Sunday, May 10, 2015

Unit 6: BioTech +Art

Faux or Not? Real vs Fake Leather
Leather is a material made from the skin of animal by tanning or a similar process. Every year the global leather industry slaughters over one billion animals just for their skins. With ethical fashion, the use of leather is discouraged. Leather is seen as the by-product of animals living in the horror of unsustainable factory farming. However, leather is a great material. It is flexible, comfortable, durable and can be crafted into gorgeous pieces.
Victimless leather is grown from just cell cultures and polymer
BioTech and Art make Victimless Leather possible. By working with live tissue and scientific process, fashion designers can create a material that is grown from layers of tissue and polymer. It is basically the skin without the body.It is leather without the animal. This consumer product exhibits both cutting edge research and brings to question our exploitation of animals. 
Is the future of leather  a process where it is grown and cultivated?
This fake, but  real leather  does not solve the issue between faux or real leather. Growing victimless leather makes it still somewhat living. Thus, people are still force to confront the moral implication of wearing the product of something that was once living. This debate highlights the bigger issue with BioTech and Art. As mentioned in lecture and in Chris Kelty's "Meaning of Participation: Outlaw Biology". Biotechnology and art is a extremely provocative subject as demonstrated by this one example, but the ethical boundary of using living tissues as a medium is still blurry.

Sources:
"Victemless Leather." Victemless Leather. The Tissue Culture and Art Project. Web. 10 May 2015.  

Blackmore, Claire. "Leather: The Trend We Just Can't Get Enough Of." Marie Claire. 20 Jan. 2014. Web. 10 May 2015.

Derr, Mark. "Ban Fur? Then Why Not Leather?" The New York Times. 12 Feb. 2013. Web. 10 May 2015.

Kelty, Chris. "Meaning of Participation: Outlaw Biology?"

Miah, Andy. "Bioart Is Changing the World." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 Dec. 2011. Web. 10 May 2015.


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2 comments:

  1. Justin De la FuenteMay 13, 2015 at 1:29 AM

    Hi Rebecca, this was an especially cool post for me to read because one of my roommates is vegan and I always wondered what she meant when she said that she owns a pair of "vegan leather boots." Now I see that biotechnology can be utilized to create different polymers, including one that feels close to leather. Work like this only highlights the massive potential in biotechnology as cells can be influenced and modified to produce proteins for a huge number of uses. We can use cells to produce drugs, metabolize oil spills, and apparently now people are beginning to tap into fashion-related uses as well.

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  2. UnknownMay 14, 2015 at 1:41 AM

    I feel like this is a great example of how the field of biotech/art actually has a rich history as people have made animal skins into art (with simple technologies like a knife) for thousands of years. The fact that people grow cow skin in a lab is even more mind blowing, and reminds me of the situation in which scientists grew stem cells in a lab to avoid the controversial act of harvesting them from human embryos.

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