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Biopunk

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Biopunk is a portmanteau word combining "biotech" and "punk".

Science fiction

Biopunk is a sub-genre of science fiction which uses elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, Japanese anime, and post-modernist prose. It describes the nihilistic, underground side of the biotech society which is said to have started to evolve in the first decade of the 21st century. Unlike cyberpunk, it builds not on information technology but on biology. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by human genetic engineering.

One of the prominent writers in this field is Paul Di Filippo, though he called his collection of such stories ribofunk, with the first element being taken from the full name of RNA, ribonucleic acid.

Books

Films

Television

Anime

Computer and Video games

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Movement

A growing number of scientists, artists and cultural critics are organizing to create public awareness of how human genomic information gets used and misused. On the basis of a presumed parallel between genetic and computational code, science journalist Annalee Newitz has called for open-sourcing of genomic databases. Self-described "transgenic artist" Eduardo Kac uses biotechnology and genetics to create provocative works that concommitantly revel in scientific techniques and critique them. In what is probably his most famous work, GFP Bunny, Kac collaborated with a French laboratory to procure a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit implanted with a green fluorescent protein gene from a type of jellyfish in order for the rabbit to fluoresce green under ultraviolet light. The members of the Critical Art Ensemble have written books and staged multimedia performance interventions around this issue, including The Flesh Machine (focusing on in vitro fertilization, surveillance of the body, and selective eugenics) and Cult of the New Eve (analysing the quasi-religious discourse around new scientific methods of reproduction. Eugene Thacker, a professor at Georgia Tech, leads the Biotech Hobbyist collective, and has written extensively on the field.

See also

References

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