Guy Ben-Ary is a Perth-based artist and researcher. Recognised internationally as a major artist and innovator working across science and media arts, Guy specialises in biotechnological artwork, which aims to enrich our understanding of what it means to be alive.
Guy's work has been shown across the globe at prestigious venues and festivals from the Beijing National Art Museum, Beijing to the Venice Biennale to the Mori Museum in Tokyo. His work can also be seen in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work Bricolage won an Award of Excellence at the Japan Media Arts Festival; Bricolage, cellF, and Silent Barrage were awarded an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica (2020, 2017, 2009); and Silent Barrage also won first prize at VIDA, a significant international competition for Art and Artificial Life.
Interested in how art has the potential to initiate public debate on the challenges arising from the existence of liminal lives, Ben-Ary creates artworks designed to problematise current and emergent bio-technologies' influence on the shifting forces that govern and determine life, death and sentience.
I believe art plays an important role in encouraging engagement with, and critical reflection on, a unique cultural moment where we are witnessing the unprecedented evolution of biotechnologies and various modes of liminal lives that defy traditional understandings of life.
Interested in how art has the potential to initiate public debate on the challenges arising from the existence of these liminal lives, I create artworks designed to problematize current and emergent bio-technologies' influence on the shifting forces that govern and determine life, death and sentience.
I am an artist and a researcher at SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence for Biological Arts at UWA. Since 2001, the biological laboratory has been my art studio — where the creative process takes place — and tissue culture, tissue engineering, electrophysiology, microscopy and other biological techniques have been my artistic mediums.
My research explores a number of fundamental themes that underpin the intersection of art and science; namely life and death, cybernetics, and artificial life. In my work, I use biotechnologies in a subversive way, attempting to problematize them by putting forward absurd and contestable scenarios.
Recognised internationally as a major artist and innovator working across science and media arts, I have shown my work across the globe at prestigious venues such as the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Beijing National Art Museum, Exit Art and Eyebeam in NYC, to name a few. My work has featured in leading art festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Moscow Biennale, Adelaide Biennale, Ars Electronica and the CTM Festival, among others. My work can also be seen in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bricolage won an Award of Excellence at the Japan Media Arts Festival; Bricolage, cellF and Silent Barrage were awarded an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica (2021, 2017, 2009); and Silent Barrage also won first prize at VIDA, a significant international competition for Art and Artificial Life.
In 2016, the Polish curator Ryszard Kluszczyński curated my retrospective — Nervoplastika — in Poland, followed by the publication of a book about my art practice, in which nine international scholars each analyse my work from a different perspective.
In 2025, Revivification — a collaboration with the late composer Alvin Lucier — premiered at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, marking a historic first: a deceased composer continuing to create through a bio-engineered surrogate performer grown from his own cells. The work attracted major international coverage including The Guardian, Forbes, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR and Scientific American.
I have also published chapters about my work in several books including Robots and Art — Exploring an Unlikely Symbiosis (Springer), The Future of Live Music (Bloomsbury) and Handbook of Artificial Intelligence for Music: Foundations, Advanced Approaches, and Developments for Creativity (Springer) to name a few.