10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17405
application/pdf
2038-3460
17405
2
en
Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
NoArk (Cover’s Comment)
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Editorial
2019-01-31
2023-06-25
2019-01-31
2023-08-31
TS
Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr
2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17405
2038-3460
2
en
NoArk (Cover’s Comment)
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17405/16263
9
                                                     Cover’s comment


NoArk (2007) by The Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat
Zurr) in collaboration with Marcus Canning.

NoArk is a research project exploring the taxonomical crisis that is pre-
sented by life forms created through biotechnology. NoArk takes form as
an experimental vessel designed to maintain and grow a mass of living
cells and tissues that originated from a number of different organisms.
This vessel serves as a surrogate body to the collection of living fragments,
and is a tangible as well as symbolic ‘craft’ for observing and understand-
ing a biology that combines the familiar with the other.
As opposed to classical methodologies of collection, categorization and
display that are seen in Natural History museums, contemporary biologi-
cal research is focused around manipulation and hybridization, and rarely
takes a public form.
To create NoArk we used cellular stock taken from tissue banks, labora-
tories, museums and other collections. NoArk contains a chimerical ‘blob’
made out of modified living fragments of a number of different organisms,
living, in a techno-scientific body. In a sense, we are making a unified
collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms.
Like the cabinets of curiosity that preceded the natural history museum’s
refined taxonomy so we hope that NoArk will be a symbolic precursor to
a new way of approaching the made nature.

https://tcaproject.net/
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/
