Perhaps I’ve finally found my inner Luddite. This sounds far creepier than killing an animal, skinning it, and tanning its hide. From Jacket Grows From Living Tissue:
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr at the Tissue Culture & Art Project are attempting to grow a semi-living jacket in an effort to create ‘victimless leather.’ Hoping to highlight the possibility of wearing leather without killing an animal, the duo is presently focused on growing living tissue into a leather-like material and having it mature in the form of a miniature, stitchless, coat-like shape.
Some specifics:
Grown using a combination of mouse and human cells, the jacket is currently quite tiny (about 2 inches high and 1.4 inches wide) and would just fit a mouse. Using a biodegradable polymer as a base, the team coated it with 3T3 mouse cells to form connective tissue and topped it up with human bone cells in the hope of creating a stronger layer of skin. The jacket is being grown inside a specially designed bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The group hopes that once the polymer degrades, a whole jacket that maintains its shape and integrity will be left behind.
Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad. But this does:
The artists [at SymbioticA: The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia] are also designing what they call a MetaBody, creating a semi-living object consisting of different tissues that originate from different bodies. They will be collaborating with the French performance artist Orlan, who constantly experiments with her own face, using plastic surgery to transform herself into the quintessence of classical beauty: a new being modeled on Venus, Diana, Europa, Psyche and Mona Lisa.The artists will culture Orlan’s own skin and hybridize it with skins of different pigmentation from other people of different races to create a miniature Harlequin dress. By culturing these tissues together while they are stripped from the bodies’ immune systems and making them a single, semi-living entity, they intend to abolish identities of individuals, genders, races and species.
They’ll also be growing facial parts for Stelarc, an Australian artist who explores extending the body through prosthetics. The duo plans to grow a nose, lips and a shape of the eyes, connecting them to form a living mask that would either imitate a face or represent a mutation of it.