On the Plasticity of Flesh: Breeding, Bodies, and Bio Art - Presented by: Professor Anne Milne
Channel: Colina Maxwell
Date: 2013-05-12

On the Plasticity of Flesh: Breeding, Bodies, and Bio Art
Presented by: Professor Anne Milne (University of Toronto)
Happening: 7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Sunday November 4th, 2012
                at 121 Hughson St. North

Lecture Description:
In this talk, Anne Milne illuminates the discourses of genetics in eighteenth-century animal breeding and connects these discussions to twenty-first century Bio Art. In doing so she provocatively suggests that domesticated animals are (and have been for several hundred years) largely not the domain of nature or science. The 'plasticity of flesh' domesticated animals offer renders these animals sculptural -- and, as a result, largely cultural products. Indeed, at some level, these animals are works of art in whose bodies assumptions about the body are deposited and naturalized. Through the use of examples by artists such as Eduardo Kac, Patricia Piccinini, Stelarc, and Kathy High, Milne connects the past to the present as a way of extending and deepening the critiques of biotechnologies that these artists offer.

Speaker Bio:
Anne Milne is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) in Toronto, Canada. Her academic research focuses on representations of animals, labouring-class poets, and agrarian studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British texts. She published "'Lactilla Tends her Fav'rite Cow': Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women's Poetry" with Bucknell University Press in 2008 and was a 2010-2011 Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Ludwig Maximilians University/ Deutsches Museum) in Munich, Germany.