The Pig Wings Project
by the Tissue Culture & Art Project
March 8 — May 25, 2003
Opening Reception: Friday, March 14, from 6-8 pm
In 2001, the Tissue Culture & Art Project, a group of artists from Perth, Australia, were invited by Dr. Joseph Vacanti of the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School to be artists-in-residence. There, emulating their hosts, they embarked on a program to create sculpture out of living tissue. The Pig Wings Project documents the first-ever wing-shaped objects grown using living pig tissue.
Deciphering the human genetic code, and the creation of genetically modified pigs for the purpose of transplanting their organs into to humans, opens up a space for the creation of ambiguous chimeras. The Pig Wings Project was set to explore this space. Winged bodies (both animal and human) have been used in most cultures and throughout history. Usually, the kind of wings represented the creature (chimeras) as either good/angelic (bird-wing) or evil/satanic (bat-wing), although there is a third solution to flight in vertebrates which seems to be mostly free of cultural values—that of the Pterosaurs. The organizers behind this installation have used tissue engineering and stem cell technologies in order to grow pig bone tissue in the shape of these three sets of wings.
The Tissue Culture & Art Project deals with serious ethical questions regarding a near future when objects that are partly alive and partly constructed exist, and when animal organs will be transplanted into humans. What kind of relationships we will form with such objects? How are we going to treat animals with human DNA? How will we treat humans with animal parts? What will happen when these technologies will be used for purposes other then strictly saving life?
The Tissue Culture & Art Project team members are Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, and Guy Ben-Ary, in collaboration with Adam Zaretsky of MIT. DeCordova's Curator of New Media George Fifield is site coordinator for The Pig Wings Project.
This installation is also part of The 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival, which will take place from April 26 through May 10, 2003. The Festival highlights artists working with new technologies in all media and includes exhibits, performances, screenings, and lectures and symposia at sites both in Greater Boston and on the Web. Detailed information about this festival is available online at www.bostoncyberarts.org.
