Abstract

Bioart, even in its most material definition, entails a critical discourse on the use of technologies. The aim is to produce an experience, an image or a discourse that is able to decenter the viewers’ perception and, if possible, bring them to question their own practice. As Deborah Dixon’s framing of the critical stakes of bioart with Jacques Rancière’s philosophy, aesthetics, by virtue of their ability to «redistribute the visible and the sensible », are inherently political. As far as biotechnologies are concerned, their use, meaning and ethical limits are drawn by the companies who use them and patent them. Their participation in the capitalist economy can be questioned from the point of view of recent postcapitalist theories, that displace the Marxian concept of infrastructure from capital to technics, following Jacques Ellul’s understanding of the «technician system». Bioart’s claims for paradigmatic changes and perceptual redefinitions are an attempt at drafting a new ethics, one that is adapted to the omnipresence of technics within our capitalist society. Using a few significant examples, this paper examinates how bioart relates to the current situation, and how the «criticality» or modality of critique of bioart works both undermines hegemonic discourses and offers alternative visions for the individual and her or his relations with the others and the world in a postcapitalist future.