Visual Culture and BioScience

Virtual Symposium: the discussion continues

2007-03-20T05:06:00.000-07:00

The posts listed below represent the transcripts from the Virtual Symposium on Visual Culture and Bioscience held on March 5 through March 15, 2007 and co-sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The posts are listed in chronological order with the first post at the bottom of the list (to the right) and the more recent post at the top.

Over thirty panelists from a variety of disciplines and geographic locations presented their ideas and perspectives on such topics as the visualization of art and science, artists in the lab, and the cultural and social implications of bioscience. The list of panelists can be viewed at www.visualcultureandbioscience.org

Although, the panelists may or may not be available to respond, we encourage interested members of the community to continue to use this site by posting comments relevant to the discussion.

On behalf of the NAS and UMBC, we wish to think Suzanne Anker for her insightful moderation of this symposium and to all of the panelists for their commitment to this discussion both in the context of this conference and in their personal work. We would also like to thank the over 2500 members of the internet community who participated online during the conference.

Sincerely,
JD Talasek
Director
Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs
National Academy of Sciences

Anker: BEST REGARDS

2007-03-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 06:42:43 -0500

Dear Panelists, Conference Hosts, IT Specialists, Bloggers and JDTalasek,

To all on board, my sincerest appreciation for your participation in our conference. Your thoughtful dialogue, opinionated comments, humor, and engaging ideas provided a stimulating and at times a well needed, if not, contentious discussion. The on-line symposium proved itself to be a worthy form of exchange and allowed for a contagion of comments, not to mention the flu. The manner of our discussion incorporated personal style as a method of doing business, for better or for worse. Embedded in the results was the desire to let conversation do what it does as a hypertextual mode of connecting. As a self-generating system, of yeas and nays, our conference ran its course of obstacles. However, I cannot report any casualties. As an update on current ideas at the nexus of visual culture and the biosciences, our dialogue will be added to the literature on this subject and hopefully be employed as a tool to generate further ideas, discourses, projects and the like. I have never had the experience of being so ardently tuned into my computer. It reminded me of my teen-age years waiting in anticipation for the telephone to ring. And although our conversations were solely conducted through zeros and ones, I couldn’t help myself feeling delightfully ever-present in the rush and pace of energized personas. Thank you all and we will be in touch.

Best regards,
Suzanne Anker

REICHLE: WRAP UP

2007-03-16T05:16:00.000-07:00

From: Ingeborg Reichle
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 10:04:07 +0100

WRAP UP

Thanks to Suzanne for making this symposium possible and thanks to JD Talasek, and all the people who were involved behind the scenes. Next week we have a symposium about "Visual Models" (Visuelle Modelle. Fragen der Bildwissenschaft) in the context of image sciences here in Berlin, where some of the issued adressed by Suzanne and others will be on the agenda. I hope to see some of you at the workshop 'Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museological Context? in late August 2007 in Copenhagen, followed by a one-day public conference on 'Biomedicine and Art'.
All the best,
Ingeborg

Dr. Ingeborg Reichle
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe "Die Welt als Bild"
Berlin

Sappol: WRAP UP: FINAL REMIX

2007-03-15T20:14:00.000-07:00

From: Michael Sappol
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:25:26 -0400

I want to congratulate the participants, JD Talasek and the other organizers, and especially the moderator Suzanne Anker, for an enjoyable and enlightening symposium.

As for my projects, I'm currently working on two that may be of interest to the group:

1) A DVD publication series of historical medical films from the collection of the National Library of Medicine. The first volume, on American WW2-era public health films, is very near completion; other volumes will be on cancer, tuberculosis, child development, human psychology, dental health, etc. (See image 1 for a taste.)

2) "Man as Industrial Palace": Fritz Kahn, Conceptual MedicalIllustration and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity, a book project on theorigins of modernist medical illustration, focusing largely on the workof Fritz Kahn (1888-1968). (See image 2.)

Mike

Michael Sappol, Ph.D.

History of Medicine Division

National Library of Medicine

CARNIE: WRAP UP.

2007-03-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 08:45:47 -0000

The symposium has to end just when I was beginning to get the hang of the whole
event. Well done JD Talasek, Suzanne and all that were involved behind the scenes.
Hope you get well soon Jill.
Many, many thanks but it is time to Disperse.

DISPERSE. 2002. slide dissolve work, 162 slides 2 projectors,
3 voile screens, + dissolve unit.
Made for the \School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine , London.
Photograph Andrew Carnie.

Andrew Carnie
Artist and Lecturer
Winchester School of Art
Southampton University Website http://www.andrewcarnie.co.uk/

Rijsingen: WRAP UP

2007-03-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

From: Miriam van Rijsingen
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:04:09 +0100

Dear Suzanne and all,
As I came down with a very heavy flu I was unable to contribute more unfortunately. I will however have much to read and think about, as there are many sparkling points of interest which should be pursued further. Perhaps I will come back to some of the postings individually later, when I am well again.

In the Netherlands we have the Genesis show at the Utrecht Central Museum, starting April 14th, with a symposium in June. Adam Zaretsky is doing his guest professorship at Leiden University in April and May, hosted by The Arts & Genomics Centre. Two more research projects(initiated by TA&GC) are financed and start this summer under the title: Imagining genomics: Introducing Visuality in the Genomics Debate. It focuses on the word-image issue and on the function of the visual in the ethics debate.
For more information see: www.artsgenomics.org
We will meet at various conferences no doubt, and I am looking forward to it. I thank you Suzanne for this conference, and for your various leads(both words and images) in the discussion. It was quite an experience.

Best wishes,
MiriamDr. Miriam van Rijsingen (PhD)
Department of Art History
University of Amsterdam

CARNIE : Futher brief answer to Richard Wingate

2007-03-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:03:00 -0400 (EDT)

Richard,

the artist’s studio is often only occupied by one person, but this does not stop it being the site of many a love-hate relationship. The hate when one thinks why did I ever start on this painting, why did I ever begin on such a precarious career; to some great self-satisfaction and self-love on the occasion of the completion of some work which has ended up far beyond the expectations to which it was conceived, and for that moment when one is alone in the studio to love, the space, and the chance to begin to play with materials and ideas.Back to your other posting on “hands” on and “outsiders”; I very much agree with the sentiments of what you say, it seems the conversations that have crossed between us, as we have been observing, interpreting and understanding the world have been the most important moments, and this just emphasizes my wish that all disciplines become more permeable to “outsiders”.

Andrew Carnie
Artist and Lecturer
Winchester School of Art
Southampton University Website
www.andrewcarnie.co.uk

Djerassi: Final comment

2007-03-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

From: Carl Djerassi
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:15:45 -0400

RESPONSE FROM CARL DJERASSI TO
Sent: 11 March 2007 13:40
Subject: Suzanne Anker: Science and Gender (Jill Scott)
Science and Gender Discourses on gender and society abound in the cultural and scientificliterature. In this symposium there have been several references tosocial issues regarding gender identity and its power politics. As newtechnologies reconfigure the sexual revolution into an asexual one,Susan Squier's initial comments about trans-sexuality and reproductiverights target an aspect of this circumspect and unchronicled territory.Lee Silver in Remaking Eden goes into full detail about theconceivability of male pregnancy. He also cites a time when humanembryos may be created from the fusion of cells from same sex parents.Brad Davis further engages the ways in which the female is erased by theimaging practices of sonograms. These images focus only on the fetusitself as if it is located somewhere else. The new technologies of sexselection raise serious questions issues concerning female fetuses,particularly in China and India. Recently the American College ofObstetricians and Gynocologists (ACOG) released a statement on thenon-medical use of sex selection as a sexist practice (Committee Opinion#360, "Sex Selection" February 2007, Obstetrics & Gynechology.) However,this Committee Report also raises questions about the nature of anindividual's reproductive rights. What I do find so compelling in thissymposium, that as soon as it begun, reproductive rights and embryonicimages flooded in. In what way, are we engaged in updated variations ongendered anatomies? Or on the other hand, is the fetus a "primal marvel"that still remains opaque to us? Are there any sociologists out there?Richard Twine and Troy Duster, what do you think are the core issuesregarding gender, society and technology at this point in time?

3/14/07 London
This is a combination of a wrap up message from me and a grumpy comment. I apologize for the critical tone, but there is little purpose in sanitizing one's comments.

I am bothered by the direction in which some of the messages and comments dealing with "reproduction" went since some seem to deal quickly and superficially with a vast number of issues and do so rather devoid from the real world. The following sentence from above "As new technologies reconfigure the sexual revolution into an a--sexual one, Susan Squier's initial comments about trans-sexuality and reproductive rights target an aspect of this circumspect and unchronicled territory" is such an example.

What sexual revolution is being talked about? That of the 1960s dealing with sexual behavior and its impact on the power relation between men and women or the reproductive revolution starting in the 1980s created by IVF technologies with a very different impact on that power relation? The above sentence marked in bold only makes sense if sex and reproduction are always bundled together. As I have written in books, scientific articles, novels, and plays, what we are facing is a separation between sex and fertilization. Sex, as always, for love, lust, fun, curiosity or whatever and fertilization increasingly under the microscope. This is happening primarily in the "geriatric" countries of Europe, Japan and soon also USA, where the average family consists of 1.5 children. Planned fertilization and consequent reproduction now happens so infrequently that it must be firmly separated in our discussions about sexual behavior. There is plenty of realistic and societally crucial new territory, foremost of which is the postponement or circumvention of the biological clock, because that impinges on the lives of millions of women and has an enormous effect on the power relationship between the two genders. Sex predetermination falls into this category and so do many of the implications of preimplantation embryonic genetic analysis. But to put potential "male pregnancy" into the same pot is absurd. It is a form of mental masturbation that, as most masturbation, is enjoyable, sterile, and basically harmless, except when it offers fodder to the lunatic fringe and reproductive fundamentalists. I am of course not referring to Silver as the lunatic fringe, but rather to some people who will make horror scenarios out of this. Face the fact that enabling male pregnancy is of no priority whatsoever among reproductive scientists and is of so little importance globally speaking that it isn't worth arguing about, compared to the enormous implications of the other applications of reproductive technologies.

