The unnatural relations between artistic research and ethics committees
an artist's perspective
pp. 201-210
in: Paul Macneill (ed), Ethics and the arts, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
In this chapter we discuss case studies involving proposals for artistic research projects for working with living material and we follow the ways in which the project proposals were engaged with, challenged and dealt with by the ethics committees involved. It is our view that artistic research, involving hands-on engagement with the tools of the life sciences, challenge perceptions and create a zone for discussion about our changing relations to life as material for manipulation. There is a tension between artistic research and the "cost benefit" analysis governing the Universities ethics committees, that creates situations which shed light on some of the ethical and philosophical questions contemporary society deals with. There is an increase in the use of living matter as technology, and in treating life as a raw material that can be manipulated and engineered. Human relationship to life is increasingly confronted with our ability to intervene at all levels of the life processes. Just as engineers are entering the field of the life sciences to offer engineering solutions and utilitarian applications, so should artists, who offer non-utilitarian artefacts and gestures, participate in this field to problematise, provoke and subvert those dominant understandings and uses of living material.