Bioart is art made with living organisms, biological processes, or life-science tools like genetic engineering and tissue culture. The field spans decades and includes works ranging from glowing transgenic animals to sculptures grown from living cells. Here are the most notable examples and the techniques behind them.
GFP Bunny: The Glowing Rabbit
One of the most famous bioart works is Eduardo Kac’s “GFP Bunny” (2000), a white rabbit named Alba that was created by splicing the rabbit’s DNA with a gene for green fluorescent protein taken from a jellyfish. The result was a transgenic animal, one carrying genetic material from two species, that glowed green under blue light. Kac worked with French scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet to produce Alba, and the project ignited fierce public debate about the ethics of engineering animals for aesthetic purposes. The piece wasn’t just the rabbit itself. Kac framed the entire social response, the controversy over whether Alba should live in a lab or come home with the artist, as part of the artwork.
Microvenus: Storing Art Inside Bacteria
Before Kac’s rabbit, artist Joe Davis was already encoding information into living cells. His 1996 work “Microvenus” took a Germanic rune symbolizing life and the female earth and converted it into a five-by-seven bitmap of ones and zeros. He then translated that binary code into a short DNA sequence using the four-letter genetic alphabet (A, T, C, G) and inserted it into living E. coli bacteria. The bacteria became tiny living storage devices, carrying a human-designed image in their DNA. This was one of the earliest demonstrations of DNA data storage, a concept that biotechnology companies are still developing today.
Victimless Leather: A Jacket Grown From Cells
The Tissue Culture and Art Project, led by artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, created “Victimless Leather” as a provocation about our relationship with animal products. The work is a miniature, stitch-less jacket grown from immortalized cell lines on a biodegradable polymer scaffold. Living cells multiply and coat the matrix, forming a tiny garment-shaped object made of real biological tissue, but without requiring the death of an animal. The piece was famously displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it had to be “killed” (its life support turned off) when it grew too aggressively and began clogging its own nutrient system.
Stranger Visions: Faces From Discarded DNA
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Stranger Visions” (2012) took a surveillance-minded approach to bioart. She collected hair, cigarette butts, and chewed gum from public spaces in New York City, extracted DNA from these discarded items, and analyzed forensically relevant genetic markers called SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). From those markers she generated predictions about the person’s likely appearance: skin color, eye color, face shape, nose width. She then used 3D printing to create life-size portrait sculptures of strangers she had never seen. The project raised uncomfortable questions about genetic privacy and the growing power of forensic phenotyping, a technique increasingly used by law enforcement.
Ear on Arm: Surgery as Sculpture
Australian performance artist Stelarc took bioart into his own body with “Ear on Arm,” a years-long project to surgically implant an ear-shaped structure under the skin of his forearm. The internal scaffolding is made from Medpor, a porous biocompatible polyethylene material with pore sizes between 100 and 250 micrometers. That pore structure allows the body’s own blood vessels and tissue to grow into the implant, anchoring it in place so it doesn’t shift. Over multiple surgeries, Stelarc has refined the ear’s shape. The plan includes adding a silicone ridge along the outer rim, eventually replacing it with cartilage grown from his own tissue, and forming an earlobe using his own adult stem cells and fat cells. His long-term goal is to embed a microphone and wireless transmitter, turning the ear into a functioning internet-connected organ.
The Plague Dress: Bacteria Woven Into Textiles
Anna Dumitriu works at the intersection of microbiology and craft. Her “Plague Dress” incorporates the DNA of plague bacteria into a historical garment. She extracted the DNA from killed plague bacteria in the laboratory of the National Collection of Type Cultures at the UK Health Security Agency, where she holds an artist residency. The bacteria are dead and safe, but their genetic material is real, woven into the fabric alongside traditional textile techniques. A companion piece, a necklace made from porcelain teeth, accompanied the dress when it went on display at a Leeds museum in 2024. Dumitriu’s broader body of work combines bacteria and textiles to explore what she calls “the intricacies of the microbial world.”
Genetically Modified Flowers
Some bioart projects use plants rather than animals or human tissue. As early as 1991, the Calgene Pacific company developed a rose variety called Blue Moon that was genetically engineered to produce delphinidin, a pigment found in naturally blue flowers but absent from roses. The result was a flower with a color that doesn’t exist in nature for that species. Other projects have used gene-silencing techniques like RNA interference to knock out pigment genes in petunias and tobacco plants, producing pure white flowers from normally colored varieties. More recently, researchers have used CRISPR gene editing to target a specific gene in torenia plants, producing pale blue flowers by altering the plant’s flavonoid chemistry. These modified flowers sit in an interesting gray zone: they’re commercially motivated in some cases, but artists and designers have adopted the same tools to create living organisms that challenge what we consider “natural” beauty.
What Makes These Works Bioart
The common thread across all these examples is that the artwork is not a representation of biology. It is biology. The medium is life itself: living cells, DNA, whole organisms, surgical transformation. That distinguishes bioart from scientific illustration or nature photography. The artists use real laboratory techniques, often collaborating with working scientists, and the resulting works raise ethical questions that are inseparable from the art. Whether it’s the right to engineer a glowing rabbit, the privacy implications of sidewalk DNA, or the possibility of growing consumer goods from living tissue, bioart forces viewers to confront how biotechnology is reshaping what it means to be alive.