The Ars Electronica 2000 Festival of Art, Technology and Society on NEXT SEX in Linz, which incidentally is summarized in an excellent volume:NEXT SEX: Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness. Sex im Zeitalter seiner reproduktionstechnischen Überflüssigkeit (Ars Electronica) (Paperback) by Gerfried Stocker (Editor), Christine Schöpf (Editor) , Springer, 2000 (as well as another good book "Sex vom Wissen" which was published in 2002 by the Deutsche Hygiene Museum in Dresden on the occasion of its huge exhibition under the same name) offers a good example of what I am worried about. During that excellent and wide-ranging festival, Nobuya Unno from Japan reported on his work on the artificial placenta, which included stunning video footage of 4-months old fetal goats inside an artificial placenta where they were hooked up to a dozen or more tubes, pumps and artificial feeding systems and thus kept alive for several weeks. Since they were already at an advanced stage of development, they moved around to a startling extent and seemed "live.". Of course these fetuses were removed from the goat uterus and placed into the artificial placenta when they were already fairly advanced in order to see whether they could be brought to maturity. The ostensible ultimate aim of this research is to see whether even 22-week old super-premature HUMANS could be kept alive and allowed to mature for another few weeks so as to provide viable babies. Without now arguing whether such efforts are really worth while from a societal standpoint, at least the scientific rationale was made clear. But the journalists present at that conference all focused on the question whether this meant that in the future women would be able to have babies in that fashion by depositing 3 or 4 day old embryos into such artificial placentas and then pick up the intact baby 9 months later. Aside from the preposterously difficult scientific hurdles to be overcome (tubes and pumps can be hooked up to an advanced fetus but hardly to an embryo or blastocyst) and the unbelievable cost of such an artificial placenta baby, is it really worth while to seriously debate this issue? Given the existing opposition to societally useful applications, is it worth while to offer fodder for horror scenarios to the strident opposition? It does far more harm than good and the same applies to discussions of male pregnancy. A 9-month ex-utero gestation or successful male pregnancy are not the societally important issues of this century.

Having gotten this complaint out of my system, let me end by doing what Suzanne Anker suggested today: feel welcome to preview any forthcoming projectsyou are engaged in.

The program introduction of my play TABOOS, (which premiered in London in 2006 and will have its North American premiere in September 2008 at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City) states:

Terms such as “marriage,” “family,” and “parent” used to have firm denotations. They were the rock on which our cultural values rested. Terms such as “embryo,” “baby,” or “twin” were also considered unambiguous. Assumptions that marriage must be heterosexual and that a child cannot have two parents of the same sex were never even considered assumptions, because they were beyond questioning. All of these terms have become destabilized, their meanings blurred, their ranges extended. Some would blame in vitro fertilization technology during the past three decades for these developments, but in actual fact major social and cultural changesprimarily in the United States and Europe were even more responsible for the monumental shift that has caused so much fear and antagonism, especially among the ever increasingly strident fundamentalists in the United States. So why not write a play about a situation where “family” and “parent” have assumed disturbingly fuzzy meanings? This is why I have situated Taboos in two of the socially and politically most polarized parts of the United States: the San Francisco Bay Area and the American Deep South.
Anyone interested in reading the text (and thus understanding why I am so touchy about sloppy definitions) can actually do so on the following link http://www.djerassi.com/taboos/TaboosFull.html

Carl Djerassi

Mironov: Artists as spokespeople for bioindustry

2007-03-14T10:59:00.001-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:54:10 -0500

Popularization of biotechnology through bioart is an excellent and reasonable idea. Scientific conferences is probably not the best place for bioartists to present their works. Criteria and goals in science and bioart are different. However, science and art museums is probably most appropriate place for BioArt. BioArt can help to attract new generation of scientists to bioindustry. BioArt can also create much broader public appeal and public impact especially in discussion of potential social aspects of adaptation of new biotechnologies.

Concerning suggestion: "Might we someday see artists as spokespeople for pharmaceutical companies?". Any new technology in drug or medical device industry usually needs and uses professional visual presentation and even animations. Thus, it is safe to say that in certain aspects artists are already working as spokespeople for biotech industry. One can predict that the contribution of bioartists to bioindustry will continue to increase. However, the interaction between BioArt and Biotechnology, their mutual enhancement and mutual benefit is definitely beyond just pragmatic considerations and it deserves special systematical analysis.

Vladimir Mironov

WRAP UP: FINAL REMIX

2007-03-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 08:04:48 -0500

As we embark on our final last words segment, please feel welcome to preview any forthcoming projects you are engaged in. Additionally, please free to express your thoughts in regard to any of the ideas posted here. We will be accepting posts until Thursday, March 15 11:59 EST

Anker: Preview of Kemp’s The Human Animal in Western Art and Science

2007-03-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:48:58 -0500

Many posts in our conference have referred to questions about “the animal.” From a companion species (Haraway) to living test-tubes ( Karafyllis) to food sources, our co-evolution with non-human species continues to raise innumerable questions, both ethically and psychologically.
At a time when H.G. Wells fantasies of Dr. Moreau move out of the laboratory and into social space, question concerning “taxongenomic crash” as I term it, rise to the forefront. Examples include the accelerating ease with which diseases are jumping from animals to humans and Darwinian selection between industrialized food source fish and “wild-type” species. Martin Kemp’s forthcoming text, which is cited here, historically traces human thinking and picturing in regard to our sentient others. I invite you to a preview .

The Human Animal in Western Art and Science
by
Martin Kemp

If it is dangerous to make man see too much how he is like the beasts, without showing him enough of his grandeur, just as it is to make him see his grandeur without showing him enough of his beast-like qualities, so it is even more dangerous to let him ignore one or the other. (Blaise Pascale, 1632-1662)

Part I.: Humours, Temperaments and Signs
Chapter 1:Fixing the Signs
Chapter 2: Feelings and Faces
Part II: Souls and Machines
Chapter 3: From Meaning to Mechanism
Chapter 4 Fable and Fact: La Fontaine and Buffon
Part III: Going Ape
Chapter 5: Beastly Boys and Admirable Animals
Chapter 6: Our Animal Cousins
Chapter 7: Art and Atavism

Introduction:
Facing up to ourselves

We all exhibit a propensity to react to members of the animal kingdom as if they have personalities that we can read from their appearance. We also manifest a tendency to see individual people as bearing some kind of resemblance to one of our fellow vertebrates, or even invertebrates. The title of this series of studies is to be understood in this double sense – humanised animals and animalised humans. There is rich historical legacy of imagery, which illustrates both sides of this animalistic coin.

On one hand we have the wide vein of animal representation, ranging from compilations of natural history to the illustration of animal fables. It would be easy to disassociate the more obviously humorous and story-telling aspects of the animal capers from the “serious” scientific illustrations. But this is certainly not valid historically. In the first great printed picture-books of animals in the Renaissance, the character and meaning of the animals as defined in the “Bestiaries” was of as much concern as what we might regard as more scientific data. And fables, for their part, could serve serious philosophical ends. It might seem the whimsy of legend was progressively expelled from the portals of zoological science, above all in the 19th century. However, the element of “story” in the natural history of animals has continued to exercise a powerful if somewhat covert hold on the imaginations of those who aspire to build up a picture of nature in action. Darwin is a key participant in this respect.

At the more popular level, we can all recall as children the central role that animals played in our developing consciousness of character, behaviour and life-narratives. Children’s storybooks are replete with speaking animals, often standing on two legs. How many of us have not possessed beloved cuddly or less cuddly stuffed animals, accorded human names and very distinct personalities? It is striking how relatively constant are the virtuous and the villainous amongst the child’s cast of animal characters. Teddy bears – improbably, given, the fierce irascibility of bears in the wild – have become the most popular repositories of warm feelings and trust companionship. Over the longer span, we expect to find dogs and cats and small birds featuring strongly in the lists of the basically good. Snakes figure hardly at all amongst the virtuous. Foxes, amongst the canines, are not regularly regarded with feelings of trust, whereas badgers, which are at least as keenly carnivorous, generally fall on the friendly side of the divide. Wolves are generally beyond the pale. Certainly for Red Riding Hood. Though for the Romans a she-wolf suckled their legendary founders, Romulus and Remus, and there were persistent legends of wild children nurtured by wolves.

Clearly the actual behaviour of the animals in relation to humans plays a powerful role in our instinctive perceptions of their characters. The most sustained relationship that we have enjoyed with any animal is with the horse, the noble beast that for generations carried men into war, pulled wheeled vehicles and tilled our fields. Only exceptionally does the horse play anything other than a worthy role. Equally, it is difficult to imagine a dairy cow or woolly sheep acting as the villain of the piece (or peace), even less so if they feature in their youthful guises as calf or lamb. Bulls and rams are a different matter. Gender and age are obviously potent factors. On the other hand, some notably violent and unsociable animals regularly play admired roles. Our cherished cats are noted for their ritual slaughter of mice and baby birds. Even the lion is conventionally granted a noble personality, according to a legend of many centuries’ standing. There is hardly a building erected by European and many oriental rulers that do not parade lions as representative of the potentates’ just but fierce virtues. Tigers occupy in a more ambiguous position, desirably signifying the high performance of Esso petrol, while not commonly regarded as promoters of peace and harmony. Bats, creatures of the dark, are not much liked, in contrast to many birds. Black crows do carry sinister connotations, however, while black and white magpies are notorious thieves.

Inhabitants of the waters are best considered on a case-by-case basis, but tend on balance to fall on the distrusted side of the emotional spectrum, with sharks and octopuses regarded as particularly malevolent. Fishes’ eyes tend to be regarded as unappealing and unsettling, and we often refer to something “fishy going on” when we suspect that deceit is being perpetrated. Amphibians and reptiles also tend to evoke feelings of revulsion. To describe someone as “reptilian” is certainly not a complement, and we may suspect that are likely to be involved in fishy or creepy activities. The aesthetics of touch undoubtedly play a role in stigmatising such genera of animals. Wetness, sliminess, hardness and temperature all have roles to play. Someone lacking warmth of emotion is described as a cold fish.

Non-vertebrates as whole tend not to get a good billing, though snails clearly do much better than slugs. Animals with angular exoskeletons exude an air of aggression, reminiscent of knights in armour. Strangely, such “medieval” insect garb has become one of the stock in trade features for futuristic sci-fi warriors from alien planets. Insects and crustaceans are not fondly regarded as a group. Butterflies are an exception, even when masquerading as caterpillars, as are bees for the most part, but not wasps (unless you own a Vespa scooter in Italy). Spiders can sometimes be regarded as OK, especially with respect to their arachnid weaving skills, and little “Money Spiders” can be children’s favourites, but they more often stimulate strikingly adverse reactions beyond rational explanation. Even in Britain, where there are no native poisonous spiders, the sight of a big, black specimen who has ascended the waste pipe into a white bath is likely to produce a shudder of dread. Size and hairiness are definitely significant factors in defining a spider as threatening.

