SymbioticA's Fish and Chips: Bio-Art with Fish Neurons

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, artists from the SymbioticA research lab at the University of Western Australia, created Fish and Chips, a bio-cybernetic artwork using fish neurons grown on silicon chips. The piece, exhibited at Ars Electronica 2001, converts electrical impulses from a fish neuron connected to a retina into mechanical drawings via a computer program. The title juxtaposes a favorite dish of a prominent Australian neo-fascist with Austrian political news. The artists, working in 'wet-biology,' aim to explore creativity and art in the age of biological technologies, creating semi-living entities. Fish and Chips stages an ad hoc theater of art and science as a rhetorical strategy for philosophical inquiry into experience. The work challenges modernist art history by reviving experience as a cornerstone of creation, questioning the boundary between the culturally constructed and the encoded. Michael Punt, director of the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Art and editor-in-chief of Leonardo Digital Reviews, commented on the piece.