The Art of (Bio)Surveillance: Bioart and the Financialization of Life Systems

Abstract

Our paper examines the complex relations between bioart and the financialization of life itself through the bioeconomic apparatus of biosurveillance. Briefly, the bioeconomy, or the relocation of genetic, microbial and cellular productive processes within capitalism (see Melinda Cooper 2008), involves the expansion of the life sciences industries into every domain of society. Bioart explores the “mobilization of the biological” to understand how culture confronts and/or collaborates with neoliberal forces. One key aspect of the bioeconomy is the financialization of living systems via the increasing importance of financial markets within the biotechnology industry and post-genomic technologies (synthetic biology). The concept of biosurveillance, originally developed for disease surveillance and monitoring, is now, in the era of the post-terror state, strongly linked to national security; it concerns “a wider biopolitical strategy” connected to the active gathering and surveillance of “person-specific biological information” (Parry 2012: 718). The use of biosurveillance to secure populations is aimed at securitizing populations in the context of both defence and financialization. Major science and technology innovations (RFID tags, VeriChips, animated tattoos, DNA chips, human barcodes, etc.), which enable the policing of “biological threats” have become integrated into the bioeconomic cultural apparatus and have inspired several bioartists. What does bioart uncover about the complex relations between risk-based surveillance and the accumulation of insecurity in an era of financialized capital?