Art as Entanglement: A Theory of Bio-Art
October 2025
“Not Darwin, but fungi taught them that it is collaboration over competitiveness that defines a notion of evolutionary success. The only way to survive and thrive is through cooperation and collaboration. Because we are never separate from others.”
– Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez 1
The sun rises over a brick-walled studio, filtered through a panelled window, dappled by the light of a nearby oak tree, working its way through glass jars of liquids and mosses. There, on the shelf, a collection of petri dishes, homes to creeping yellow veins of Physarum polychephalum, which pulse nearimperceptibly in pursuit of collective nourishment. There, on a clothesline which spans the length of the room, a fermented pellicle, beige and pink and fleshy, wet and visceral and smelling of vinegar. There, in a ventilated enclosure, a fungal body fruits from its collective home, embodying the vast expanse of fungal connections that vivify it. There, a collapsing algal form, a home so inviting for mould that the fuzzy pink interloper has overtaken its host. And there, just there behind the desk, sits the bio-artist. There are no people there, save for her. She would appear to be entirely alone, the only life surrounded by mere inert matter. But the bio-artist is never alone, even when she’s hiding in her studio for days without human contact. The bio-artist is always one of many, always working with, always entangled in a collaboration, a co-creation. The bio-artist is always multiple, multiplied, multiplying. She cannot make art without her organic collaborators, cannot inform matter without acknowledgment of the autonomy of her natural co-creators. The bio-artist shows us how all organic life – human and more-than-human – is always already entangled. It is simply a matter of attuning to matter.
Bio-art, the creative practice of fine art-making in collaboration with organic beings, materials, and ideas, proposes new relationships between artist and material, self and other, human and more-than-human, organic and manufactured. It is a mode of thought, a way of working, a genus of materials, an interspecies intersubjectivity.
More simply, for the purpose of this essay, one may define bio-art as visual forms made from more-than-human
1Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Let’s Become Fungal!: Mycelium Teachings and the Arts (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023).
organic materials, which must be living or have at one point been alive, and must, therefore, either be dead or have the capacity to die. Some of the many biomaterials which are presently most utilized in the fine arts include the pellicle of Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria & Yeast (SCOBY), mycelium, algaes and alginates, and slime moulds such as Physarum polycephalum.
This new mode of fine art-making demands new modes of art theory. Working with organic beings challenges artist/material dichotomies; the bio-artist cannot see herself as a God-like form creator when she is working with other living creatures. Biomaterials take form autonomously, defying the artist’s preconceived end by dehydrating, changing colour, growing unexpected life, dying, fermenting, and engaging in many other modes of organic self-creation. Thus, bio-art demands a sense of collaboration wherein the bio-artist sees herself as one collaborator in a network of collective making. She cannot claim to be the sole maker of beauty. She must acknowledge her interconnectedness with other organic life. Bio-art forces the artist to understand that the anthroexceptionalist notion of man informing matter cannot remain the basis of a theory of fine art. Bio-art, in its inherent mode of collaboration, reflects a broader truth of the human as part of a larger ecology, always already in relation to other natural beings. Bio-art shows how mutualism and organic entanglement can ground a theory of art and of life.
When one sees oneself as part of nature, rather than seeing nature as an external thing, classical conventions of art theory become troubled. The Aristotelian claim that art is imitation, as asserted in Poetics, cannot stand up in a biomaterial conception of making.2 For Aristotle, the basis of all art is its imitative capacity. Its purpose is to represent given forms through creative mediation, to present that which is natural in a man-made medium. The Aristotelian view of art as imitation suggests that art is the representation of the natural world through the informing of matter, that we see the natural beauty of the world and replicate it in our art. This logic, while tempting and historically celebrated, inherently suggests nature as Other, a thing outside oneself which one can represent. We can imitate natural forms only because they are external to us. If something were like us, we would not have to imitate it; we simply would be it. Thus, the sculptor becomes separate from the natural world
2Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997).
which surrounds him, separate even from the natural bodies of his fellow men. The artist becomes an island of one, so too does the human race become isolated from its ecological intertwinements. By making the natural into the Other, we reinforce an idea of man as separate from nature, as the pinnacle of creation, and as superior to all other organic life. Yes, the imitation theory of art recognizes the immense beauty of natural form, but it instrumentalizes this beauty, turns it into an object for human extraction and consumption, and encourages man to see himself as separate from the now othered organic world.
