“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

“Lab Grown Bespoke Materials”


Amy Congdon has taken up a residency at SymbioticA in Perth, where I gave a talk last year. She's studying possibilities of using tissue samples to grow tissue using bio-inkjet printing.

Would you wear lab grown ivory? Or eat lab grown meat? My first reaction to both is no. I'm not yet sure of all the reasons, and I haven't thought it through very much. But I have a negative reaction to the idea of preserving the fantasy along with the fantasy support, in both cases, perhaps in an even purer form since both items are now definitely human made.

There's a Firesign Theater piece, an ad for “plump, sugar fed meat” that I recall.

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