Dr. Ionat Zurr and Oron Katts

I did some further digging on ORLAN's harlequin living skin coat project and found that she had worked with the duo of Dr. Ionat Zurr and Oron Katts, the master minds behind SymbioticA.  Dr. Zurr received her doctorate from the University of Western Australia.  Her thesis was "Growing Semi-Living Art" done under the faculty of architecture. The two are pioneers in the field of biology based art.  They are perhaps best known for coming up with Victimless Leather.  The project being to grow a seamless leather jacket.  They based the jacket on a biodegradable polymer, coated it with 3T3 mouse cells, and then overlayed that with human bone cells for added strength.  My understanding is that they are able to combine between different species because there is no immune system.  The work was presented at the MOMA, but it didn't go over particularly well, and they ran into technical issues.

Victimless Leather

  Other projects include their Pig Wings project, where they grew pig bone cells into wing shapes.  They also did a project where they grew frog steaks in their lab/studio, and gave them to exhibition attendees to eat.

                      Pig Wings