"[W]hy should we still call this hair human? Doesn't it belong
now to the cactus and not in a trivial sense either? Or better
still, doesn't it become just a standard biological part, to use
a revealing phrase from the biological engineering laboratory at
MIT? In this case, as in so many others, what makes it standard
is not its elemental composition but its technical
transmissibility: the apotheosis of Fordism put into service as
an organizing principle for life?" Paul Lewis, The Edge Effect:
Art, Science, and Ecology in a Deleuzian Century in An
[Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with
Deleuze/Guattari The Cactus Project (2001) is a living artwork
of cacti expressing human hair. The work explores a reproductive
paradox in genetic engineering - the inherent sterility of
transformation processes. The work makes use of agrobacterium-
mediated gene transfer to introduce hair keratin genes into
cells of cacti. Transformed cells were regenerated as engineered
transgenic cacti. The aim was to have human ke