The growing field of bioart and design raises significant questions for artists and designers working with life as raw matter. What is necessary in such practices is that critical discussions centered on ethics and power are integrated into broader cultural dialogues in the creation of objects and products that design or redesign biological parts, devices or systems.
This paper will examine specific examples of wearable art produced by architect and designer Neri Oxman. Using generative software to develop the series titled ‘Wanderers, An Astrobiological Exploration’, computational growth patterns give rise to undeniably biomorphic designs that emerge as external-organs-as-outerwear. Articulated as an imaginative set of prostheses hosting their own synthetic biology, these pieces represent a new frontier worn at the threshold of the skin. In the appraisal of these examples, I register speculative critical design as a methodology that interrogates the underlying assumptions of bioart and design processes as they converge with the life sciences. I ask what happens when the human body presents as a parasite to the apparatus upon which it depends? And further, what status can a prosthetic organ achieve if it becomes a co-participant in life? This paper will pursue these questions and examine whether the symbiotic relationships established between humans and their wearable prostheses could enable us to transcend corporeal difference, effectively challenging some the key analytical challenges facing a biotechnological future.