In 2001, Dr. Joseph Vacanti, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School who heads Massachusetts General Hospital’s Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, invited a pair of Australians named Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, both of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A), to be artists-in-residence. Based at the University of Western Australia, TC&A is an ongoing research project that explores biological technologies from an artistic perspective. The project the artists worked on at Mass General was deliberately provocative: using bleeding-edge tissue engineering and stem-cell technologies — the same sorts of techniques that researchers are exploring as a way to grow new human organs for transplant — Catts and Zurr created sculpture out of living tissue. Taking stem cells from the bone marrow of a pig, they grew three sets of appendages modeled on the shapes of bird, bat, and pterosaur wings. The results of what they’ve come to call "The Pig Wings Project" will be open at the DeCordova Museum next Saturday.

With one finger poised on the pulse of scientific discovery, another on the pulse of contemporary art, and tongue firmly in cheek, TC&A is creating a bridge between science and art, establishing a vocabulary that allows for a necessary — and even crucial — dialogue. The artists of TC&A are looking ahead to a possible future and asking us to consider it now. "Someone said that art opens windows into a world under construction," Catts explains in an e-mail sent while he was on his way from Australia to France. "I think that is what we are trying to do."

TC&A’s projects deal with the "semi-living," and the Pig Wings Project marks the first ever wing-shaped objects grown using living pig tissue. Catts sees TC&A, and the Pig Wings Project in particular, as "a critique of the rhetoric used to ‘sell’ us biological technologies." The language surrounding such scientific frontier-expanding efforts as the human genome project, he says, has created unrealistic expectations. "One statement that has particularly grabbed our attention was that ‘now the impossible is possible,’ which in other words might mean that pigs could fly. We don’t see this project as a protest, but more as a deep artistic exploration into what flying pigs might mean to society." Catts has long been intrigued "by the role art can play in predicting and critiquing technological and scientific developments." He believes that the best way to use art to predict and critique "is by actually using the knowledge and its application in order to create tangible contestable scenarios that act as a starting point for a wider cultural discussion."

George Fifield, the curator of new media at the DeCordova, heard the artists of TC&A give a talk at MIT and "was very impressed, not just with what they’d created, but their whole attitude. The one thing that’s most compelling to me about TC&A is how they’re using tissue as both medium and subject." If we can make wings for pigs, TC&A asks us, where else can these technologies take us? Catts says, "It’s not that we’re saying that growing a finger to someone who lost it, or a longer penis, or fashion-driven body modification is bad, but there is a need to discuss it and explore the possibilities."

Because we’re not talking Botox or a boob job here. Semi-living sculpture points to a time when we’re no longer bound by our genetic inheritance, when our bodies are completely changeable, when the boundaries between organisms and species are blurred. The Pig Wings portion of the TC&A Web site refers to the infamous photo of a mouse with a human ear grafted on its back as "a living icon of unlimited sculpting and designing abilities to create the creatures/monsters of our imaginations and the possibility to sculpt and design ourselves in these shapes."