When the Two10 gallery in London (an art venue operated by independent British charity Wellcome Trust, an organization mostly interested in biomedical research) commissioned art for the ‘Working Drafts’ exhibition in 2000 that was supposed to address the cultural impact of genetics (inspired by the announcement of the first working draft of the Human Genome Project), they were thrilled when seven artists submitted their ‘subtle’ and ‘harmonic’ pieces, whose ‘overall effect is benignly futuristic’ (Jones). This future envisioned by the exhibit, as curator Denna Jones argues, is supposedly vibrant with utopian potential: ‘I think this is in keeping with future applications for the genome: its potential is vast and for each of us there may be one “interpretation” that holds significance for our future.’

What the official curatorial statement does not mention is that critical proposals, such as that offered by the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A), initiated by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, were rejected in a vetting process because, as the artists later announced, ‘the advisory group felt that our project presented an unrealistic reflection of the public's opinion of the Genome’ (Zurr and Catts, ‘Big Pigs’). Their proposal for Wings detached, the tissue-cultural generation of three sets of wings from pigs’ stem cells, is offered as ‘an exercise in putting things in perspective,’ claiming that the original impossibility of the claim ‘pigs might fly,’ leading to its cultural use as connoting unrealistic fantasy, is today made possible via genetics and the art object would be a way to ‘gauge how people will react to the fulfilment of other fantastic claims’ (Zurr and Catts, ‘Big Pigs’), that is, those made by genomics. By satirizing the wish-fulfillment strategies of biotechnology (in creating miniature wings) and adding to their proposal the claim to file a patent on the wings in order ‘to “initiate and control” the pig wings “market”’ (Zurr and Catts, ‘Big Pigs’) (leading to the above-quoted pronouncement of intellectual copyright), the artists demonstrate the subversive potential of art to interrogate corporate strategies in shaping the technoscientific discourse on biology.