Corpus Extremus (LIFE+)

Exit Art, 475 Tenth Avenue, New York Until 18 April 2009. http://www.exitart.org

A fluorescing tadpole reveals its previously unseen developmental secrets. Credit: D. BULATOV, J. LABAS & K. LUKJANOV

When images of the Vacanti mouse, the mouse with a cartilage ear growing on its back, were released in 1997, it seemed that a surrealist project had come alive. Although the experiment was a step towards using living material for tissue engineering, the surprising and provocative juxtaposition of body parts was also a culturally evocative artefact — an art piece.

The exhibition Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), at New York's Exit Art until 18 April, examines the effect of biotechnology on our notions of life and death. Diverse works include living matter, and reflect on the creation of new organisms — hybrids, cyborgs and extended human bodies.

A cabinet of chimaeric curiosities explores the taxonomical crisis that is presented by new life forms in NoArk II, by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, the biological art centre at the University of Western Australia near Perth. They display masses of living cells taken from different organisms alongside preserved museum specimens. Skin and blood cells are used as a screen on which movies are projected in another installation by the BioKino collaboration, a reference to early science films.

The Mirror of Faith, an installation by the Ultrafuturo group, is an attempt to create “self-transcendent” bacteria that carry VMAT2, the gene controversially claimed by some to cause higher consciousness and spirituality in humans.

Other works embrace robotics. A culmination of six years of research by artists Guy Ben-Ary and Philip Gamblen, Silent Barrage evokes the human machine and futuristic communication interfaces. A robotic body made of 36 connected parts is controlled by electrical signals in a network of rat neurons growing in a remote Petri dish in Steve Potter's lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Ironic, critical and Utopian, the exhibition raises issues about artificially cultured cells, the presumed uniqueness of human life, our anthropocentric hierarchies and the possibility of engineered and commodified perfection.