If we conceive of ourselves as entangled with broader ecologies, we can no longer imitate but instead must co-create. In bio-art, one cannot see oneself as separate from other beings. There is no Other in bio-art, as it shows the interconnectedness of the organic through creative collaboration. Art can no longer be the imitation of an external Other, instead becoming a collaboration with the natural world. The artist cannot imitate forms that she is working in active collectivity with. They are no longer separate from her and, therefore, no longer capable of being imitated by her. They are what they represent. One is not painting water-kissed algae on a Pacific rock, but is working alongside that algae, working with that algae. One is not sculpting a form that evokes fungal life, but is creating with fungal life. Bio-art demands a new theoretical approach to fine art-making, one that cannot sit within the Aristotelian view so many hold dear. Bio-art, as creative symbiogenesis, shows us that we are not separate from nature; we are inextricable from nature. Bio-art is a working together to make something new, in which the artist and her collaborators effect mutualism, asserting a new relational mode between art and nature, outside imitation and towards entanglement.
Bio-materials have a long history both in and out of their applications to fine arts. Humans have been brewing kombucha, for example, since the Qin dynasty, around 221 BCE. The SCOBY pellicle, which is an inherent byproduct of kombucha, has, thus, also been around since 221 BCE.3 This SCOBY is used contemporarily as “kombucha leather” in fashion applications, as sculptural material, even as lamp shades. 4 There
3Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, “The Cloudy Origins of Kombucha,” Smithsonian Folklife Magazine, March 2022, https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/cloudy-origins-of-kombucha
4Suzanne Lee, “Grow Your Own Clothes,” TED Talk, June 2011, https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes.
was no magical material transformation nor stunning development in fermentation technology that allowed SCOBY to become an artistic material in 1997 when the term “bio-art” was first coined.5 The material has always been there; we just never thought to use it to its creative potential, never saw the SCOBY as a creative collaborator. This is not because of its properties, but because of our perception of this microbial community, because of our perception of nature, and our logic of art as imitation, not collaboration. We do not view organic matter as important because we do not view the organic world as important. Fungi are between 635 million and 2.4 billion years old, sharing a common ancestor with man at 1.3 billion years ago.6 There is nothing new about mycelium, yet we are only now coming to understand its incredible intelligence and creative potential. Biomaterials are not new because the biological world is not new. Our insistence that nature is Other, that art is imitation of the external and not collaboration with the entangled, has so clouded our view as to render the materials right in front of us invisible.
In the face of these logics of othering, how can one build a philosophy of art that acknowledges entanglement? First, in turning to the materials themselves. As anthropologist and fungi forager, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, tells us, “If we want to know the possibilities of the worlds we can make together, we need to follow them as they express themselves through form.”7 Can we show matter that it matters through attention to its form? The forms of biomaterials can teach us a great deal. When an algae sculpture unexpectedly grows mould, its form shows us what art without artist/material distinctions can be. When a mushroom emerges from a mycelial picture frame, its form shows us what art without a means/ends dichotomy might be. When a slime mould goes dormant, dries out on its agar agar gestalt, its form shows us what art that embraces collective cocreation can be.
5Eduardo Kac, “Bio Art: From Genesis to Natural History of the Enigma,” 2007, https://www.ekac.org/bioart_kac.pdf.
6Constantine J. Alexopoulos, Charles W. Mims, and M. Blackwell, “Fungus,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 12, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/science/fungus.
7Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Attunement: Form in Motion,” in Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, ed. Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 95.
Biomaterials cannot be governed by human will, for biomaterials have a will all their own, have life all their own. They will grow mould, change colour, fruit fungal bodies, die, dehydrate, and refuse to take forms the artist may have wished for. There is simply no way to have absolute power over the form our organic collaborators may take. They resist the notion of inert material, but are instead living co-makers. Thus, the bioartist cannot conceive of an end, a final form which they can then fabricate exactly as envisioned. The materials simply will not bend to human will. Instead, the artist and her organic collaborators must work together, creating something unforeseen in the meeting of many minds.
