Anyone growing up in the nineties will never forget the virtual pet fad that took pre-teen North America by storm. After all, who didn’t raise, neglect, and repeatedly resurrect their pet Tamagotchi?

Today, another pseudo-pet is seizing the attention of the modern world. Known as Genpets, these fetal-shaped, fleshy-looking, disturbingly realistic creatures have people clambering to buy them.

But they’re not for sale. Selling them would defeat the purpose, said Toronto-based artist and the creator of Genpets, Adam Brandejs.

A recent OCAD graduate, Brandejs created Genpets as his artistic contribution to the global controversy of bioengineering. He shows Genpets around the world to challenge views about bioengineering, consumerism and the commoditization of life.

“I see this generation slowly and systematically being desensitized towards owning and manipulating life,” said Brandejs in his artists’ statement.

Genpets are unquestionably lifelike-they’re designed to convince. Each rubbery-skinned Genpet has been electronically animated to twitch and jerk while strapped inside its plastic packaging. A built-in heart monitor ominously beeps in the background. The Genpets are colour coded to correspond to the personality trait they will have when reawakened from their induced hibernation.

Brandejs goes even further to cultivate the Genpets’ mystique. His website introduces Genpets as living, breathing, genetically engineered creations of a convincing bioengineering company, Bio-Genica. The website touts Genpets as “living pets, but better, modified to be as reliable, dependable and efficient as any other technology we use in our busy lives.”

“A lot of days, [the website] gets up to a million hits per day, which is great for exposing the work to a wide audience,” said Brandejs. “It’s gained a lot of interest it wouldn’t have in a gallery setting.”

For a month in the fall of 2005, Genpets hung in the store window of Iodine and Arsenic, a Queen Street West salon that regularly features local artists’ work.

“It was a great exhibit because…people didn’t know what the hell was going on. They thought they were real. They thought they weren’t real. They thought they were for sale, that they weren’t for sale,” said Julie Nadalin, the owner of Iodine and Arsenic. “Late at night, people would just be standing there…in the front of the building going ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!'”

“There were some people who were offended by them,” said Nadalin. “People didn’t get it until you explained it to them.”

“We’ve seen time and time again that the introduction of foreign species into a new environment causes unforeseen problems, and yet, that’s just what bioengineering aims to do,” Brandejs remarked.

After the exhibit closed, Nadalin received persistent phone calls from people who wanted to buy a Genpet. With such a following, Brandejs argued that his work has a more encompassing message.

“We’ve been taught to desire anything with glossy packaging and a lot of people comment on wanting one because of this, and then have to question whether or not they should because it’s an animal,” said Brandjs.

Genpets will be back in Toronto at Paul Petro Contemporary Art on September 30.