Ancient legends of the animals, particularly as recorded in “Bestiaries” told of idiosyncratic habits that were frequently read in terms of human meaning. The legacy of the legends is found in popular imagery and sayings, “Hiding one’s head in the sand”, as ostriches were wont to do, has come to symbolise not facing up to reality. When we manifest insincere grief, we are “crying crocodile tears”. The key compilations of fables, by Aesop and La Fontaine, including many illustrated editions, and the recurrent tales of Reynard the Fox, have typically dressed up salutary lessons for humans in the garb of picturesque stories of talking animals. Reynard’s legendary cunning is both a literary topos and related to the well-documented inventiveness of foxes pursued by hunters. As in other territories inhabited by the human animal, many beasts retain relatively constant characteristics, such as the kingly lion, though even he could be satirised as occasion demanded.

Over the ages and across cultures, many different animals have been regarded as sacred, and even as deities. Just to take two examples, monkeys are sacred in Sri Lanka, while cows are accorded divine status in India. The term “sacred cow” has entered common usage to indicate something or someone who cannot be criticised (often with the implication that such status is not altogether warranted). The many Egyptian statues of cats testify to their divine attributes, while combinations of feline and aquiline characteristics in such compound beasts as griffins signify origins and powers beyond those of natural creatures. Generally speaking, creatures fantastically assembled from the component parts of diverse species have served as harbingers of divinity or devilry. Almost all religions that have exploited figurative imagery have developed fantastically confected agents for good or for evil. Human-animal compounds carry a particular frisson, as mermaids, sirens, harpies, centaurs and satyrs testify.

The perceived character of particular animals, male and female, real and imaginary, is not subject to simple generalisation, and once we embark on the assembly of lists it is difficult to know when to stop a complex and often unstable mesh of cultural factors, knowledge, experience, and deep-seated instincts are involved, collectively and individually. The same creature can play the roles of polar opposites. Many people love birds of all kinds. A few cannot stand to look or touch of feathers. And one of the scariest of all Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces of filmed unease was “The Birds”, in which flocks of flapping insurgents wreaked mass revenge on humans, as fronted by the lovely Tippi Hendren (fig. 1). The complexity and fluidity of our feelings does nothing, however, to diminish the elemental power of our reactions to each creature in particular circumstances.

The power of a film such as Hitchcock’s, addressed to adult audiences, shows that whatever we may have sloughed off amongst our childish things, we retain a very strong instinct to anthropomorphise animals and to build them into our own stories. Domesticated companions are obviously in the front line, but no visitor to a zoo is likely to the resist the pull to assign character on the basis of appearance. Even the popular names of some wild animals and, most notably, birds speak of their fancifully assigned roles in human society. The Secretary Bird, for instance, is all neat precision and high-heeled pertness.

Orwell’s exemplary “fairy tale” of revolutionary animals taking over their farm, and the inexorable onset of hierarchies and divisiveness, gains much of the efficacy of its characterisation from our instinctual anthropomorphising. The initial assembly was convened by “old Major, the prize Middle-White boar”, now venerable and stout, but still “majestic looking”. Of the sketches of the animals, all of whom behave as more-or-less true to type, none are more finely characterised than the horses, the beast best known to humans over the ages:
"The two cart-horses, Boxer and Clover, came in to together, walking very slowly and setting down their vast hairy hoofs with great care lest there should be some small animal concealed in the straw. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quire got her figure back after her fourth foal. Boxer was an enormous beast, nearly eighteen hands high, and as strong as two ordinary horses put together. A white stripe down the centre of his nose gave him a somewhat stupid appearance, and in fact he was not of first-rate intelligence, but he was universally respected for his steadiness of character and tremendous powers of work…
At the last moment, Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare, who drew Mr. Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing a lump of sugar. She took her place near the front and began flitting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with."
Writing this, as I am, in Los Angeles on the night that the Oscars are awarded, I sense that Mollie would had felt more at home amongst the bejewelled starlets than with the pigs snuffling in their troughs. Though in Orwell’s tale it is the pigs that are the cleverest of animals.

At the very end of the book, the pigs are to be discovered forging a self-serving alliance with neighbouring humans. Looking into the house at the summit meeting of pigs and farmers,
"Clover’s old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins. some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing?…"
Later, following an argument between Mr Pilkington and Napoleon, the leading pig, who had been accused of cheating at cards,
"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
This last line of Orwell’s novel flips to the other side of our coin; that is to say; to our parade of animalised people.

Carnie: "hands on" and "outsiders" response

2007-03-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:19:31 -0400 (EDT)

I do wonder whether our training sets our brains differently. I wonder whether the situation is analogous to sport. In sport, preparation sets up the body for the rigours of the particular activity. It is impossible to think a thin framed, lean cyclist like Lance Armstrong could be involved in the Tour de France and in-between be an American Football player in the Super Bowl. The world I think my work comes from as an artist is the area of slippage and leakage between brain areas the fortuitous accident and the ability to recognise its value. Living at ease with this state and maintaining it is difficult. In science a different rigour is needed. It is strange how many artists are dyslexics and I wonder if this is part of the brain set needed to be artistic. I did start a training to be a scientist and think I could have done this; but I think much of either of these disciplines is dammed hard work and doing the amount of labour twice over to be fully trained in two disciplines is hard to conceive of unless the economics of matters changed massively to help free up lots of time. My dyslexia would certainly have got in the way and I could never do the paired down writing that Richard achieves for his journal submissions; that I am jealous of.

Carnie: The Two Cultures

2007-03-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:45:16 -0400 (EDT)

The Two Cultures, some thoughts

With reference to recent discussions I would like to add a few points in a similarly clumsy way that I have added to earlier discussions. Writing is not my metier and from time to time some would say neither is my visual work!

I would agree with what Suzanne is saying that there is a drive to move away from some of the maddeningly commercial driven aspects of the Art Fair and Art Market. Certainly some sanity can be found in the discourse and images displayed within this symposium. The web offers other ways of displaying material and new technologies, new ways of presenting material. This mean sartists can subvert the traditional dominant cultural forces and make the own production and consumption zones. Of course they then have to accept the limitations that come with such a domain.

With regard to the two cultures and notions of dominance of one over the other or considerations as to whether they are coming together that has been suggested, certainly I think mixing the two cultures up is healthy with us all having deeper understandings of every field of life is important. I think artists should be very happy to talk and work with any field of study.

Maybe there will be a new phase and a new fusion of science and art work and this will produce new types of production which will supersede our traditional separations. However I would venture to stand by the fact that ultimately I think the good scientist and the good artistist have to stand back from any excursion into the others field and make good science and good art from the heart of their own practise respectively. I do think that artists need to have content and they need to know it well, and this can be in a scientific field. The specialist will have to reign ultimately returning to what they know bestand the successful multidisciplinary expert will be very rare. I have written this, now do I believe it? give me a few days.

As a practitioner I don't feel any particular jealousy towards scientists and what they discover. I am amazed by what they do produce and I am amazed by whatI have produced and what other artists have produced over the centuries. I havetalked in conferences amongst scientists been overwhelmed by their discoveriesand ideas only to find at the end that they have been very impressed by what Ihave shown them in terms of my practise. The images and metaphors produced byartists are obviously powerful things.Strangely maybe it is often the art that seems to linger longer in memory fromany one generation or from any past century down the years. Is this acontroversial thing to say; is it only true of the past, only true of me? Willthis current generation and future generations remember only science from thisperiod we are in now, with science so dominant, or are there visual iconscurrently being produced which will pass on into the collective image bank thatfuture generations might carry?I can see an image of the Dutch anatomists at work in my head from the 17 century, [Thomas de Keyser, Osteology Lesson of Dr Sebastian Egbertsz 1619], but can remember little of the science of the time. Like wise I can conjure many artists from the Renaissance and their paintings but remember little of the fascinating discoveries made in Florence. I think if ones understanding of science are that it deals with facts one surpassing the other this does mean that the history of science becomes weakened force in ones memory over time. Ultimately the product of science is rules and formulae about the world which are ever being advanced. "Significant" art deals with particular human "subjective" truths and that these strangely become critically and objectively "true" generation after generation. Art is about sounds, pictures, poetry and prose and they seem to linger for longer. The science writing that Richard Wingate talks of in his recent submission is as he says paired down to exclude all metaphor, and has no place to resonate. The visual and sound world we know has existed for humans for much longer than that of the spoken and written word. We have always seen and heard but we have only begun to talk and write more recently; with the first the earliest known hieroglyphic inscriptions around 3200 BC; thought Homo Habilis was looking and hearing in Africa some two half million years ago. The picture and metaphor maybe have a deeper resonance a connection maybe with older areas of the brain. I rather like Richard Gregory's visual experiment with the hollow mask, spinning slowly; the nose always appears to stick-outeven when the reverse should be true. Our brains over rule our eyes, to say ""that nose's always protrude"; perception acts over sensation. A further adaptation to this demonstration has been added by Gregory and I think a team of Canadian scientists. Subjects asked to point to where the nose is on the mask when looked at hollow side facing them, always point in the air in front of the mask if asked to undertake this process with consideration. Asked to do it with speed and with no hesitation the subjects finger reaches into the mask and point into the inverted nose. At a deeper level our "old brain" gets it right and understands the real spatial aspect in the experiment. Deep down lies an unconscious visual awareness and truth.

Andrew Carnie
Artist and Lecturer
Winchester School of Art
Southampton University
Website www.andrewcarnie.co.uk

Wingate: "hands on" and "outsiders"

2007-03-14T05:51:00.000-07:00

From: Richard. Wingate
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:26:24 -0400 (EDT)

There is indeed great deal of value in a constant explanation and defence of ideas and results with the non-scientist, the "outsider". Best when it’s witha creative mind that has a similar interest in observing, interpreting andunderstanding the world (artists, playwrights, children, sometimes students).However, I’m not sure that the artist in collaboration is necessarily anoutsider. Over the last year or so of hearing Andrew Carnie talk about my work, I feel he invests it with more interest and excitement than I can muster. He explains the concepts equally well and is an excellent advocate for science andscientists. I think, incidentally, that this is something that he has conveyedin some of his postings. So Andrew’s an “insider” but not a benchresearch scientist.Could he be? Well the training is long and hard - there are degrees anddoctorates to be won along the way - and he’s already been through his ownlong and hard professional development, with so many parallels in structure andbenchmarks for achievement. Andrew, what do you think?So when a non-scientist is trained to use a scanning electron microscope(Jill’s observation), the use of the term mimicry is very accurate superficially daunting equipment can be used efficiently and correctly by anyone with a relatively brief training. But these are just tools. Theinstinctive understanding of the significance in form and function -what todiscard and what to leave in is gained through experience and often a greatdeal of scholarship.