Art is often conceived in a way that relies on cause-and-effect, means-and-end, form-and-matter distinctions. We see the end–the painting we plan to make, for example–and use the means–paint–to effect that end. Art is often seen as a bifurcated process where concept and ideation precede fabrication, where the artist informs matter after imagining the desired form. Many artists, bio- or otherwise, will tell you that this is often not how it goes. The artist might ideate through making, becoming a communicator between form, matter, and herself, always already in collaboration with her materials. Many artists’ processes depend on an ability to adapt, to discover the form by working with matter. This becomes undeniable in bio-art, where the materials will grow, die, or change as they wish, whether the human artist likes it or not.
In R.G. Collingwood’s cornerstone text, Principles of Art, to conceptualize an end in imagination and then fabricate in matter is not the mode of fine art.8 For Collingwood, making art is becoming conscious of an impulse, starting with, “I feel… I don’t know what I feel,”9 and not knowing what you are trying to express until you have experienced its expression in the making. Here, art-making has no means/end distinction, as the end cannot be foreseen, but comes unexpectedly through the means, through the making. There is no cause/effect dichotomy, as the artist does not cause the materials to effect a predetermined end. The artist and the material cocreate, effecting and affecting each other mutually. In Collingwood, art is a continual becoming, becoming, being; a becoming-conscious, a making something unforeseen together.
8R. G. Collingwood, “Art & Craft” in The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 15–41. 9Ibid., 109
Bio-art not only fits into this theory of fine arts, but models it. The Collingwoodian ideal asserts itself as artist and algae, man and mycelium work together to build something neither could have determined in advance. Each organism involved in the making of bio-art is collectively contributing to something unforeseen. Thus, making art in Collingwood’s model of becoming conscious in making, while also collaborating with biological beings, means that you are collectively making something organic that cannot be known until it is made, evoking the evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis.
Symbiogenesis, an evolutionary theory popularized by Lyn Margulis, is defined as “the origin of evolutionary novelty by symbiosis,” or living together to create.10 It suggests that evolution is not the survival of the fittest, individualistic, Darwinian model we have so long assumed it to be. Instead, evolution is posited as the process of multiple species combining or collaborating to adapt. In symbiogenesis, we see how mitochondria originate in a mutualistic relationship between prokaryotic cells and larger host cells. 11 To avoid diving too deep into evolutionary biology, the vital claim is that evolution in the model of symbiogenesis is multiple organisms collaborating to make something that cannot be foreseen, something that must be made through mutualism, something that enables collective survival through co-creation. This is echoed near-exactly in the Collingwoodian mode of art-making, and especially in bio-art-making. When the artist works in community with more-thanhuman organics, she is in a cross-species collaboration to make something unforeseen, much like symbiogenesis. Bio-art demands a creative symbiogenesis, a working mutualism to build something new, something collaborative, something unforeseen.
The logics of bio-art are, therefore, incredibly important in conceptualizing the human role in our global ecology. It has, sadly, become normalized in contemporary culture to view humans as a plague upon this world, and to resign to our own extinction as an apology for the damage we’ve done. Not only does this ignore the other species we’re taking out with us, but it also fundamentally misunderstands the
10Lynn Margulis, “Words as Battle Cries: Symbiogenesis and the New Field of Endocytobiology,” BioScience 40, no. 9 (October 1990): 673–677, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1311435, 674.
11Thomas Cavalier-Smith, “Origin of Mitochondria by Intracellular Enslavement of a Photosynthetic Purple Bacterium,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273, no. 1596 (August 7, 2006): 1943–1952, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3531 .
relationship between the human and the more-than-human. Robin Wall-Kimmerer shows us how First Nations, Metis, and Inuit (FNMI) knowledge understands the human as part of a huge organic process, as one of many collaborators in an enormous ecosystem.12 Humans are not a plague upon nature because we are not separate from nature. Nature depends on symbioses and intricately interdependent ecosystems. We must do our part as collaborators in the relational process that is nature.
