Victimless Leather

Victimless Leather – a prototype of a stitch-less jacket, grown from cell cultures into a layer of tissue supported by a coat shaped polymer layer.

This is a sub-project of the Tissue Culture & Art Project where the artists are growing a leather jacket without killing any animals. Growing the victimless leather problematizes the concept of garment by making it semi-living. This artistic grown garment is intended to confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and confronts notions of relationships with manipulated living systems.

The SymbioticA website explains what it is, "an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning, critique and hands-on engagement with the life sciences.". The artists work with tissue, constructing and growing complex organisms that can live outside the body, making the new objects semi-living. Their projects are meant to question life, identity and the relationship between humans and other living beings and environments. They are also interested in the ethics around partial life and the possibilities around this type of technology in the future.

These are some of the sub-projects that are also part of the TC&A project, in addition to Victimless Leather:

NoArk – NoArk is a collection of cells and tissue from many different organisms, growing together inside a "vessel", a reference to Noah's Ark. The project website states that NoArk is "a tangible as well as symbolic ‘craft’ for observing and understanding a biology that combines the familiar with the other".
Worry Dolls – Seven modern versions of the Guatemalan Worry doll were hand-crafted of degradable polymers and surgical sutures and seeded with skin, muscle and bone tissue. The tissue was then allowed to grow inside a bioreactor, replacing the polymers as it degrades, thus creating seven semi-living dolls.
Disembodied Cuisine – Along with Victimless Leather, this is part of the "Victimless Utopia". The idea for this project was to take cells from a frog and grow them into something possible to eat, displaying it next to the still living frog the food came from. This problemetizes the whole meat industry – how we kill animals to eat them. Growing tissue outside of the body of the animal is a way to "make" meat while the animal stays healthy and living.
Extra Ear – ¼ Scale – Using human tissue, a quarter-scale replica of artist Stelarc's ear was grown. The project wanted to confront the cultural perceptions of life now that we are able to manipulate living systems, and also discuss the notions of the wholeness of the body.
The Pig Wings Project – This project bases its ideas on xenotransplantation and genetically modifying pigs so their organs can be transplanted to humans. The artists used tissue engineering and stem cell technologies to grow pig bone tissue, forming three different sets of wings. One set shaped as bat wings ("evil"), one as bird wings ("good") and one as pterosaurs wings ("neutral").

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Wikipedia