. A collaboration between SymbioticA and the Potter Group in the U.S., the arm is activated via the Internet by live recordings of fish neurons cultured in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia. SymbioticA's American association goes back to 2000, when Catts, Zurr and colleague Guy Ben-Ary spent a year at the pioneering tissue engineering lab of Harvard professor Joseph Vacanti, famous for growing a human-scale ear on the back of a mouse. The fruit of that residency was The Pig Wings Project, where for nine months the team grew 2.5-cm bird, bat and reptile wings out of pig cells in an ironic response to the Human Genome Project. (The remains, bathed in led lights, are now on display at Madrid's La Casa Encendida until October 3.)