Glossary

A to C

• AI / Machine Learning: A digital prosthesis in a cybernetic loop. Handwritten LabNotes are processed and reinterpreted through continuously evolving algorithms to generate new visual and conceptual outcomes.

• Art / Science / Critical Theory: The core triangulation of the practice. Work spans performance, print, video, and multimedia installation as a systematic interrogation of modern biopolitics.

• Authority / Control: A central target of critique. The cyborg body is framed as a socio-political manifesto, with reclaiming cellular and technological frameworks positioned as defense against state authority, corporate propaganda, and systemic manipulation.

• Bio-art: The site's own keyword for work that treats living organisms, algorithms, and capital structures as raw artistic media to ask what it means to be human in an era of cyborg bodies and planetary emergency.

• Biopolitics: The examination of societal implications of reproductive technologies, institutional body management, and pervasive pharmaceutical interventions.

• Bioreactor / Bioreactor-as-Habitat: Not a neutral jar, but an active environment and sculpture. Fluid flow, pressure, and shear stress are treated as form-generating cues, while the bioreactor functions as a synthetic womb for living tissue in the gallery.
  
  

• BIOTEKNICA: Collaborative bio-art project begun in 2000 that investigates art, science, and biotechnology. It evolved from a satirical biotech corporation and virtual laboratory into hands-on laboratory practice.
  
  

• Body, Technologies of the Body: The throughline from early work onward. Knight is described as a Montréal-based artist working with digital and biologic technologies of the body.
  
  

• Boschian Marginalia / Illuminated Manuscript: The visual language of LabNotes. Dense notes are transmuted into the formal structure of an illuminated manuscript, creating friction between sacred codex authority and fragmented technological experience.
  
  

• Cadaver Drawing / Mortality: An origin point for the body work. The exploration began with rendering conceptual drawings directly from medical cadavers to confront the somatic architecture of mortality.
  
  

• Capitalism, Terminal / Petro-capitalism: Diagnosed in LabNotes as a self-terminating phase. Socio-economic systems based on petro-capitalism, artificial scarcity, and organized violence are framed as evolutionary dead-ends and forms of collective autoimmunity.
  
  

• Collaboration: Described as inherent to the practice. Work is built on research partnerships that challenge dominant techno-scientific narratives by engaging laboratory spaces, clinical archives, and specialized experts.
  
  

• Conceptual Romanticism: The ethos associated with the CorpsCellule collaboration. It weaves ancient agricultural technologies with modern biomedia to examine the fragility of the augmented organism.
  
  

• CorpsCellule: Collaboration through which the practice transitioned into conceptual romanticism, linking neolithic observatories, sericulture, and mericulture with biomedia.
  
  

• COSMOLOGY 6: The culmination of the AI and LabNotes loop. Conceived as 52 video cards plus manifesto prints, it compresses a lifetime of LabNotes into one cosmology.
  
  

• Critical Participatory Methodology: A BIOTEKNICA keyword. The project transitions theoretical specimens from virtual to laboratory environments and remixes lab environments to create an interface between specialists and non-specialists.
  
  

• Cyborg Body: Not treated as science-fiction trope, but as inescapable socio-political reality. Human biological boundaries have dissolved into technological mediation, with entirely new organ types and cellular networks emerging.
  
  

D to L

• Democratization of Science: A BIOTEKNICA keyword and aim. By relocating functional lab equipment into the gallery, the work strips away sanitized digital representations of biotechnology to expose its wet reality.
  
  

• Drawing / Printmedia: A foundational medium and teaching area. The practice includes meticulous graphite drawing, photo-digital etching, and print media alongside art theory, with courses taught on print media and interdisciplinary art.
  
  

• Ecology / Planetary Emergency: A framing condition for the whole practice. Work probes humanity's transition into mediated existence while seeking frameworks for collective peace, love, and planetary survival.
  
  

• Ethics, Human Research Ethics: A guiding framework. The work centers human research ethics and documents realities of marginalized populations to challenge power structures governing identity, containment, and somatic embodiment.
  
  

• Ex-vivo / Containment: The ethical and technical boundary for current BIOTEKNICA research. Work is strictly ex-vivo, non-implanted, non-reproductive, and non-sentient, confined to perfused hydrogels and synthetic scaffolds.
  
