Abstract: The Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) are credited as the first to grow (2000) and eat (2003) lab grown meat as well as the first to grow tissue engineered leather (2004). These where critical art projects that were set to highlight the radical shifts in our understanding of, and relationships with the concept of life. More than ten years later cellular agriculture and biofabrication are hailed as solutions to a many environmental issues. The biological laboratory is imagined as the new farm, where animal and/or agricultural products a grown using regenerative biology and other bio-techniques. This talk would present the concepts behind the developments of cellular agriculture and biofabrication and would attempt to situate their existence within a timeline and scale of global scientific, technological, economic and cultural narratives and endeavours. It will start with the original Tissue Culture & Art Projects, follow the trajectory of the fields of cellular agriculture and biofabrication, and present some of the recent works from SymbioticA that are in dialogue with these recent developments, including a series of off grid incubators powered by compost.
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