Cell Break is a series of performances based on my experiences as an artist and non-specialist working in a variety of bioscience and biomedical laboratories.

Kira O’Reilly and Jennifer Willet have been in a creative dialogue since 2004 when they were both artists in residence at SymbioticA art and science research laboratory, University of Western Australia. Both are concerned with the body in its mutable form as extended and radically refigured thought biotechnical discourses.

InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies is a course of research and creative productioncentering around the notion of a ‘laboratory ecology’ that will result in a series ofperformances, installations, art objects,and critical writings. This work is basedon my experiences as an artist and non-specialist working in a variety ofbioscience and biomedical laboratori

Contemporary discourse surrounding biotechnology places great emphasis on digital metaphors in describing the biological sciences.  In these discourses it is as if mankind’s ‘cumulative’ technology – computation – performs the ultimate science, the dominion of man over nature through the application of numeric code to living organism.  This general application of computational models to instances of biotechnology provides a sterilizing affect, removing all that is wet, bloody, unruly, and animal, from mass imaginations of the biotech future.  As I argue this vision of biotechnology (as it is presented to non-specialists) may serve to nullify public engagement in the complex ethical dilemmas that arise from engaging […]

BIOTEKNICA is a not-for-profit artist collective founded by Shawn Bailey* and Jennifer Willet in 2000.  Its purpose is to investigate critically the ethics, aesthetics, and technological potential for new art forms that lie at the intersection of the arts and the biological sciences.