What happens when we try to engineer life, and why do the things we create so often unsettle us?

Bioartist Oron Catts joins cultural historian and musicologist Sarah Collins to explore artificial life, automation, and the desire to control living systems. Drawing on their book Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems, co-written with Elizabeth Stephens and Ionat Zurr, they examine how art, science, literature, and technology shape our ideas about what is natural, what is artificial, and what it means to be alive.

Their conversation moves from SymbioticA’s experiments with living materials and lab-grown meat to the history of musical aesthetics, the relationship between autonomy and automation, and competing views of life as a machine or something that escapes control. They discuss how artistic critique can become a commercial promise, why technological breakthroughs are repeatedly presented as if they have no history, and what gets hidden behind visions of abundance without consequences—from the resources needed to sustain cells in a laboratory to the human labor behind AI.

From there, they turn to artificial wombs, the spectacle of early infant incubators, and the stories we tell about creations that take on lives of their own. Through Frankenstein, the Golem, and Catts’s search for traces of fiction in the Orkney Islands, they ask whether the answer to a technological problem is always another technology, and what cultural anxiety can reveal about our hopes for the future.

Three core questions:

What do we mean when we call something “artificial” or “alive,” and why are both words so hard to pin down?
Why do we keep promising ourselves technologies that deliver abundance without consequences?
What do stories like Frankenstein and the Golem reveal about our desire for control and our fear of losing it?

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GUESTS

Oron Catts – Artist, Researcher, and Curator
Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia
Co-founder of SymbioticA and the Tissue Culture and Art Project
Co-author of Tissues, Cultures, Art and Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems
https://tcaproject.net/about/

Sarah Collins – Cultural Historian and Musicologist
Professor and Chair of Musicology, UWA Conservatorium of Music
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and 2024 Dent Medal recipient
Author of Lateness and Modernism and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott
https://www.uwa.edu.au/schools/music/sarah-collins

THE BOOK

Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems
Oron Catts, Sarah Collins, Elizabeth Stephens, and Ionat Zurr (UWA Publishing, Vignettes series)
https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/artificial-life-the-art-of-automating-living-systems

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Chapters

00:00 Meet Oron Catts and Sarah Collins
03:26 The book and the beginnings of SymbioticA
08:42 Making strange and the slippery meaning of “artificial” and “life”
14:54 Schiller, absolute music, and the longing for immediate experience
23:02 Keeping disciplines intact in art and science
29:53 Lab-grown meat from art critique to venture capital
35:50 Mechanism, vitalism, and cultural amnesia
44:49 Frankenstein and the myth of the magical lab
52:31 Illusion, staging, and hidden labor
54:36 Artificial wombs and outsourcing the body
1:01:23 Golems, Pinocchio, and why life resists control
1:08:28 Searching the Orkney Islands for Frankenstein’s lost creature
1:20:21 The Golem of Prague and ending on optimistic anxiety