THE AESTHETICS OF REASON AND CARE Ryszard W. Kluszczyński Growing art Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts’ establishment of the Tissue Culture and Art Project in 1996 marked the beginning of the mature phase of their work, centred around concepts they had already been carefully considering and examining. As the name itself indicates, the project combined artistic practices with others that previously had never been placed within the spectrum of the arts. 1 The growing of living tissue had so far been the domain of biology 2 (and in particular a specialized field within it – biotechnology) and not a form of artistic activity. Catts and Zurr’s proposal for linking art and biology led to the birth of biotech art, which due to the nature of their artistic practices, can also be described as tissue culture art or art of cultivated artworks. The biotech art they created, along with artistic endeavours involving gene technology that developed alongside it through the work of artists like e.g. Joe Davis, Eduardo Kac and Marta de Menezes (genetic or transgenic art), is now considered the primary trend in contemporary bioart. With sort of a conflictive tension between them, these two major trends in bioart – biotech and genetic – together attest to a much more extensive process, that is, the interaction between the worlds of art and science, resulting from creative dialogues that are developing between them, and leading to a profound transformation in artistic practices (leading to new forms and tendencies) and in art and aesthetic theory, as well 1 Anatomical knowledge, traditionally used in artistic work, did not lead to artistic practices like those of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr and other artists involved with the SymbioticA laboratory. 2 As well as in medicine and biomedicine.