Media-N, v.05 n.03, Winter 2009: agriART: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems; Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis, guest editors.

[…] agriArt is an attempt to highlight other possibilities for the consideration and development of bio art. As an exhibition, it brought together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption as a specific site of biopolitics. In essence, our concern was to step back from the assumption that bio art needs to start at the line drawn by industrial capitalism, and look at the work of artists investigating other intersections of the biological and social. The questions they pose are not exercises in philosophico-ethical deliberations that take for granted a given industrial paradigm as the most productive site of action. Instead, they practice a relation between the biological and the social that is pragmatically opposed to the instrumentalization of life that Critical Art Ensemble has termed the molecular invasion. While this opposition sometimes takes the form of reaction and protest, it just as frequently chooses to perform in ways that refuse the instrumental separation of the social and the biological. Our questions are simply: What is gained or lost as we shift scales from the molecular to the social, and vice versa? Can we expect our interventions into the molecular to resolve problems created at the scale of the social?”