Wingate: SESSION TWO brief answer

2007-03-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

From: Richard Wingate
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:19:27 -0400 (EDT)

1) What is a laboratory? I don’t think of the laboratory is as a creative space - it’s more like a battleground. I’s a place where we wrestle with temperamental equipment anddiscomfort and the site of almost constant defeats and only the occasionalheart-stopping victory and revelation. It’s also a collegiate atmosphere ofconstant banter, gossip and humour, flirtation even. Because so many peoplepass through and invest each inch of bench surface with the story of theirstruggle the laboratory is often redolent with memories and evidence of pastcolleagues - a very “human” (and I’m conscious of the conversations inthis session) environment, not at all impersonal. Scientific creativity is inmy experience exercised on whiteboards and paper, in offices and seminar rooms, on the commute into work and at home in the late night around the kitchentable.

The studio, by comparison, seems enormously liberating - a playground. However, I’d imagine that what the studio shares with the laboratory is a love-hate relationship with their respective occupants. Is this true?

Sappol: The Two Cultures Update

2007-03-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

From: Michael Sappol
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:41:54 -0400

Suzanne:
I like your response to my two cultures posting. But I think you misunderstood what I was getting at with my statement that artists are "making themselves into scientists and philosophers of science” (because I was operating in the ironic mode). I was thinking about performative aspects of contemporary art. I was arguing that artists play-act the discourse, tropes, productions and characteristic (or stereotypical) performances of science. This work, like other contemporary art, participates in the creation of marketable personae and trendy commodities. But in the best cases it also performs a valuable critical function--in collaboration with the apparatus of art historians, documentarians, etc.--mounts a critique of science, art, governmentality, markets and lots of other things that need thoughtful explication and criticism.

Mike

Waldby: Science and Gender (Jill Scott) and session 3 questions

2007-03-13T23:33:00.000-07:00

From: Catherine Waldby
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 16:04:15 +1100

Re Eugene's point about the labour of tissues

I agree thinking about the productivity of biological material as a from of labour is really useful ? effectively this is the source of productivity of the bioeconomic industries - their ability to tweak in vitro and in vivo living materials and turn their normal productivity into labour for biocapital as it were. At the same time I would want to link this labour to what I would call human in vivo labour. A lot more areas of biotech involve ongoing relationships to populations who give access to their in vivo biology as well as their ex vivo tissues - biobanking, where banks take blood samples but also monitor the lifetime health of their cohorts, clinical trails participants, increasingly drawn from third world populations where this is their main source of income, women who sell ova on a regular basis, to the reproductive industries and now to stem cell research. The last two of these are very onerous and involve significant risk and often pain. In each of these cases the labour performed by tissues requires a prior and ongoing labour performed by subjects. I think the biotech industries would like to escape this relationship and rely purely on in vitro life, but in many arenas they can?t.

Catherine

Eugene wrote
I wonder if this neoliberalization also relates to anew type of labor - one different from the maternal body and the attendanttechnologies involved in reproductive biology. What "labor" is performed bycells, eggs, and embryos? It sounds a bit ridiculous, I know (no, I don't meanembryos as a form of child labor in Chaplin's factory...). But much of thescience behind these innovations is predicated on the notion that, given theright conditions (e.g. the right growth factors, etc.) a group of cells willthemselves differentiate in a particular way - with a minimum of intervention.Of course there is a lot of intervention. But the concept is that thebiological entities will do it themselves - there's an interesting approach of"pulling back" here that seems consonant with the neoliberal "flexibility"surrounding reproductive technologies...?

RE: SESSION THREE: bioscience and bioart

2007-03-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 14:51:36 -0400 (EDT)

Hi all -
I have to admit that I concur with many of Michael's statements here, though I remain interested in innovations in both and across both areas. Personally I'm not convinced that we are anywhere near being "beyond" the two cultures (let alone in a "third culture" as that book by Brockman suggests).

(i) There's a conceptual issue involved, in that we often *begin* discussion presuming the categories of "artist" and "scientist," if only for heuristic reasons. That's fine, we all do it, whatever. But there's an important discussion to be had about the function of those categories in making possible a discussion at all. The "artist-scientist" dichotomy often comes tometonymically stand in for the "two cultures," whereas there are far from being identical. I'm not sure a philosopher would be on the side of the artist, or a programmer on the side of the scientist, etc.

(ii) But I'm always reminded of the way that the various institutional sites relentlessly - and invisibily - interpellate us into these positions as well. I would include here the very literal spaces of the classroom, the art studio, the media production "lab," the science lab, the conference/convention/symposium, and online variants of these. There's no reason to think that Peter Burger's critique of the "institution of art"doesn't apply to other fields as well.

(iii) This conceptual issue, and its articulcation within institutional sites, lead us to think about the refractory effect that many of our basic concept shave. For instance "creation" may mean something very different for one artist and another, let alone between those artists and a scientist. How different can the concepts become while still remaining the same concept? (The concept of "purpose" is another one; Kant famously posited a weird "purposiveness without a purpose" in the asthetic...).

A while back I tried to - in a somewhat provocational manner - sort out some of these problems in a short article that started by flaming Jeremy Rifkin andthen talking about bio-art. I quote from a part of it here:
"-Bioart usually benefits the artists more than the scientist collaborators.While there are a great many examples of scientists collaborating with artistson projects, there are a few asymmetries worth noting. First, the work itselfis usually shown in an art context. Second, if publication occurs, it is morelikely to be in an art journal than a scientific one. Third, when instances ofprofessional recognition arise (e.g., tenure & promotion), the artist getsrecognition, while the scientist often does not. Fourth, artists and scientists work with very different funding budgets. Very different.- The context for bioart is often the site of the gallery. This may not beproblematic in itself, but when bioart claims to be speaking about biotech interms of education and public awareness, then we have to wonder about the siteof this engagement. The art gallery is itself a specialized site, quitealienating for many people. How can art claim to reach a public about science,when it still has not resolved its inability to reach a public about art?- In bioart, "gee-whiz" science often overwhelms critical engagement. That is, bioart often eschews ethical considerations in favor of technical ones. Anyone will admit that learning how to work the automatic sequencing machine is cool, but it is worthwhile to reflect on it a little. The old question can I do this versus should I do this is worth reconsidering in the context of bioart practices as art practices.
- Bioart can sometimes become PR for the biotech industry. In some cases the aestheticization in bioart can feed into the "rhetoric of wonder" abundant in popular discussions of the genetic understanding of life. It is fascinating that your DNA stretched out is five feet long (or whatever it is) And?
- But not all bioart is formalist. In fact, a number of artists enjoy and cultivate the "outsider-artist" persona, which indicates that bioart may be attempting to fashion itself as the new avant-garde (oh no, not again!). By pitching itself as transgressive, bioart risks replaying the tired narrative of mainstream recuperation. Except that recuperation will this time be activated by government research institutions and biotech companies with programs titled "a celebration of art and science." (Might we someday see artists as spokespeople for pharmaceutical companies?)..."[ full article: http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=7028&page=1 ;]

-Eugene

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Anker: The Two Cultures Update (Sappol)

2007-03-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:12:19 -0500

Having recently re-read C.P.Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) with my M.F.A. Graduate students in S.V.A.’s Writing and Art Criticism Program, we did in fact, find some points that still have currency. Although couched in existential terms, Snow distinguishes “the individual experience and the social experience, between the individual condition of man and his social condition.” Thus for Snow, who had one foot in each camp,
he talks about scientists thus:
“Most of the scientists I have known well have felt just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well-- that the individual condition in each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.”

Your impressive and comprehensive listing of “structural similarities” between art and science, is in fact well taken. However I would like to argue with your notion of “artists making themselves into scientists and philosophers of science.” I have made references during the symposium to the fact that at the present time, art practice has devolved into an entertainment industry. Operating as an unregulated insider trading brokerage network, it advances its platforms and cultural consensus through a checkbook. From the Art Fair to the International Biennial, goods for sale (or tourism bucks) are only outflanked by the perception that the “expression” of art is synomous with human rights and political freedom. The enormous interest in objects and markets may in fact dilute the actual practice of art. If one conceives of the artworld as a microcosm of the real world (and this may or may not be true in science) than the commodity trumps the iconic, linguistic, philosophic or other charges that have historically been within the provenance of modern art. And it is here that we can consider the changing ways in which communities and social complexes form. As global markets produce more and more “stuff”, objects, as stated by Karin Knorr Cetina, replace personal relationships substituting ‘things’ for sentient intimacy.

If artists, are migrating towards alternative discourses, it may in fact be that they do not agree with the art world’s self-proclaimed agenda. In this sense, artists are still doing what they have always done, particularly in regard to the historical avant-garde. The claim that art has value, exceeding it material costs, has created a coterie of art historians, historians, curators, documentarians and others as they interpret, catalogue and protect what has been deemed valuable. So in some ways, art functions as a data-bank or archive of the changes over time in our ideas about what constitutes “world-making.” Hence, this current round of artists, not content to endorse the slogan “dumb like a painter” wish at least to have the “creative moments,” the “pools of light” that C.P Snow talks about. And it is to this ambitious undertaking that I give my respect.

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Twine: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

From: Richard Twine
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:45:01 -0000

SESSION THREE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE
Each discipline has its own set of practices with regard to this question. From your particular perspective, please identify the issues, values, and ethics involved in these transformative bio-practices.

As a sociologist interested in the social and ethical aspects of animal biotechnologies, a central issue is to investigate the extent to which the bio-sciences are effecting a shift in our relations to nature, and the very meanings of 'nature'. I take on board Oron's point that artists, sociologists and cultural critics can certainly become embroiled in the mythical hyping of bioscience, and so consequently we should be cautious in over-stating our claims. Interestingly since we are talking about highly commercialised domains of science, scientists may be encouraged to adopt a rather performative stance to prospective venture capital audiences. We can witness this right now in the area of using cloning technologies for animal agriculture which (setting aside ethical questions and focussing on the technical possibility) is rather 'gung ho' in the USA and treated with much more scepticism in the EU.

