A new trend in the arts is to use human and animal organic tissues (mixed or grown together) instead of paint, clay or other traditional media as the primary material for art. The artificiality in art is literal, and yet subverted, the artificial becoming natural, being grown out of the natural world, and - more disturbingling - creating a new "natural" or at least living world.
See for yourself: artist Sterlac implanted a third ear in his forearm, with the hope to actually listen through this prosthesis made flesh.
Surrealism started to literalize metaphors. Now art returns to Bruegel, and creates hybrids of flowers and humans, instead of just painting them. How do we call imagination when it is no longer the realm of images of the impossible, but it inhabits the real, embodied world?
This is what happens when you read every single page of the French newspaper "Liberation": you come across "things" your mind cannot grasp.
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University
What Stelarc and others reminds us of is that a horizon has emerged that few really wanted but that we have to face. Also with humor, since there are so many eerie perspectives concerning transhumanism, the posthuman, etc. Perhaps some of the most important lessons will be that the aesthetics of 20th century demonstrates that perfection is boredom, which again can be turned into an ethical argument; and that the social nature of humans will prove even more important when manipulations of the body becomes more and more advanced.