What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media, and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach. Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.

What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media, and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach. Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.

Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation scrutinises the form of the recipe, using it as a means to explore a multitude of subjects in post-war Western art and culture, including industrial mass-production, consumerism, hidden labour, and art engaged with the everyday. Each chapter is presented as a dish in a nine-course meal, drawing on examples from published cookbooks and the work of artists such as Alison Knowles, Yoko Ono, Annette Messager, Martha Rosler, Barbara T. Smith, Bobby Baker and Mika Rottenberg. A recipe is an instruction, the imperative tone of the expert, but this constraint can offer its own kind of potential. A recipe need not be a domestic trap but might instead offer escape – something to fantasise about or aspire to. It can hold a promise of transformation both actual and metaphorical. It can be a proposal for action, or envision a possible future.

The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ideas through food in a variety of scenarios. Beginning from a focus on the body and subjectivity, the authors zoom out to look at the domestic sphere, and finally the public sphere. Here are essays that study a range of artists including, among others, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Dieter Roth, Joseph Beuys, Al Ruppersberg, Alison Knowles, Martha Rosler, Robin Weltsch, Vicki Hodgetts, Paul McCarthy, Luciano Fabro, Carries Mae Weems, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Janine Antoni, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Liza Lou, Tom Marioni, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, and Natalie Jeremijenko.

An exploration of food, ingestion, and digestion in the emerging field of the metabolic arts. Food appears everywhere in the arts. But what happens after viewers carry food away in the intestinal networks activated by social practice art, the same way digestion turns food into a body? Exploring the emerging field of metabolic arts, After Eating claims digestion and metabolism as key cultural, creative, and political processes that demand attention. Taking an artist-centered approach to nutrition, Lindsay Kelley cultivates a neglected middle ground between the everyday and the scientific, using metabolism as a lens through which to read and write about art. Divided into two parts and full of playful chapter titles such as “Food Babies” and “Poop Circus,” After Eating investigates multiple facets of the sociocultural implications of body image and body process in body art from the 1970s to the present. By engaging the notion of “after” as an artistic homage or tribute, metabolism moves beyond the cell to transform into a method for responding to the most difficult cultural, philosophical, and political challenges of the contemporary moment. Metabolic reading rethinks feminist, queer, bioart, installation, and performance projects, providing artists, students, and teachers with new pathways into art theory.

This volume critically investigates current topics and disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies.

Curating Lively Objects explores the role of things as catalysts in imagining futures beyond disciplines for museums and exhibitions. Authors describe how their curatorial collaborations with diverse objects, from rocks to robots, generate new ways of organising and sharing knowledge. Bringing together leading artists and curators from Australia and Canada, this volume addresses object liveliness from a range of entwined perspectives, including new materialism, decolonial thinking, Indigenous epistemologies, environmentalism, feminist critique and digital aesthetics. Foregrounding practice-based curatorial scholarship, the book focuses on rigorous reflexive accounts of how curating is done. It contributes to global topics in curatorial research, including time and memory beyond and before disciplinarity; the relationship between human and non-human across different ontologies; and the interaction between Indigenous knowledge and disciplinary expertise in interpreting museum collections. Curating Lively Objects will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of curatorial studies, museum studies, cultural heritage, art history, Indigenous studies, material culture and anthropology. It also provides a vital resource for professionals working in museums and galleries around the world who are seeking to respond creatively, ethically and inclusively to the challenge of changing disciplinary boundaries.

A long overdue look at the artistic investigations of the late artist Beatriz da Costa, revealing the depth and prescience of her work. Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics is the most comprehensive documentation and analysis to date of late artist Beatriz da Costa’s (1974–2012) groundbreaking work. As a retrospective of a brilliant young artist, it renders a social portrait of her artistic practice by both contextualizing the work in its historical period (late 1990s to early 2010s) and extending the work’s socio-political concerns to the present. The book, edited by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, features a collection of essays by curators, artists, and researchers from a variety of fields, including technoscience, tactical media, cancer research, environmental justice, performance art, and participatory art. It also includes a group of reflections written by former collaborators and close friends. Beginning with da Costa’s early projects in the late 1990s as a student in the arts and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, the book surveys her collaborative work with collectives Critical Art Ensemble and Preemptive Media, as well as her research-based and large-scale installations made in the early 2000s. The publication is a faithful record of da Costa’s entire oeuvre, including information about artworks she left incomplete due to financial, health, or time limitations. Additionally, the book includes da Costa’s own critical writing on art and politics, as well as self-authored descriptions of her own work and an unflinching interview with cancer researcher Robert Schneider, who was a fundamental figure for da Costa at the end of her young life. The book accompanies a solo exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in 'the material' in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of 'critical description' with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in political and artistic practices, in order to address global ecological change. The chapters in this edited volume challenge scholars to attend more carefully to the ways in which they think about soil, both materially and theoretically. Contributors address a range of topics, including new ways of thinking about the politics of caring for soils; the ecological and symbiotic relations between soils; how the productive capacities and contested governance of soils are deployed as matters of political concern; and indigenous ways of knowing and being with soil.