We're in the early stages but arguably changes are afoot, hyped or otherwise. Marker Assisted Selection or Gene Assisted Selection which are molecular techniques of refined selective breeding using genomic information (not to be confused with genetic modification - GM) are developing with some already in use, and pockets of research for the use of GM & Cloning in animal agriculture are also ongoing. Xenotransplantation has hit a wall, but research continues, and biopharma research although rather slow in progress is also ongoing. Several of these techniques encourage a convergence between medical and agricultural domains which is novel in its hybridising effect, if not its history of knowledge exchange. Obviously plant agriculture is further 'ahead' in these respects.

The ethical import in these transformative bio-practices could revolve around the question of what the human becomes when it transitions into a designer of life? The bio-sciences might equally be drawn upon to underline cross-species solidarity or indeed a definitive humiliation of a nature still represented as abject and nonhuman. In terms of animal ethics specifically, the vast majority of GM work is in medical research, a historical paradigm that is very difficult to extract ourselves from. Nevertheless our values towards other animals are highly ambiguous, with this ambiguity probably being a latent cultural resource for change. It's arguably the dark little marginalised truth pertaining to our cultural practices of animal consumption that is more ethically interesting. Unless our thriving posthumanist vegan and vegetarian friends are grabbing some animal protein on the sly, it does in fact appear that our animal consumption is a psychological/cultural/geographical need rather than a physiological one. We might then want to think more on why art/sci interactions could be seen to be privileging certain forms of 'sexy' science. An artist working with a team of animal welfare or behavioural scientists or even nutritionists might come up with a different take on the issues of hubris and anthropocentrism than one who goes for animal transgenics, as interesting and as valid as that is. Perhaps, as implied by one or two earlier posts, sciences such as tissue engineering will have a considerable impact on human/animal relations if engineered meat really does happen, or at least a proliferation of novel protein foods (see this Dutch research project for more information on that - http://www.profetas.nl/). It would be good to hear more from the artists here who use animals in their work - whether or not they think their work is raising any particular ethical questions or questionings of bioscience.

thanks,
Richard

Dr.Richard Twine
Principal Investigator & Postgraduate Director
ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen)

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Sappol: bioscience and bioart

2007-03-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

From: Michael Sappol
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:51:38 -0400

This may be stating the obvious but I want to offer an abstract, but I hope useful, response to the virtual symposium as a whole. Oron Catts's post about the unfriendly reception of his poster at an international tissue engineering conference raises the issue of the ambivalent relationship between artists and scientists, and their work. Without invoking the now-tired "two cultures" argument, it seems evident to me from many of the posts in this symposium that there are structural, and more than structural, similarities between artists and scientists: both make artifacts that are connected to truth claims; both do their work in sequestered spaces (the laboratory, the classroom, the studio, the gallery, the journal); both derive authority and legitimacy, cultural privilege, from claims to be connected to progressive lineages of accomplishment, with chronologies of "landmarks" and "breakthroughs"; both have a canon of performance based on the notion of "genius"; both increasingly use a specialized technical vocabulary that excludes the larger public; both have knowledge communities that assess, comment on, and validate their claims (and both share a knowledge community, the group of people who do sociological/cultural theory/critique of art and science). And both have transformative effects on a wider public, on society and culture, on everyday life, on the embodied self.

Although some of the posts in this symposium have stressed the ways in which artists and scientists collude, and have colluded over the centuries, it seems to me that there is a competition for authority, an abiding tension. Today, the cultural prestige of science is very high, hegemonic; for a long time science has trumped art. Artists have responded in part by adopting the language of "experimentalism" and the "laboratory", first in music, then in conceptual and visual art; by working in new technologies (video, digital imaging, tissue engineering, recombinant DNA); by taking up residence in the institutions of science; by adopting at least in part the specialized technical vocabulary of science; by making "epistemic objects" that mimic or parody or "destabilize" the objects of science; and by taking on an oracular, prophetic role that offers a critique of science, especially biotechnology. In other words, artists have responded by making themselves into scientists and philosophers of science. Who make far-reaching truth claims about science and technology: about the way science works; about the power relations that are built into science's "epistemic objects"; about the mystification, reification, and/or naturalization effects of scientific productions; about science's embedded ideologies and aesthetics; about its cognitive, and much more than cognitive, effects on us and the world around us.

Mike Sappol
History of Medicine Division
National Library of Medicine

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Wingate: Use of Metaphor

2007-03-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

From:Richard Wingate
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:16:05 -0400 (EDT)

Hi Jill,
Really racing to catch up with this fascinating symposium - if I can return toyour questions (of many days ago)...You mentioned the use of metaphor (visual and written) and the differences in their use in arts and science. I'd agree that there is a lack of training of science researchers in the use of a visual language, at least (maybe not quite the same thing). To me this gives free rise to a fascinating absorption and recycling of stray elements of visual culture in visual scientific presentation. This contrasts with the written science research paper, which in its ideal form, is a highly disciplined and sparse form of literature, entirely free of metaphor (well, that's the idea at least). Perhaps this is the origin of the ambiguity you've identified - we formally reject metaphor within primary written research but bask in the pleasure of a poorly balanced visual metaphor given the opportunity.

In answer to your points:
-I think that scientists would enjoy explicitly confronting the poetic motives behind what they produce. A comparative scientific and an artistic appreciation of an identical set of events might come up with parallel models thatcomplement and define each other. I suspect that, in any case, we use thisprocess of poetic/literal comparison in interpreting what we see - even if wecouch these interpretations formally within a more austere language.
- Successful Art-Sci collaborations are indeed a dicussion of metaphor, butI'm not sure that a resultant artwork would ever be judged purely within ascience arena. My utilitarian stance would be that the value of the exercisecame within the process. I'm not sure which part/element of science is able tojudge or afford respect to the product - an artwork that was useful to sciencemight fail in so many other ways...

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Anker: Modes of Depiction/Epistemic Systems (Florian, Brad, Max)

2007-03-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:50:12 -0500

Several panelists have had professional training and/or careers that span the visual arts and the sciences. Florian Dombois is commenting about the way in which content from one discipline can be transfigured and expanded into content in another. Please talk about the ways in which symbolic forms intersect with your work in the sciences. To what extent do you differentiate your roles in each? What are some of the ways you can describe art practice as an epistemic system?

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Kemp: Reporting on Human Chromosome 16

2007-03-13T06:54:00.000-07:00

From: Martin Kemp
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:55:53 -0400

Background

In lieu of being able to participate in the debate, though sheer pressure of time, I’m sending my latest Nature column, which is at least germane. It is not yet published and has not been through the editorial process.
Sarah Jacobs has been keeping me informed about her work for a number of years. We met for the first time when I was preparing this essay. I think she will come to be regarded as one of the major artists working in the field.

Martin Kemp

Reporting on Human Chromosome 16

Sarah Jacobs mutates information into art
How is any artist to confront the excruciating complexity of the human genome – or any genome for that matter? There are just too many CGATs. It is possible to make some general artistic “statements” about the project, about its implications and about genetic engineering. It is all too easy to sink to the level of the “Frankenstein Food” headline in the Daily Mail on13 February 1999.
But Sarah Jacobs shows that the complexity can be tackled head on and turned to brilliant aesthetic account. She has a record of working with the blank poetics of modern scientific discourse, with its studied eschewing of stylishness or personal _expression_. Her 92-page e-book, Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here is studded throughout with phrases from the original 2004 article, “The sequence and analysis of duplication-rich human chromosome 16” (Nature 432). “We report here” is one of these, together with “We observed” (of course),“Here we describe”, “We constructed”, “We adopted a strategy”, “We then eliminated”, “Finally we identified”, and so on. Isolated, the phrases that are so much part of scientific normality, assume the quality of an incantation.
Following the Nature article, Jacobs googled such terms as “human chromosome 16”, “chromosome 16 book” and “chromosome 16 _expression_”. She even searched for odd combinations, such as “chromosome 16 Saddam Hussein”. (Yes, it really does produce results). She sifted out around 250 website links on the basis of what appeared intellectually or intuitively interesting and “looked good”. The e-book proceeds through simple pages of the incantatory phrases interspersed with coloured lower-case overprinting of the site links with fragments of their texts and numbers from the original article in large capitals, such as the “…..NINE PERCENT / EIGHT HUNDRED / AND EIGHTY. ONE THOUSAND / SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY / NINTEEN /THREE HUNDRED AND / FORTY-ONE / 3” on the illustrated page.
The result is a doggedly accumulated “report” on the incredibly rapid Internet diffusion of the knowledge in standard and bizarre forms. The contents are however subject to constant mutation. Every 6 months Jacobs took screen shots to document the changes.
To accompany the Report, she has now issued an Index as a print-on-demand book, heavy in its fixed form of 552 pages. Against the rat-a-tat background of the CGAT permutations, the accumulated numbers are remorselessly spelt out, up to “Sixteen million five hundred and forty-one thousand and nine hundred”, still short of 90 million plus noted in the article. They are accompanied by enigmatic fragments from the websites.
Given the vagaries of the production process, each Index assumes an individual character. The CGATs on every left hand page are bled to the very borders, and their visible _expression_ along the unbound edge of the closed book varies unpredictably as the result of minute variations in the trimming process.
The Report and the Index are strange, difficult, perplexing, suggestive and strangely beautiful - and awesome in their numerical persisitence. Jacobs has created something that is very directly drawn from the science and its diffusion, using the tools of a rabid bibliographer-cum-classifier. Yet the result subverts the science in the direction of chaos and cacophany. The effect is analogous the way that the extraordinary particularity of each individual person seems to confound the overwhelming similarity of our genetic constitutions.
At least, this is one interpretation that I can give it. There are others. Jacobs is, I suspect, resisting any closed or dominant reading. Therein lies the difference between the original article and Jacobs’s visual play. The scientific exposition states that “WE FOUND” with as little lattitude for alternative readings as possible. Jacobs provides a field for interpretative flexibility that triggers thoughts and insights of an unexptected nature – unexpected even to the author herself.

Illustration: Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here, p. 6 http://www.informationasmaterial.com/ http://www.informationasmaterial.com/documents/HC16report_06_12_20.PDF

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Catts: Living Removable Tattoo as a BioArt?

2007-03-13T06:52:00.000-07:00

From: Oron Catts
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:21:28 +0900

The use of biomedical technologies for non medical ends is one of the criticism that is been laved against artists who are working in this field. I remember that Vacanti once said that the goal of tissue engineers is either to get the Nobel prise for medicine or to find a way to regrow hair...

