Keynote lecture delivered at the NOBA Norwegian Bioart Arena Symposium “Thinking through matter – Exploring BioArt and design in a Norwegian contemporary context”, 2 April 2019, Ås, Norway.

Bioartistic projects and objects both challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, and problematise the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.

By looking at select bioartworks, this lecture argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable: as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. BY doing so, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.

While taking feminist posthumanities as its theoretical ground, the lecture suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.