REMATERIALIZED TENDENCIES IN MEDIA ART? FROM SILICON TO CARBON-BASED ART

The importance of digitality in Media Art theories consolidated the aesthetic of dematerialization, as it shifted the value of materiality in this field. However, the advent of new forms of technological art, such as Bio Art, which uses laboratory technologies in an aesthetic way to manipulate life, demonstrates the crisis of this paradigm and the trend of rematerialization. This paper investigates the role of materiality, even in the more dematerialized realms of Media Art: the digital technologies. We focus on two art forms that combine new technologies and life sciences: Artificial life, which involves the intangible features of Media Art, and Bio Art, which interprets materiality in a radical manner, by choosing life as the raw material for artistic creation