Yet, of course, Western colonial thought does not allow humans to be in symbiosis with the Other, instead treating nature as something to be dominated, subordinated, exploited, and trampled upon by man. We coerce and manipulate our natural collaborators, extract everything we can from the earth. We take so much more than we need and force it to do as we please. This logic carries directly into the visual arts. We imitate organic forms because we think we are not like them. We use immortal materials, so vain are we that our beings must be externalized ad infinitum, sculpted and moulded with matter that will outlive us all. We refine nature, bend matter to our will. We dominate her and reassert our patriarchal dominance over her every time we paint in oil or cast in silicone. We view her as an object and an Other, something that can be represented in visual art, but always represented on the human’s terms.
Dr. Kim Tallbear speaks and writes on how we view nature, sex, and spirituality as objects, instead of as the intersubjective and collaborative relations that they are.13 Nature is not something you can hold in your hands; it’s not really even something you can point to. This is because nature is not an external object; it is a relation that the human is part of. When we objectify nature as such, we are already preparing to dominate it, viewing it outside of and below ourselves. This is, unconsciously, the precise logic that underlies an art philosophy of imitation. If we reorient ourselves to see nature as it is, as a dynamic relation, the notion of creative imitation becomes redundant. We are always already a part of nature; nature is a part of us, and we are working in collaboration to create new forms together. There is no need to imitate an external Other when we can collaborate
12Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
13Kim Tallbear, “Decolonial Sex and Relations for a More Sustainable World,” lecture, Weweni Indigenous Scholars Speaker Series, The University of Winnipeg, October 17, 2018.
with both internal and external relational beings. We must reorient practice and theory to a mode of relational collaboration, undoing the imitate and dominate logic many have taken up.
At present, ecological crisis and the logics that have prompted it are made manifest in most creative practices, both materially–acrylic, silicone, oil paint–and philosophically– art as imitation. If we wish to address the problems of our time in art, and if one of those problems is environmental collapse, we must work creatively to repair our relationship with the more-than-human organic. We must critically examine how we dominate nature casually, how environmental destruction is normalized and banalized, and how our patriarchal obsession with overcoming the more-than-human world has led to this point of ecological collapse. This must be addressed in art by reorienting practice. To address environmental problems in visual forms, we must work against and challenge our automatic dominance over nature. We must conceive of ourselves as collaborators with other species, recognize that we owe so much to the more-than-human, and actively practice a mode of making that works against our dominance of nature.
The mode of bio-art-making reminds us that life is not grounded in individualism and othering. Instead, it shows how humans, and all organisms, exist in a collaborative world, and that we must work together for collective survival and co-creation. When we acknowledge that co-creation occurs between many species, organisms, and life-forms, we can see how man is entangled in all ecology. Nature is no longer the magical Other, but instead is a relation in which we are always implicated.
This is why bio-art must be made today. It is the only medium that can address the logics of ecological crisis in its form. Bio-art is the only art that can materially process and productively materialize how human and more-than-human relate to one another.
Works Cited
Alexopoulos, Constantine J., Charles W. Mims, and M. Blackwell. “Fungus.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Accessed October 12, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/science/fungus.
Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997.
Cavalier-Smith, Thomas. “Origin of Mitochondria by Intracellular Enslavement of a Photosynthetic Purple Bacterium.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 273, no. 1596 (August 7, 2006): 1943–1952. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3531.
Collingwood, R. G. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938.
Kac, Eduardo. “Bio Art: From Genesis to Natural History of the Enigma.” 2007.
https://www.ekac.org/bioart_kac.pdf.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Lee, Suzanne. “Grow Your Own Clothes.” TED Talk, June 2011.
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes.
Margulis, Lynn. “Words as Battle Cries: Symbiogenesis and the New Field of Endocytobiology.”
BioScience 40, no. 9 (October 1990): 673–677. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1311435.
Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Yasmine. Let’s Become Fungal!: Mycelium Teachings and the Arts. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023.
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. “The Cloudy Origins of Kombucha.” Smithsonian Folklife Magazine, March 2022. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/cloudy-origins-of-kombucha.
Tallbear, Kim. “Decolonial Sex and Relations for a More Sustainable World,” lecture, Weweni Indigenous Scholars Speaker Series, The University of Winnipeg, October 17, 2018.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Attunement: Form in Motion.” In Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, edited by Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod, 87–95. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.