| Sumario: | Using a recent exhibition work entitled Futile Labor involving the use of tissue-culturing techniques to create a ‘living machine’ , this article explores the relations between the biological and the digital in a post-439 humanist context. Beginning with a first person description of the encounter with the work, I focus on ‘the aesthetics of disappointment’ (Catts and Zurr) that occurs in the encounter between the spectator and living cells – cells whose action and agency lie beyond the threshold of the human perceptual apparatus, and hence, frustrate the spectator’s expectations for the visually spectacular, which normally accompanies digital performance practice. Futile Labor thus sets up the (false) hope that somehow an artistic event will overcome the disappointing limitations of both human perception (the inability to see and experience the world directly at cellular scale) and the media generated hype of new biological entities that we somehow imagine artists have the possibility of creating with new technologies. Indeed, the larger question of how the digital and the biological are enmeshed in the performative and what affects are produced in the perceiver is exactly what haunts the work.
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