Public defence: Hege Tapio

Bioart’s critical contribution

The research is institutionally situated between two distinct environments. It was initiated within FeLT – Futures of Living Technologies, a research project at OsloMet investigating how art engages with scientific perspectives on technology, ecology and aesthetics, and later transitioned into the Innovation for Sustainability (PINS) PhD programme.

This combination situates the Metabolome project and how artistic knowledge from within the field of bioart can address technological, ethical, and ecological challenges. The project contributes to the emerging field of bioart in Norway, helping establish conceptual tools, methods, and critical vocabulary for a field that is only now taking shape nationally.

From datafied emotion to generative practice

Metabolome responds to a critical societal issue: as affective computing and emotiontechnology spread into welfare services, healthcare, workplaces, and consumer technologies, they increasingly claim to “read” or predict emotions through data. Such systems rest on the assumption that emotions are measurable, classifiable, and programmable.

Metabolome challenges this assumption directly. Drawing on biology, biochemistry, and long-term artistic practice, the project demonstrates how emotions arise through bodily, relational and biochemical processes, and that they cannot be fully captured by facial recognition, biometric measurements, or machine-learning models.

From Datafied Emotion to Generative Practice

This disconnect between lived emotional experience and its technological translation is articulated as the affective rift, a new theoretical concept developed in the thesis. The concept reveals how technological systems simplify or misrepresent emotional life, and provides researchers, designers, and policymakers with a tool for identifying the gaps where human experience escapes digital representation.

Alongside this conceptual contribution, the research delivers a revised Bioart/Hybrid Art Map that expands the terrain of bioart with gradients locating blurred boundaries or tensions between the living, the synthetic, and technologic.

Additionally, the thesis presents a methodology grounded in experiential artistic work, showing how creative experiments can serve as sensitive tools for detecting tensions, blind spots, and ethical dilemmas in technological and scientific frameworks.

What makes this research relevant is not only its critique, but its generative potential. By working inside scientific laboratories, collaborating with researchers, scientists and developing speculative prototypes informed by neuropharmacology and microfluidics, Metabolome demonstrates how artistic practice can expose ethical and societal implications long before technologies are widely adopted. It positions art as an early warning system, capable of revealing unintended consequences, challenging assumptions, and expanding our understanding of what it means to live with technology.

In an era when machines increasingly reach into emotional and relational life, Metabolome argues for approaches that respect the complexity of the living. It invites public reflection on what should, and should not, be delegated to technological systems, and offers new conceptual tools for imagining technologies that remain attentive to the fragile, metabolically entangled experience of being human.