@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0468, 

TITLE={Factories of the living}, 
  
AUTHOR={Ruth Scheps, }, 
	
JOURNAL={Art and Science}, 
	
VOLUME={4}, 

NUMBER={Issue 1</br>}, 
	
YEAR={2020}, 

URL={https://openscience.fr/Factories-of-the-living}, 
	
DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2020.0468}, 
	
ISSN={2515-8767}, 
	
ABSTRACT={In 2019, one book (Xénobiologie, by Marie-Christine Maurel and Michel Cassé) and two exhibitions (La Fabrique du vivant at the Pompidou Center, Formes vivantes at the Musée national Adrien Dubouché in Limoges) displayed a convergent interest for the living : science studies and synthesizes it ; art imagines it and draws inspiration from it to represent it, bio-art to recreate it. Mythology and literature have revealed long ago the porosity between the categories of living and non-living in peoples’ imagination. Contemporary experiments conducted by scientists (biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians) and creators (artists, designers, architects) tend to blur the split between the living/natural/subject and the non-living/synthetic/object. They give rise to new hybrids, « partial lives » whose raisons d’être extend from ecologically oriented multifunctionality to philosophical questioning on the living status and the place of the human within the numerical world. The present paper aims at extending this inquiry and drawing attention to the ethical implications of those hybrid works to which most of their creators only pay limited attention.}}