Bio Tek Kitchen

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

Starrs, Josephine

Cmielewski, Leon

1999

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