Critical Art Ensemble - Performance Style

Performance Style

• To create the façade of a group of scientists, the CAE wear lab coats and assume characters of amateur scientists. Instead of using fancy, high-tech machinery they use ‘high school lab equipment as well as common household supplies and groceries’, which brings the scientific difficulty down to a level at which the public can understand and engage with because the worlds of science and technology in the modern world are ‘increasingly privatised’. This playful style however contrasts with the groups numerous books and manifestos which have an analytical focus.

• Nicola Triscott is the founder of The Arts Catalyst. In her writings of the CAE, she states that their participatory theatre ‘aims to involve the public in the processes of biotechnology in order to contribute to the development of an informed and critical public discourse on contemporary bioscience’. This provides people with knowledge of how science can be interesting and that it can be misused if in the wrong hands. Their works have ranged from genetically modified food, the human genome project (CoNE), reproductive technologies, genetic screening and transgenics. The way they approach this style is through directly engaging with the science and presenting techniques generally unknown to the public in a performative way.

• The work of the CAE continues to entertain, inform and show the public how biotechnology can be demonstrated via performance As part of their critical objectives, they target their attention on private corporations unknown in the public sector who misuse biotechnology. This tactical response is what the CAE have termed ‘Fuzzy Biological Sabotage’ (or FBS if abbreviated). Using harmless biological species including plants, insects and reptiles, they make sophisticated pranks ‘to operate in the grey, in-between spaces as yet unregulated by institutional regimes’