Steve Kurtz was a pioneering biotechnical artist, writer, activist, and professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art from 1994 to 2002. The tribute below, originally published in the February 2026 issue of Art Monthly, tells the story of Kurtz as a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble.
By Nicola Triscott
Steve Kurtz, founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), was one of the most uncompromising practitioners of politically engaged art, whose work over nearly four decades challenged how artists might intervene in the intersections of science, technology and state power. His death leaves an enormous gap in tactical media and critical art practice.
Formed in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida, CAE developed what they termed “tactical media,” a practice distinguished by its insistence on direct engagement with the material systems it critiqued. Their early publications, including The Electronic Disturbance (1994) and Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1996), became foundational texts for networked resistance practices. But it was CAE’s subsequent move into biotechnology that proved genuinely radical. They weren’t making art about science; they were performing scientific procedures, challenging who controls biological materials and knowledge production itself.
CAE’s work in the UK centered on a collaboration with Arts Catalyst spanning 15 years, beginning with GenTerra (2001-03) at Gallery Oldham and London’s Natural History Museum. This participatory performance invited audiences to grow transgenic bacteria before playing “genetic Russian roulette” with a bacteria release machine. The work demystified genetic engineering through direct engagement, exposed the constructed nature of biotechnological fear and interrogating the spectacle of risk assessment — trusting audiences’ capacity for complexity while making abstract technological systems viscerally immediate.
In May 2004, Kurtz’s practice collided catastrophically with post-9/11 security apparatus. After reporting his wife Hope’s death from heart failure, FBI agents detained Kurtz for 22 hours on suspicion of bioterrorism. When charges proved baseless, the government pursued mail fraud allegations over $256 worth of harmless bacteria. The case dragged on until finally dismissed as “insufficient on its face” in 2008. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 2007 film Strange Culture documented Kurtz’s Kafkaesque ordeal, crystallizing the chilling effects of security culture on artistic and scientific freedom.
Despite the FBI’s confiscation of his research materials, Kurtz reconstructed and completed Marching Plague (2006), an Arts Catalyst commission filmed on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. Recreating 1950s UK military experiments testing plague as a naval weapon, the work deployed dark comedy to interrogate why governments continue to invest billions in demonstrably failed bioweapons programmes, exposing how manufactured fear becomes infrastructure for expanded state and corporate power.
While CAE’s primary commitment was tactical intervention rather than art world legitimation, their work gained significant institutional recognition, exhibiting at the Whitney Museum, ICA London, and Documenta 13 (2012). In Kassel, CAE’s A Public Misery Message deployed a helicopter rising 738 feet to represent top one percent’s wealth, a literally elevated spectacle of inequality that disrupted documenta’s contemplative atmosphere with impossible-to-ignore noise.
CAE’s final UK project, Graveyard of Lost Species (2015-16, with YoHa), created a temporary monument on a Thames Estuary fishing boat, gathering memories of extinct species and vanished livelihoods. The work demonstrated how environmental destruction operates through gradual erasure, rendering collective amnesia a condition of capital’s “acceptable losses.”
CAE’s practice endures as a rigorous model for art that refuses complicity, insisting that cultural production engage the urgent political formations of its moment – a standard few contemporary practitioners meet.