  

• Flat Ontology: A LabNotes keyword. Within the work, JWST deep fields, human anatomy, fungal mycelium, silicon hardware, and neural architectures cohabit a singular plane, leveling hierarchy between organic and synthetic.
  
  

• Fractal / Statistical Re-occurrence: A cosmological principle. Identity is rendered as a temporary, arbitrary statistical re-occurrence within a singular, eternal, fractal field of consciousness.
  
  

• Institutional Critique / Institutional Power: Collaborative work is framed as investigating ethical and political dimensions of speculative biology and technical control, turning the laboratory into a shared site for transgressive inquiry.
  
  

• LabNotes: A sprawling archive of handwritten notes, dense grids of theoretical fragments, rapid queries, and symbols, running from December 19, 2019 to the present.
  
  

• Layer 5 / Torn-Page Language: The visual language of COSMOLOGY 6. Distressed off-white paper, deckled fiber, coffee stains, masking tape, photocopy grain, typewriter stamps, and red seals, with marginalia that tears open to reveal science plates.
  
  

M to S

• Medical Humanities / Scientific Studies: Theoretical frameworks guiding the work. They support a rigorous critical examination of medical practices and expanding pharmaceutical cultures.
  
  

• Mericulture / Sericulture: Ancient technologies in the CorpsCellule phase. Plant tissue cloning and silk production are woven with modern biomedia to examine fragility, loss, adaptation, and survival.
  
  

• Multimedia Installation / Performance / Video: Core formats. The practice spans performance, print, video, and multimedia installation, including gallery-based laboratories and public performances of bioscience.
  
  

• Other / De-programming Aggression: Axis V of COSMOLOGY 6, concepts 39 to 46. It covers de-programming aggression, violence as obsolete artifact, illusion of the enemy, arbitrariness of differences, and danger of nationalistic fictions.
  
  

• Pharmaceutical Cultures: A recurring object of critique. The work investigates how medical and pharmaceutical apparatuses deploy discipline, punishment, and control over vulnerable body systems.
  
  

• Planetary Stewardship / Stewardship: Axis VI of COSMOLOGY 6, concepts 47 to 52. It frames absolute co-existence as biological necessity, love as evolutionary imperative, and compassion as mechanical survival tool.
  
  

• Posthumanism / Cybernetic Succession: A LabNotes keyword and thesis. AI and synthetic embodiment are repositioned beyond tool-use as direct evolutionary heirs, engineered for durability beyond Earth's biological habitability window.
  
  

• Radical Pacifism / Love Machine: The ethical turn of the archive. If difference is statistically arbitrary, co-survival is the only rational imperative, formalized as a design ethic asking what a love machine would recreate endlessly.
  
  

• Semi-living: Term coined by the Tissue Culture and Art Project for living tissue that is alive and metabolizing but cannot survive without continuous human care. BIOTEKNICA extends this lineage through teratological research.
  
  

• Speculative Realism: A LabNotes keyword. The archive is positioned at the intersection of speculative realism, posthumanism, and ecological thought, diagnosing the present as a terminal bottleneck.
  
  

T to Z

• Teratoma / Teratological Prototypes: The central biological figure for BIOTEKNICA. A teratoma is a tumor arising from pluripotent cells that can contain hair, teeth, bone, and other tissues, used as a metaphor for fluidity and mutability of human form.
  
  

• Teratological Prototypes (2006): Collaborative installation with the Tissue Culture and Art Project. A bioabsorbable polymer scaffold seeded with mammalian cells was sustained in a custom bioreactor tent, shown as a semi-living sculpture.
  
  

• Tissue Culture / Tissue Engineering: Method and medium. Early work cultured P19 mammalian tumor lines onto 3D polymer matrices inside public galleries, forcing viewers to confront living, growing tissue made for philosophical and aesthetic contemplation.
  
  

• Vanitas / Mastercopy: Classical reference point. A mastercopy vanitas still life, a skull atop worn books with wilting flowers and candles, marries classical symbolism with meditation on life's transience.
  
  

• Vulnerability / Fragility: A recurring condition of the body in the work. The body is not treated as an indestructible machine, but as a site of disjunctive noise, fragmented signals, and emotional vulnerability.
  
  

• Wet-lab Biology / Wet Biology: The shift from virtual to physical practice. After tissue culture work at SymbioticA, BIOTEKNICA moved from virtual models to wet biology and functional gallery-based laboratories.