Signs of Life offers one of the first surveys of the emerging field of ‘bioart’. But, writes Betti Marenko, this book often reveals an art genre in danger of providing biotech with its ultimate PR tool, instead of the critique its production of new economically driven life forms so urgently requires

Bioart and biomedia broadly concern the manipulation of life and life evolution for artistic purposes. Thus, the near impossibility of circumscribing the issue within either the realm of scientific discourse or the field of art practice must be acknowledged. Rather, we have to locate it within the realm of biopolitics. Scientific research takes places socially, possesses a cultural specificity inscribed in its paradigms and a situatedness to its ethos that cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, this is what most of the essays contained in Signs of Life. Bio Art and Beyond seem to do.