skin layer. To create the victimless leather, the team needed an artificial environment where semi-living entities are grown, so it is grown inside a bioreactor that acts as a surrogate body. The bioreactor used in this project was custom made, based on an organ perfusion pump designed by Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh. It has an automatic dripping system which feeds the cells. The artists assumed that when the polymer degraded, an integrated jacket would appear. The resulting jacket was tiny, about 2 inches high and 1,4 inches wide and would just fit a mouse. To idealize the "victimless" of the jacket, immortalized cell lines or cells that divide and multiply forever once they are removed from an animal or human host forming a renewable resource, have been used in the project. The 3T3 mouse cells all come from a mouse who lived in the 1970s. Research and development The research and development of “Victimless Leather” has been conducted in SymbioticA: the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia and in consultation with Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan from the School of Anatomy and Human Biology as well as Verigen, a Perth-based company that specializes in tissue engineered cartilage for clinical applications. Western Australia state made the investment in the project through ArtsWa in Association with the Lotteries Commission. Exhibitions From a list of selected TC&A exhibitions. Killing the Jacket The victimless leather was featured in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, United States. February 24 – May 12, 2008 The project was scheduled to grow continuously until May 12 when the exhibition ended. There were some problems though, when the leather started expanding too quickly, clogging tubes inside the bioreactor. The exhibition leader therefore decided to unplug the project before the end of the exhibition – in a way, killing it. Response Because the artificial leather is made semi-living, the project might be seen as speculative and provocative to some people – questioning whether it is better to kill semi-living beings rather than living beings. "One of the most common and somewhat surprising comments we heard was that people were disturbed by our ethics of using living cells to grow living fabric, while the use of leather obtained from animals seems to be accepted without any concern for the