When we present one of our pieces as a poster in an international tissue engineering conference we got lots of hard time for degrading this technology to something so frivolous as art, while some posters next to us dealt with penis extensions and other cosmetic enhancements... As the technology of producing 3D organs using tissue engineering proves to be as elusive as ever this technology is starting to be employed for nonmedial ends - body enhancements is an obvious way to try and manufacture needs for this new technology. Others are the development of in-vitro meatand leather (that we had something to do with...), as well as military applications.

oron

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Catts: response to A small note on the lab

2007-03-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

From:Catts Oron
Date:Tue, 13 Mar 2007 21:02:13 +0900

This interesting point that is important to note- what it really means that as with much of this type of technology, and in particular technology that employ rudctionist abstraction- the victim is hidden from view. The notion of the technologically meditated victimless utopia that our last few projects ironically dealt with is indicative to the distance that western capitalism generate between the perpetrators and their victims (see the media coverage of war in the US). This type of distance can be seen as a device to eliminate the need of contemplating the ethical issues so not to hinder "progress". The visceral experience that much of the wet "bioart"
produce might be seen as a way to confront this notion.

oron

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Anker: Migrating Social Spaces - Art As Invention

2007-03-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

From:Suzanne Anker
Date:Tue, 13 Mar 2007 06:47:04 -0500

Novel ways of thinking and doing can be socially, economically and politically beneficial. The wonder of invention is a creative springboard allowing the more adventurous to remix the given. Negotiating territorial discourses and practices requires tenaciousness and makes significant learning demands on the border-crossers. Mironov’s suggestion about living, removable tattoos as possibly being a form bioart , is something to think about. Certainly within the traditions of body and performance art possibilities abound. Many artists have used their own bodies as malleable sites of sculptural form. From Beuys and Nauman to Hannah Wilke and Orlan, performance art is very much alive within the cultural establishment of the artworld. In an earlier post, Orlan talks about a prospective collaboration with Oron Catts. Mironov’s idea about removable tattoos may in fact one day cross the art/sci divide as well.

Invention can also be looked upon as incorporating an element of chance. There are many historical examples in this regard, the discovery of penicillin being one. For the artist, recognizing nuance and possibility in the process of making, is part of artistic creation. Another aspect, furthering collaboration and creative process is the random and not so random meeting of various practitioners at cocktail parties, lectures art exhibits and the like. The scientific laboratory and artist’s studio are generally off-limits to a public audience. Perhaps shared laboratory/studio visits could be arranged?

I am very intrigued to learn about Thomas Edison's tattoo machine. In some ways it can be compared to Paul Winchell's prototype for an artificial heart. The comparison is not one of function, but one of migration between the worlds of art, science and entertainment. Most Americans (of a certain age) are familiar with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney, as a ventriloquism duo performing on early television. Paul Winchell being sentient, Jerry Mahoney, a puppet. However, what is not well known is that Winchell was also an inventor. He studied acupuncture, was engaged in medical hypnotism and had a close relationship with Dr. Henry Heimlich. In consultation with Heimlich, Paul Winchell designed the first the prototype of what we now know as the artificial heart.

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Twine: A small note on the lab

2007-03-13T06:43:00.000-07:00

From: Richard Twine
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:28:09 -0000

I don't think this has been mentioned yet but it occurs to me that weshould be a little cautious about valorising the lab as the site ofscientific investigation when talking about art/sci cross-over. Duringmy research into animal geneticists and genomics scientists it becamevery apparent that less and less work, and in some cases no work, iscarried out in the lab as we might traditionally conceptualise. Many ofus will be familiar with the idea of life being converted into code,information (see Canguilhem, Haraway, Rose, Rabinow, Anker and so on).Well I saw this in practice - the majority of work is now done in theoffice in front of a computer screen doing comparative work on variouscross-species databases of sequenced code. Livestock animal scientistsdraw upon the sequenced human and mouse genomes in order to learn -through homology - about quantitative trait loci of economic interest intheir respective species, be that pig or whatever. Obviously lab workstill happens, but there is a degree of stratification, it's more likelyto be the grad students or post-docs doing the lab work. Maybe somethingto think about/of use to someone.

Thanks,
Richard

Dr.Richard Twine
Principal Investigator & Postgraduate Director
ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen)Lancaster UniversityUK.
Project Web-site http://www.cesagen.lancs.ac.uk/roar/
Homepage http://www.richardtwine.com/

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Catts: Vacanti Mouse

2007-03-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

From: Oron Catts
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:02:37 +0900

Hi all
This is an interesting tread and I would like to get into it on both fronts
The Wiseman human brained mouse and Vacanti’s mouse. But first I would like to add to Eugene’s SF comment - as mentioned else where much of the developments in the life science and in particular in the area of molecular biology are over hyped (sometimes referred to as DNA mania (Andre Pichot) or Genohype (Neil Holtzman). The interesting thing is that as a result both the opponents and the proponents of developments of biotech subscribe to the same hyperbole rhetoric that exaggerate the power of this technology- hence we have a debate that creates unrealistic expectations as well as fears which have very little to do with the actualities of the knowledge and its application. One of the best examples was the use of the ear-mouse in an ad in the NY times (attached) where the mouse was used as an icon of the monstrosities that genetic engineering. The problem is that as you know –this mouse had nothing to do with molecular/genetic intervention. How can we then have a credible debate? Ionat and myself just finished a paper addressing it and in particular the ongoing straggle we have to distance our work from the discourse of GE and molecular biology.

As for the ear mouse- Vladimir rightly mention the failure of Vacanti's mouse to produce the ear that would keep its structure. This poster boy ofTissue engineering can be seen as one of the most celebrated technological(note- not scientific) failures. The question is did Vacannti know at the time that it is not going to work - and released the image as he was aware of its highly evocative nature as away to show the possible potential of tissue engineering and call attention to the new ways of dealing with living materials - I know that it evoked me and was one of the major influences on my decision to work with tissue engineering as my medium of artistic research. One of the reasons for that was that this mouse represented the surrealist project comes alive but by someone who did not call on the history of these types of images. In a sense like any "good" "bioart" pieceits strength was in it's eventual failure - making it a non utilitarian culturally evocative object - and in my books that the closer one can get to an art piece. I still have a dream of trying to collect artistic references to the ear mouse for a show. Vladimir talks about a transgenic muse at the San Jose science museum - well in the science museum in Shanghai that had amouse with an ear on its back - it was made specifically for them and was presented alive for awhile - it is now preserved and presented (intestinally enough) in the section of the museum the celebrates our "genetically engineered future"... Irving Weissman's human-mouse hybrid was even more explicitly presented (at first at least) as a theoretical object for debate (seehttp://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9400E5DA1738F934A15752C1A9649C8B63 )This project (among other things) prompt Ionat and myself to develop our new project (see project description below). But before that I would like to comment about Jens reference to epistemology vs ontology, it is interesting to note that when we started to work in this area we thought that we are dealing with an epistemological crisis however, in the last couple of years we realise more and more that we are dealing first and foremost with ontological questions. It is not surprising then that we see our work as dealing with life rather then cognitivistic approach of art and science(back to knowledge production vs meaing production).

Here is the blurb about our new project:

NoArk is a research project exploring the taxonomical crisis that is presented by life forms created through biotechnology. NoArk will take form as an experimental vessel designed to maintain and grow a mass of living cells and tissues that originated from a number of different organisms. This vessel will serve as a surrogate body to the collection of living fragments, and will be a tangible as well as symbolic ‘craft’ for observing and understanding a biology that combines the familiar with the other. As opposed to classical methodologies of collection, categorization anddisplay that are seen in Natural History museums, contemporary biologicalresearch is focused around manipulation and hybridization, and rarely takesa public form.To create NoArk we will use cellular stock taken from tissue banks,laboratories, museums and other collections. NoArk will contain a chimerical‘blob’ made out of modified living fragments of a number of differentorganisms, living, in a techno-scientific body. In a sense, we will be making a unified collection of unclassifiable sub-organisms.

NoArk will critically examine and make strange contemporary life sciences’ formations that confront our familiar ordering of the living world: How do taxonomical systems based on traditional classification accommodate life forms created by humans? We hope to answer this through the development of strategies to collect, display and preserve sub-life (lab made cellularlife), visit and research Natural History collections/practices, consult with experts in regard to a place for sub organisms in current taxonomy and research and collect what widely referred to as anomalies that do not adhere to traditional classifications. In addition to the philosophical and ethical dialogues that we feel this project will engage with we are also interested in artistic and technological strategies for maintaining and exhibiting living collections of sub-organisms in a vessel for long periods of time. NoArk will offer an evocative tangible ‘semi-living’ system which will further problamitise human anthropocentric desire to classify the living world around it. NoArk will present ecology of parts as an attempt to observe the living world through a post-anthropocentric system; once we have become fragmented into tissues and cells, the possibility of being embedded within each other, and within the greater living world emerge; the Human is not the centre but rather a part of a larger changing ecosystem. Ultimately, this will be presented as an installation in which the vessel containing living tissue constructs will be displayed as a chimera, alongside technologically preserved specimens of organisms. The project will involve developing methods of co-culturing different celltypes from different organisms over 3D matrixes inside a costume designed vessel.NoArk will present materiality of life and its forms, in a time that life is becoming a raw material for utilitarian manipulation. We believe that artists should offer alternative modes of engagements with the material of life. Description Rapid developments in the life sciences and its applied technologies have created new ways for beings to come into the world, and ew categories of existence that are challenging the order of the world. This requires us- humans to rethink our understandings and our relationships with our own identity/body, other animals, as well as the concept of lifeitself. The growing number of ‘labmade’ life forms, either modified living organisms or different combinations of modified living fragments such as cell-lines and tissue (which we refer to as sub-life or sub-organisms), requires special attention. In pharmacological factories, research universities, and other technologically driven institutions there already exists a mass of disassociated living cells and tissues (sub-life) in thethousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. We created the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A)in 1996 mainly as a way to define this category of life and, at the same time, as an attempt to destabilize some of the rooted perceptions of the classification of living beings. We see TC&A, and our other attempt to grow aspects of the extended body, as an amalgamation of the extended human phenotype– a disembodied body that is unified in living fragments, and anontological device for re-examining current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life. The extended body is by no means a fixed, scientifically binding order; it is rather a soft, artistic and conceptual view of the subject of technologically mediated and augmented life. NoArk is an attempt to develop this idea further by engaging with the notion of the collection of parts that constitute a whole. By creating a device that will allow the co-culturing and fusion of cellsand tissues from different genotypes and phenotypes (i.e. from differentorganisms and different tissue types) NoArk will present the breakdown ofboth Linnaean taxonomy and Molecular systematics (chemotaxonomy). A newtechnologically mediated ecology of semi-living fragments that will question deep rooted perceptions of life and highlight the need for re-evaluation ofhuman relationships with the greater living world.

