Bio Tek Kitchen
Description
Bio Tek Kitchen takes the form of a first person role playing game, deploying both the pixelated aesthetics and simple but multiple narrative outcomes of early video games. The work playfully engages with many of the tropes of bio-art at the time, which critically interrogated biotechnology and its impact on public IP and agricultural workers, highlighted by the contemporaneous work of artists such as CAE, (Critical Art Ensemble) and Eduardo Kac. In Bio Tek Kitchen a first person 'shooter' uses 'weapons' that are domestic rather military to 'clean up' rather than create mess. In so doing the work not only engages with the politics of biotechnology also deploys and flips multiple early gaming conventions. Gillian Fuller
Artist Statement
Players clean up the kitchen laboratory of a home biotech enthusiast using weapons such as dish cloths and egg flippers. The player is attacked by nasty mutant vegetables which are the product of genetic nouvelle cuisine, and learns throughout the game of a world wide corporate conspiracy to take over the entire food chain. Bio Tek Kitchen: a computer game patch on theme of public IP loss via biotech patenting.
Source of Artist Statement
Players clean up the kitchen laboratory of a home biotech enthusiast using weapons such as dish cloths and egg flippers. The player is attacked by nasty mutant vegetables which are the product of genetic nouvelle cuisine, and learns throughout the game of a world wide corporate conspiracy to take over the entire food chain. Bio Tek Kitchen: a computer game patch on theme of public IP loss via biotech patenting.
Source of Artist Statement
Creator
Starrs, Josephine
Cmielewski, Leon
Date
1999
Rights
Copyright Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski. The copyright of images posted on the ADELTA Website belongs to third parties and is included on this website by permission from copyright holders. Apart from any use permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 (including fair dealing) the images may not be downloaded, adapted, remixed, printed, emailed, stored in a cache or otherwise reproduced without the written permission from the copyright holder.
Citation
Starrs, Josephine and Cmielewski, Leon, “Bio Tek Kitchen,” ADELTA, accessed November 14, 2024, https://adelta.westernsydney.edu.au/items/show/228.