What Do We Mean When We Say “BioArt”?
As the BioArt in Canada research project begins mapping artists, scientists, artist-scientists, and institutions across the country, one early discovery is that bioart is not always defined in the same way across language communities. This article opens a conversation that will continue in an upcoming Fill Your Cup event online.
BioArt in Canada is a SSHRC-funded research initiative dedicated to documenting, connecting, and critically examining the diverse practices that constitute bioart across Canada. The project is structured through a Knowledge Synthesis Grant, to map the history, development, current landscape, and policy relevance of bioart practices nationally.
Interrelated Clusters, No Fixed Definition
Rather than beginning from a fixed definition of bioart, we have begun to approach the field through developing interrelated clusters:
- Ecology & Land
- DIY & Open Science
- Body & Identity
- Ethics & Politics
- Speculative & Futures
- Materials/Materiality
These themes provide a framework for tracing recurring concerns across Canadian bioart while recognizing that individual practices often move across multiple areas of inquiry. Along with mapping practitioners, institutions, laboratories, artist-run centres, and other organizations, the project also remains attentive to practices that may not explicitly identify as “bioart” but nevertheless belong within the field’s broader ecosystem.
A Field in Motion
One of the most interesting aspects of the project thus far has been in discovering the uniqueness of the Canadian bioart landscape, and the realization that there is no singular, definitive answer to the question: What is BioArt?
“There is no singular, definitive answer to the question: What is BioArt?”
From microbial pigments and industrial biodesign to environmental sensing, fermentation, tissue engineering, ecological restoration, speculative biotechnology, biofabrication, multispecies care, and more, Canadian practitioners contribute distinctive perspectives to international conversations about art, science, ethics, and the future of life in an era of rapidly evolving technologies. The field is broad, plural, and continually intersects with adjacent fields of practice and inquiry. However, in surveying the existing literature, another intriguing pattern has emerged: bioart is not only practiced differently, but also conceptualized and discussed differently within the country’s anglophone and francophone communities.
Distinct Languages, Unique Perspectives
A single search term doesn’t hold up well across Canada’s two major language communities, and this became clear early in our literature review. Anglophone and francophone practitioners often don’t use the same words to describe practices involving living systems, biotechnology, and artist-scientist collaboration. As a result, searching for “bioart” alone offers an incomplete picture of the field, potentially overlooking artists, spaces, and work that is embedded within different linguistic, disciplinary, and regional contexts.
Community-based biotechnology offers an interesting example. In English-language research and policy contexts, these practices are often described as DIYBio, while francophone contexts frequently reach for terms like science de garage. The Public Health Agency of Canada’s own bilingual naming provides an easy case study: the same 2026 national summit appears in English as the “DIY Biology and Bioart Summit” and in French as the “Sommet sur la biologie de garage et le bioart,” with “DIY biology” and “DIY biologists” becoming biologie de garage and biologistes de garage throughout.
| English | French |
| DIY Biology and Bioart Summit | Sommet sur la biologie de garage et le bioart |
| DIY biology / DIY biologists | biologie de garage / biologistes de garage |
Important to note here that DIYBio and bioart are often synonymous, intersecting practices. Although these terms refer to overlapping communities, both anglophone and francophone, they also direct researchers towards different literatures, different policy documents, and different practitioner networks.
These linguistic differences have important methodological consequences. A national mapping conducted through only one vocabulary risks overlooking artists, organizations, publications, and projects that identify themselves differently. Rather than treating this simply as a translation nuance, BioArt in Canada approaches bioart as a living and evolving category whose diversity emerges through multiple languages, disciplines, regions, and communities of practice.
As we continue our investigations, we intend to extend the research to examine how other language groups in Canada approach the field: how are various indigenous communities practicing art, science, and ecology, for example, and what words are used to describe those practices? What do newcomers bring to the conversation, rooted in their own languages?
Get Involved — Take the Questionnaire
To broaden participation beyond published literature and institutional records, we’ve launched a national questionnaire, hosted here on the project’s Art/In Forum microsite, inviting practitioners working in and around bioart, living art, arts vivant, art-science, DIY biology, biodesign and biomedia, and Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) to describe their work and affiliations in their own terms. If you are a Canadian or Canada-based artist working with biology or your practice intersects with life sciences, ecology, medicine, agriculture, biotechnology, environmental research, or related fields, we would love to hear from you. If you know of projects, archives, exhibitions, publications, or organizations that deserve greater visibility, your recommendations are welcomed.
Please fill in our questionnaire to help us understand who and where you are, and what you do.
BioArt in Canada belongs to the community it seeks to document. Our strength will come from the many unique voices, practices, histories, and futures that collectively shape the field.
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