(Hypothetical) Crimes Against Neural Art
We would expect that if there was any moral outrage to have over the treatment of cultured neural tissue, it would occur in an art gallery. Something about an art gallery sensitizes us to the well-being of critters we might not usually care about - as in the case of Garnet Hertz's Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (a three wheeled robot about half the size of R2D2, driven by a Madagascar hissing cockroach) - and to cry out over events that we might otherwise willfully ignore or even accept as routine - as in Guillermo Vargas's infamous “ You Are What You Read ,” (where a starving dog was taken off the street and brought into a gallery) [1]. Instead, when neural tissue is given a robotic body and placed on display (sometimes remotely) in an art gallery, most responses seem to focus on the ambiguous nature of the works. Artist Stephane Dumas wrote, referring to MEArt (a drawing robot controlled by a culture of rat brain cells), that “the public can experience the drawi...