Green light : toward an art of evolution

Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are bred for the elegance of their frames.Bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds, and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In this publication Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution. He looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants--the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. Gessert surveys recent bio art and its accompanying philosophical problems, the 'slow art' of plant breeding, and how to create new life that takes into account what we know about ecology, aesthetics, and ourselves.