Critical + Cultural Studies/Dynamic Media

Working with current methodologies of art, biology, and genetic technologies, the stated aims of artists working in this area include attempts both to critique the implications and outcomes of genetic technologies and to forge a new art practice involved in creating living beings using those technologies. It is this last ambition, the development of a new art practice involved in creating living beings, that this essay will particularly take to task by questioning the ethics of that goal and the uses of biotechnology in reaching it.

This dialogue concerns the nature of ethical responsibility in contemporary art practice, and its relation to questions of creativity; the role of writing in shaping the perception of transgenic art and related practices; and the problems that may be associated with trusting artists to act with integrity in the unchartered waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic technologies.

This dialogue concerns the nature of ethical responsibility in contemporary art practice, and its relation to questions of creativity; the role of writing in shaping the perception of transgenic art and related practices; and the problems that may be associated with trusting artists to act with integrity in the unchartered waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic technologies.

Annie Potts has curated a particularly strong and essential group of perspectives on ‘meat culture,’ described here as a coherent framework within which exist ‘a wide range of domains of production and consumption of animals.’ Meat Culture distinguishes itself in its clearheaded focus on the centrality of the misery and slaughter of animals without which the culture of eating meat would not exist. This journal article is available in Animal Studies Journal: https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol6/iss2/13

The aim of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is to provide a space for the development of a ―critical‖ approach to animal studies, one which perceives that relations between human and nonhuman animals are now at a point of crisis which implicates the planet as a whole. This dire situation is evident most dramatically in the intensified slaughter and exploitation of animals (who die by the tens of billions each year in the United States alone); the unfolding of the sixth great extinction crisis in the history of the planet (the last one being 65 million years ago); and the monumental environmental ecological threats of global warming, rainforest destruction, desertification, air and water pollution, and resource scarcity, to which animal agriculture is a prime contributor.

My grandmother sailed with her father, step-mother, and siblings from Abruzzo, Italy to Ellis Island, New York in 1908, where she officially immigrated to the US. She was twelve. Like a war veteran, she was taciturn about her past, giving us few details about her previous life in Italy. Perhaps because of that reticence, I have harbored an intense desire to experience and understand the land where she was born. Although only 2

change was the order of the day. From not receiving a spam call on every hour to trying to figure out what a "garburator" was (a garbage disposal), I had no doubt I was in a different country. Although I had lived in relatively rural areas in the US, it was exhilarating to discover how easy it was to see raccoons, bald eagles, bears, skunks, beavers, sea lions, seals, and of course coyotes in Vancouver's city center and surrounding neighborhoods. My favorite moment with a coyote was when my dog, Copernicus, and I stepped out the front door in the early dusk to see a large coyote loping along the street in front of us. He turned his head to look our way as he passed and gave us a "Wasup?" As the coyote floated away, it slowly began to dawn on