Abstract

Today, new artistic practices incorporate scientific techniques linked to medical research that modify the body’s biological performance in vivo, transforming it into a singular laboratory object. In this way, some artists are making works of their bodies by subjecting them to various biotechnological procedures, often invasive. Augmented, the biological body of these performance artists becomes a site for experimentation. DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts or accompanied by biologists and doctors, are these ‘bio-artists’ evidence of the changes brought about by a new mechanisation of the human body, the complexity of which we are only just beginning to understand? Could there be, in the name of art, reasons that justify the creation of utopian bodies that are not eschatological, and that could make us believe in the worst or the best of all worlds? Based on performances by Stelarc, Yann Marussich, Marion Laval-Jeantet and the Quimera Rosa duo, our aim is to analyse what is at stake in this new fabrication of the body outside its biological limits.