Abstract

BELTRAN-LUENGAS, Elsa María. Bioethical and Aesthetic Conflicts in Bioart: An Emotional Perspective. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2022, n.46, pp.51-74.  Epub Feb 21, 2022. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda46.2022.03.

Bioart is an artistic expression of the late 20th and early 21st century, characterized by the incorporation of biotechnologies and living elements as themes or media, in its works. Bioartistic creations have raised bioethical conflicts because their peculiar aesthetic proposal provokes a perceptual and emotional shock that destabilizes our sense of the world we inhabit. The purpose of this study is to integrate perspectives from aesthetics, bioethics, and anthropology in order to analyze the bioethical conflict that emerges in this field. This is done by characterizing the emotional tension provoked by a clash of values that takes shape and is perceived in the bio-work though a bibliographical review of studies on bio-art based on a bioethical and historiographical perspective. To illustrate the analysis, we selected several works from the first decade of the 2000s recorded on the artists’ websites. The article concludes that the conflict that emerges in bio-art lies in the connection between perception and emotion. If we understand emotions as a process of valuing things in the world that represent a certain importance to us, we can describe the conflict of the perception of bio-artistic otherness as a tension between divergent values. Unlike other approaches that discuss the bioethical conflict of bio-art, this proposal is intended to situate and describe it with precision and nuance. Thus, the bioethical problematic of it is located at the perception-interpretation threshold, and the different components (evaluation, expectation, and reaction) of concrete and differentiated emotions are analyzed to cast light on the conflict generated by bio-art on the basis of the tension between the different values associated with the otherness contemplated.

Keywords : bioart; bioethics; conflict; emotions; aesthetics; cultural value..

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