The new sites for the collection of specimens of ‘neo-organisms’ are the life science/engineering laboratory, the research hospital, the biotechindustry, and increasingly among artists and amateurs/hobbyists. These specimens of neo-organisms and sub-organisms are catalogued and collected systematically, in tissue banks, research institutes and the patent office. However, most of these systems have little connection to historically agreed upon taxonomies of the natural world. The appearance of these new forms of life in the public arena is, say, more akin to the cabinets of curiosities then to the natural history museum, and it is almost always anthropocentric. As part of its historical narrative, NoArk will investigate the construction of knowledge through the acts of collection and classification as manifested by natural history museums, which stand in opposition to the disorganized and unique conglomerations found in cabinets of curiosity. We will also contrast these two historic attempts to systemise life to the development of modern biological curiosities, bringing into question deep rooted perception and beliefs about the ordering of life. In NoArk we will explore collections of natural history museums, tissue and cell banks, and biological laboratories.

Biology
Cell and tissue culture:
NoArk will house cell-lines that we will obtain from various cell and tissue banks. Cell lines can broadly be defined as modified cells (often immortalised) that are derived from primary culture (cells and tissues that are taken from complex organisms). An established or immortalised cell line has acquired the ability to proliferate indefinitely, either through random mutation or deliberate modification. There are numerous well established cell lines representative of particular cell types, from a wide range ofsources. We are particularly interested in cell lines that are established from cells of two or more individuals, and cells in which their origin is designated as one type of organism while being classified as another (such as the McCoy cell line that originated from a human and is now classified as a mouse cell line). It is interesting to note that there was at least one attempt to classify a cell line as a new type of organism that should fall under traditional classification, Helacyton gartleri (Van Valen & Maiorana1991).

For the last ten years we have worked with, and in some cases developed, environments for cells and tissues to grow within. These environments are often called bioreactors, and we refer to them as the Techno-Scientificbody. For this project we will be interested in working with new types of bioreactors as well as developing a prototype vessel/bioreactor that will allow us to dynamically co-culture different types of cells. The bioreactor will act as the visual foundation for the conceptual underpinning of the project while also functioning as a vessel for its enclosed cells.

Being located at a lab in a biological science school within a research university will enable us to order the cells of interest without breaching any regulations and material transfer agreements (we feel that it is important to note this, in the light of artist Steve Kurtz’s case in which he is facing court for getting biological materials that were ordered on his behalf by a scientist). Having ten years experience in tissue culture and tissue engineering we are now interested in perfecting our techniques for co-culturing and fusing cells from different species. We will analyse the successes and the types of fusion using the expertise of Dr. Stuart Hodgetts. This stage will be monitored and documented using the microscopy facilities available for us in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, the University of Western Australia. We will also learn new techniques in the DEPARTAMENTO DEENGENHARIA BIOLÓGICA at the Universidade do Minho, Portugal. This part of the project will help us to scientifically, conceptually, and metaphorically learn more about cells interrelations inside a techno-scientific body. Growing the cells over and into different matrixes will be an integral and important part of the biological research as well as towards the final visual presentation. We will be developing the prototype for NoArk using both modified scientific equipment as well as of-the shelves materials. We were fortunate to get the use of a bioreactor for free for a year. This is an expensive and significant piece of equipment that will enable us to learn about methods and technologies employed to grow cells externally to their host body. This bioreactor represents a novel way of growing tissue in a clear soft environment, it is also unique as it is a stand alone bench-top bioreactor that does not requires an incubator for its operation, and all of its operations can be controlled from a computer. Working with the Wavebioreactor will enable us to look at ways of modifying the system for thedevelopment of the first prototype of NoArk.Working with Dr. Clive McFarland from the Biomaterials and TissueEngineering Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, UNSW will enable usto research the use of hollow fibres as both delivery system and a substratefor the cell and tissue growth. His expertise will be invaluable in thedevelopment of the Vessel and other aspects of the NoArk prototype.The development of the bioreactor represents another possible benefit to thedevelopment of low cost biomedical equipment; we will be developing a cheap,large scale bioreactor for coculturing cells and tissue and might be able tocome up with some novel approaches that will be able to be used by otherresearchers and artists.

Taxonomy:
The exploration of strategies to collect, preserve and display neo-life and sub-life will benefit both the emerging field of biological art and possibly will contribute to collecting and preserving specimens of lab-made life forms. This will allow for the development of systematic approaches to be adapted by research institutes and museums who wish to collect and preserve these types of specimens. This will be conducted by talking to specialists in the Western Australian Museum (as well as other museums around the world) and having accesses to methods as well as collections in the natural history museum. We have formed strong relationships with the Western Australia Museum, which holds a vast collection of animal specimens, including marsupials, platypuses etc. these unique animals by themselves presented a taxonomical challenge. The WA Museum will assist us in developing strategies of collection and preservations using their well established procedures and protocols. We have located few locations which have began to tackle the issue of systematically collecting sub life and its orderly preservations. Examples are ATTC (the American Tissue Type Collection) – a global bioresource centre (which most laboratories around the world work with) and the San-Diego Zoo’s Bioresource Banking project and in particular the Frozen Zoo and Adult StemCell Acquisition and Culture programs that positioned in a very interestingjuncture of collection and classification. We will attempt to useBioresource Banking project as a benchmark to question its epistemology,explore its rhetoric and strategies of collection and preserving sublife. None of these resources have explores artistic sub-life or artistically driven public displays of the new sub-lives and their peculiar position in the continuum of life. NoArk will be displayed as a semi-living artistic vessel along side preserved living organisms (specimens) arranged to reflect new taxonomies. It will offer a visual interpretations of the so called ‘new order’ by presenting, maintaining and growing our living and semi-living collections as well as preserved ones. The exhibit will form an historical narrative of the evolving living world and the human position within this ‘chart’. Special techniques will be devised, mainly by the use of hollow fibres to physically and conceptually ‘connect’ between the life in the vessel and therest of its surrounding specimens, to suggest alternative taxonomy whichaccommodates neo-life and sub-life. We also hope to be able to use sensors that will be able to provide with live feed information on the well being of the sub-life inside the vessel. This information will be then transferred to a dedicated web site. We believe NoArk has the potential to be exhibited in art galleries and other public spaces such as natural history museums around the world as well as the new locations of the Cabinets of Curiosities; science fairs, zoos, performance places etc.

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Talasek: Response to "that audience issue"

2007-03-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

From: JD Talasek
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:32:46 -0400

Marvin,
thank you for the comments regarding the challenge of providing venues for the type of work discussed in this symposium.

First, I would like to acknowledge how the origin of this symposim can be traced back to Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution. When the exhibition traveled to UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, it provided the catalyst for dialogue between our two institutions culminating in the creation and co-sponsorship of this symposium. The exhibition introduced me to the art work of our facilitator Suzanne Anker as well as others who we have exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences.

You mentioned the “entrepreneurial spirit” it takes to create venues to show this type of work. As implied in your post, the real challenge is creating and educating an audience. After all, the work that has been discussed so far is introducing an unfamiliar dialogue and process to the community which still all too often judges the quality of work based upon what would look good hanging in one’s living room.

So within the context of this section on social and cultural concerns, I’m curious to hear from our diverse experts on the issues faced by venues hosting bioart exhibitions. If such venues are liaisons between artist and public, how can they better facilitate this connection? What is the critics’ role in this?

JD Talasek
Director Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs
National Academy of Sciences

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Carnie: Social And Cultural Implications Of Bioscience

2007-03-12T19:39:00.000-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:48:46 -0400 (EDT)

Re Session Three: Social And Cultural Implications Of Bioscience and Suzanne Anker's question about genetics.

In my own work on genetics making a piece for the Mendel museum in Brno in the Czech Republic, called Things Happen,
http://www.tram.ndo.co.uk/things%20happen%203.htm
I had long discussions with Bernadette Modell, Emeritus Professor of Community Genetics, UCL Centre for Health Informatics and Multi-professional Education, London, a populationgeneticist. The understanding of genetic disease and how they were passed fromone generation to another and how in some case the knowledge held by familiesand social groups was used to counter act such affects and was significantlytouching. A small understanding of this field gained from making this work made me feel very strongly that we are all interrelated and was powerful antidote to Margret Thatcher’s, I can hardly bring myself to type her name, conviction “They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society”, October 31 1987. I would hope that contact with knowledge of genes and genetics through art and science would help us realise our interconnectivity and interdependence.

Andrew Carnie
Artist and Lecturer
Winchester School of Art
Southampton University
Website www.andrewcarnie.co.uk

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Heiferman: That audience issue....

2007-03-12T17:50:00.001-07:00

From: Marvin Heiferman
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:07:37 -0400

Getting back to the issue of audience, and the role of art-sci in the art world, I’m happy to read in posts that artists are finding their own venues and making their own opportunities to show works and to generate dialog. As Suzanne suggested, the experiences around the exhibition Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, (which opened at Exit Art in New York in 1999 and traveled for a couple of years) and critical responses to it helped me to understand that the art world is not necessarily the best place to go to have a discussion about images, their meaning, and impact.

Yes the exhibition got a fair amount of attention; it was a novel project we were lucky enough to have some foundation money to fund, market and promote it. What was interesting to me about Paradise Now—and particularly in its first and full iteration in New York--was the opportunity to see how art and science could co-exist in an exhibition space--whether and how, for example, scientific data and information could be passed along to viewers; how for instance displays of genetically modified foods could be juxtaposed with art works speculating about how similar products might impact our lives, the environment, etc. The exhibition included objects including the packaging for a porn tape entitled “Designer Genes,” one of Dr. Watson’s original models for DNA from the early 1950s, images from science fiction films, bumpe! r stickers from organic farming groups, as well as very provocative art works that directly or not so directly eluded to the relationship of genetic research to race, eugenics, and profiteering. The more than 40 artists in the exhibition ran the gamut from scientists-turned-artists to conceptual provocateurs to artists who aestheticized science. And that, I think, is what made the exhibition interesting. Exhibitions that have tackled similar subject matter since seem, to me, to have taken a more predictable, one-sided, accusatory approach to the subject matter, genetics is bad/art is good.

