Project overview
This thesis explores an artistic practice that critiques marine bio-capitalism and the "Blue Economy" by staging the metabolic realities of the Anthropocene. To move beyond static biotechnological spectacles, the research proposes the term Biosystem Art, reclaiming the biological roots of Jack Burnham’s systems aesthetics to evaluate artworks as open metabolic loops rather than discrete objects. Methodologically, the practice rejects anthropocentric control in favour of "knowing from the inside". The studio operates as a messy laboratory where the artist facilitates active correspondence with more-than-human assemblages of marine algae (Nannochloropsis), bacteria, and biopolymers. A central material strategy juxtaposes raw red algae against its sterilised industrial derivative, kappa carrageenan, to physically stage the violent alienation inherent in capitalist extraction. The work embraces thermodynamic entropy and microbial contamination as anti-capitalist mechanisms, utilising the decay and liquefaction of "biosculptures" as systemic feedback. Finally, the thesis examines the ethics of care and erasure through The Tomb, an installation that utilises chemical sterilisation to reveal the ultimate logic of bio-capitalism: that nature is only deemed "pure" when it is rendered inert and dead. Ultimately, Biosystem Art offers a theoretical and aesthetic framework for understanding posthuman entanglement in a time of ecological crisis.