œuvre 1
Bioteknica,
(Shawn BAILEY and Jennifer WILLET) (Canada/Quebec), 2000-present
BIOTEKNICA, OR THE DRAMA OF SCIENCE
"Thomas Diafoirus:
With the permission of this gentleman, I invite you to come one of these days to amuse yourself by assisting at the dissection of a woman upon whose body I am to give lectures.
Toinette:
The treat will be most welcome. There are some who give the pleasure of seeing a play to their lady-love; but a dissection is much more gallant."
Molière, Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), Act II, Scene 51
Bioteknica is a biotech corporation. It is also a fictitious one, its fiction backed by advertising blurbs boasting the company's merits (and outrageous promises), corporate videos, scientists in lab coats and masks, retorts, scalpels, microscopes, tumours, growths, and other vaguely recognizable organic specimens. The "scientists" are in fact dressed-up artists Jennnifer Willet and Shawn Bailey, and the "tumours" are sculptures, either material - fashioned from such things as pieces of waste meat from supermarkets - or virtual - created in the virtual lab accessed from the Web site.
Its clinical appearance and corporate jargon perfectly rendered, Bioteknica can nonetheless fool some of its clientele - and it has.2).
Chance visitors discovering the Web site out of context are all the more susceptible. One has to explore the site extensively before discovering the "hoax."3
Irony and parody are obviously at work here, resulting in a pointed and effective critique of the biotech sphere and its commercial exploitation, its promises - and its menace (like the temptation, or spectre, of human cloning, or eugenics).
Yet this is not only, or simply, a question of parody or irony: the work in this case may appear amusing, and incisive, but still rather limited in its subject matter.4
Irony and criticism alone could not explain the artists' long-term and ongoing engagement with the material over the last several years, including research and study internships in "real" laboratories, under the supervision of "real" biologists, mucking in the "real" stuff - life's primordial soup. This is no longer simply parody, no longer just metaphor.
There's more here: basically, a dark fascination with scientific procedures and devices - now practically inseparable from the business of science -, a fascination shared, in fact, by the general public and the scientists themselves. This isn't new, and science has often - and often sensationally - counted on it.
Thus, the scientist, and the character of the scientist - with their instruments, seemingly esoteric formula, creations, and creatures - continue to be part not only of culture but also of science itself, participating in its healing or persuasive power.
And it is often a question of "theatrical" characters, of "types" that one is as likely to find on stage as off. Here, reality and fiction, man and disguise, merge. I'll mention only, in no particular order: the doctors dressed up as weird birds as they dealt with the plague in the Middle Ages; the trappings and getup of court doctors under Louis XIV, with their lancets and clysters; the bearded, positive, and omniscient doctor of the Belle Époque; and finally the modern, efficient, aseptic, hurried doctor with white lab coat and dangling stethoscope. To give a particularly special example, think of Einstein, transformed into popular myth, the very incarnation of the scientist, of science itself - his brain thought of as "exceptional" -, a perception that he playfully nurtured himself, of course, like so many of his forerunners.5
Roland Barthes wrote about the fabrication of that very myth in his (aptly named) Mythologies ("Le cerveau d'Einstein").
From Molière to Jules Romains, from James Whale to Jean-Jacques Jeunet (Alien Resurrection) - and now, at Bioteknica - authors and artists6 have regularly staged these characters, sometimes with deference (Doctor Benassis, in Balzac's Le médecin de campagne), but often with distrust - Doctor Frankenstein, Doctor Jekill, Doctor Moreau - or derision - Diafoirus, Knock, or even the pharmacist Homais, a caricature of pretentious, overblown (pseudo) scientific 19th-century positivism in Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
One could find more examples and make out general types - the distracted one, the ecstatic, the lab rat, the visionary, the mad scientist…
If I've spoken here of the person's or the character's place in science and in the representation of science rather than of scientific theory - which has its own manifestations and reversals, of course -, it's because Bioteknica highlights the manipulations of science rather than the theoretical work as such: the manipulations in the laboratory - sample extraction, incisions, examinations, amalgams, transmutations, etc -, but also the manipulations, whether real or possible, in business.
Not surprising then that Bioteknica's purely "formal" works - whether made up of "real," tangible material, like meat, or the virtual construction of visitors to their Web laboratory7 - are inseparable from the larger, and eminently theatrical mechanism surrounding them: the performances, leaflets, videos, Web site, corporate fiction, etc, not least of which are the artists themselves and the characters they play - the perfect incarnation perhaps of our Zeitgeist's "cutting-edge" image of geneticists, tracking the "secret of life."
Indeed, genetics and its possible biotechnical uses and abuses seem to have supplanted physics and Einstein's theory of relativity as figurehead of the "scientific" in the general public's imagination.
I am not implying that science is itself a mystification! And that isn't what Bioteknica artists are saying.
What's suggested, rather, is that while science certainly has its roots in philosophy and the observation of nature, in what has been called the "Greek miracle," it also owes a lot to religion, magic, the occult, alchemy, astrology, and even to art. In other words, scientific thinking and the rationality underlying it also have to do (and often do battle) with the imagination, with reverie (in Bachelard's terms), and the unconscious, in short, with irrationality; the whole history of science, its discoveries and progress, is a long and continuous process of disengagement from that very irrationality - and from the illusion of the senses, misleading as always, and of common sense, no less misleading. But there's often a "resurfacing of the suppressed," or of the unthinkable, both in theory (which is why the work is never-ending), and at the level of culture and media: the image, the public perception, the expectations and promises elicited by science.8
Thus the objects of science - along with its gestures, effects, and applications - are never altogether pure (of irrational, or imaginary, dross).
All in all, what Bioteknica brings to light is the dream of science - and science as dream, our dream and, sometimes, our nightmare. And, by "mucking about" with stuff in "real" labs, the Bioteknica artists are only striving to approach, to touch, the material (in the Freudian sense of the word) of this dream, of which their works are clearly elaborations.
Notes
1 : Translation: Charles Heron Wall. 
2 : Victoria Laurie, Put on the lab coats, bring on the clones: "Perusing a public stand displaying BIOTEKNICA's brochure and computer website, an intrigued would-be investor asked an attendant if the company was listed on the stock exchange. He was taken aback when told that Bioteknica was a fiction, the grisly product a digitally enhanced work of art. He was standing in an art gallery."
in The Australian, Australia, October 01, 2004.
See Bioteknica press kit, available on the website).
3 : No hoax, of course, as a clearly visible notice tells visitors of the corporation's fictitious status.
4 : By no means am I implying that the ironic and critical aspects of Bioteknica are insignificant - far from it: this facet of their work has been amply covered (see the texts in the press kit available on their Web site). But the debate is a complex one, as Bioteknica artists are the first to admit (cf. S. Bailey); the issues at stake - biological, ethical, political, economic - are significant, and a simple response (either blindly and madly enthusiastic, or too negative and pessimistic) would obviously be too easy.
5 : Often for a noble cause, as when Einstein used his fame to warn people about the dangers of the nuclear technology.
6 : Especially, of course, in literature, theatre, cinema, which are more conducive to drama - and comedy.
7 : The visitor, too, may "play scientist"!
8 : This argument is of course inspired by Gaston Bachelard.
See, among other writings, Le nouvel esprit scientifique and La philosophie du non.
Anne-Marie Boisvert
(Translated from French by Ron Ross)
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