I had hoped the exhibition would trigger discussion. And it did. And it didn’t. It did among the art-sci crowd because the project was big, visible, eclectic, and gave credit to the artists who had been working, unheralded, in the area for years. The exhibition proved enormously popular for school groups--lots of students came, from elementary school age kids to groups of interns from NYU Medical School. The exhibition space was almost always crowded. One of the most interesting events was an evening in which artists from the exhibition met with research fellows at Rockefeller University and after a few drinks some lively discussions kicked in, an! d some interdisciplinary collaborations that started that evening are still ongoing.

The show got lots of press, but what it didn’t get was “serious” attention in the art press. To the art world, the exhibition seemed like a novelty event, perhaps a little too in-touch with the real world for comfort. “Serious” critics had a hard time getting serious about the work in the show. Because much of the work dealt directly (sometimes analytically, sometimes fancifully) with pressing, specific, and sometimes disturbing issues, I think it was easy for some critics to dismiss the art as being illustrative. Which is not to say that some of it wasn’t. But with over three-dozen artists, there were a lot of history, ideas and images (some pretty spectacular) flying around. I suspect that one problem I saw in the art world’s response to this, and to similar projects, is that the art world likes to set and control its own agenda, and to select the issues that it thinks are important. And for the most part, those issues--while they are often provocative, engaging, pleasurable, critical, whatever—are not often or terribly consequential.

The art world gets its power by creating a little distance between itself and the real world. I think the science part of the art-sci equation makes people nervous. Which is why (in addition to logistical issues) the exhibition, when it traveled, was pretty much stripped of its scientific and popular culture components. It became, more clearly, an art exhibition. And even so, it tended to travel not to stand alone arts institutions, but to university galleries, where it engendered interesting inter-disciplinary programming. But I still can’t forget what it was like to sit on a panel at Carnegie Mellon, where the show traveled to, and listed to the director of a local contemporary art mu! seum who just dismissed the whole art-sci endeavor--the engagement of dozens of artists in scientific images and issues--as silly, and never felt the need to explain why.

For me, the opportunity to work with scientists on exhibitions has been, and continues to be eye-opening and rewarding. I’m working on a major exhibition project now for the Smithsonian, about how photography has not only been used by, but has changed every discipline that makes use of it. I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk with astronomers, natural historians, physicists, historians from the Air and Space Museum, keepers of the earliest known daguerreotypes of the moon. The images and the conversations are incredible. I feel lucky to meet and work with people in the sciences, where imagination and thinking routinely create and bounce off of images. Which brings me back to the art ! world. The commercial art world is, despite it’s own hype, pretty parochial. And really, most collectors and/or museums don’t want to hang what they believe are scary pictures up over the couch or the admissions desk.

The point is that images of all sorts that are being made in laboratories and in the course of research are (a) interesting and revelatory to look at and (b) may actually change the way we understand our lives (all of our lives) and the world we live in. I don’t think those are the kinds of ambitions that fuel the art world of the 21st century. That said, I know there’s lots of artists out there with a genuine interest in the issues and images of science, and I support their interest and their work. I also applaud the dedication and entrepreneurial spirit it take to create venues to show that work and opportunities to discuss it, like this conference.

Marvin Heiferman
mheiferman@mindspring.com

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Mironov: How to train BioArtists?

2007-03-12T12:20:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:10:40 -0500

We have similar problem in tissue engineering at the beginning.
The question was - Do we need to teach engineering to biologists or biology to engineers? The answer was - biologists and engineers must jointly teach new generation of scientists to new evolving profession - tissue engineering. May be artists and bioscientists can jointly teach bioartist.
Learning of anatomy and anatomic drawing is already an integral part of classic artist training. Who knows may be bioartist training program based on seamless integration art and biology training will be very popular and successful. At least from my perspective there is definitely something to explore. It is interesting to know are there any demand or room for such specialists in art and entertainment industry?

Vladimir Mironov

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Carnie: Jill response

2007-03-12T11:32:00.001-07:00

From: Andrew Carnie
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:58:44 -0400 (EDT)

Dear Jill

What I had in mind was that one actually needed training to undertakecollaboration. That both parties, scientists and artists alike needed tounderstand better the nature of collaboration what it might mean and how tonegotiate the pitfalls. Then after this you are right both parties needtraining on what the respective domains of each area are. Then you can get into the experience of what the particular areas of each discipline are and theexchange of specific knowledge. A three-stage process at the least?

yours
Andrew

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Duster: some core issues -- session 3

2007-03-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

From: Troy Duster
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:37:30 -0500

It is daunting to try to come up with an account of core issues in a few paragraphs, but fools do rush in, so here goes:

1) The relationship between bioscience and society is contingent on the particular society in which the bioscience is translated into practice and policy. Here are two easy examples. Genetic screening and testing of a population in a society with universal health care is much less of a contentious issue than gene screening and testing in a society in which insurance companies can root out and exclude those with asymptomatic “genetic” conditions – from late onset disorders such as Huntington’s to likely risks of those with BRCA genes. Or second, imagine the different rate of acceptance by Ashkenazic Jews for Tay-Sachs screening done by Michael Kaback in the last two decades of the 20th century (a near complete success story) versus a similar hypothetical program in the Third Reich.

2) Two kinds of national DNA databases are in our future. The Portuguese government has already approved “everybody in the DNA bank” legislation in early 2005. The British now have over 4 million samples from their population in a databank, with an explicit goal of getting a quarter of the population in by 2010. One such database is designed for forensic purposes. As in my brief note above, acceptance, compliance, or strong resistance will depend upon the kind of society. The British were primed and ready for expanding DNA databanks from 30 years of acceptance of what in the US would be resisted (ACLU) as draconian counter-terrorist activities spinning out of the northern Ireland conflict (cameras, cameras, cameras everywhere… DNA dragnets were pioneered in the UK, etc.). But a health-inspired national DNA databank is also a likely development in some societies… again, note the conditions from the first entry above.

3) In both China and India, there is the beginning realization that sex selection practices now assisted by technological breakthroughs (from expensive amniocentesis, all the way to cheap ultrasound) are dramatically distorting male and female relations, potential mating opportunities, and will have profound effect upon social and economic policies that few could have been imagined. The book, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population, is a harbinger as ominous as global warming scenarios (e.g., for Polar Bear extinction) about the myriad of possible spinoffs from sex selection. The Chinese government is now trying to initiate some “correctives” and incentives, but 30 years of female infanticide via selective abortion is not so easily “corrected” – thus, for contemporary China – and for the next decades, lots of “bare branches.”

Troy Duster

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Thacker: Living Removable Tattoo as a BioArt?

2007-03-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:23:59 -0400 (EDT)

A friend of mine - who wrote free-lance for biotech industry journals - oncesaid that the "killer app" for the biotech industry would not come frommedicine but from an unrelated or spinoff industry - e.g. food, detergent,household cleaners, toys, fashion, computers, even pets. He also said that thiswould serve to "cushion" the introduction of biotech into the everyday. Iassume he was thinking about the prior example of computers - from militarymainframes, to IBM business machines, to our "personal" laptops, pods, andberries...
-Eugene

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Thacker: Science and Gender (Jill Scott) and session 3 questions

2007-03-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:18:38 -0400 (EDT)

Hi all-
Thanks Cathy for this excerpt -I was struck by your and Melinda's conclusions:
"Female reproductive biology is thus undergoing a complex rearticulation. New reproductive technologies like IVF have disaggregated it from its in vivo location, and stem cell technologies have diverted it into biomedical domains unconcerned with the production of children. Reproductive potential is now bifurcated. In vitro embryos and in vitro oöcytes can be transplanted to produce another human life, a child; and they can be biotechnically reconfigured in a laboratory, diverting their pluripotency into the production of embryonic stem cell lines."

What's interesting about this is that the oöcytes become this reservoir of "biovalue" (to use Cathy's term) - a kind of surplus that can be transformed"vertically" into a viable human life, as well as "horizontally" into a range of nonhuman biological entities (e.g. stem cell differentiation).

This seems to open onto other sets of questions as well. Without taking us toofar from Jill's questions, I wonder if this neoliberalization also relates to anew type of labor - one different from the maternal body and the attendant technologies involved in reproductive biology. What "labor" is performed by cells, eggs, and embryos? It sounds a bit ridiculous, I know (no, I don't mean embryos as a form of child labor in Chaplin's factory...). But much of the science behind these innovations is predicated on the notion that, given theright conditions (e.g. the right growth factors, etc.) a group of cells willthemselves differentiate in a particular way - with a minimum of intervention.Of course there is a lot of intervention. But the concept is that thebiological entities will do it themselves - there's an interesting approach of"pulling back" here that seems consonant with the neoliberal "flexibility"surrounding reproductive technologies...?

Another, related question relates to Richard's comments about biopolitics andthe modernist project of the rationalization of life. There's a new kind ofbiological "life" here that is neither natural nor artificial - even thelanguage seems less about top-down instrumentality but more about bottom-up"control," "perturbations," "coaxing" (Cathy can you confirm this?). If this is so, is this also the case in earlier examples of rethinking the concept of"population" in terms of the management of biological flows, fluctuations, andaverages?

-Eugene

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Anker: Autopoiesis and Genetic Algorithms (Moura et Walby et al)

2007-03-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:07:46 -0500

Catherine Walby referred to the term "autopoiesis" in her last posting. Leonel Moura cited the term "genetic algorithm" in relation to his image-making robots. How can these "systems" concepts be integrated into our discussion? What vernacular language can be employed to demystify these terms? How do they relate to signification and embodied knowledge?

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Mironov: Living Removable Tattoo as a BioArt?

2007-03-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:26:55 -0500

Dear all,
One of very popular contemporal form of BioArt is tatoo.See for example: <http://tattooartists.org/>In former Soviet Union only criminals have tattoo.Now many Hollywood Stars have tattoo and tattoo is very popular form of body art in young generation. There are several journal specially devoted only to Tatto art. Thus, we like it or not tattoo is an integral part of modern art.
Tatto as any fashion is temporal event and with time when fashion will change and when people will became older some of them will decide to remove tattoo and it can create problem.

One of unexpected application of modern genetic revolution is technological possibility to create removable tattoo using conditionally induced pro-apoptotic genes. Apoptosis is a programmed cell death. So if we will create library of living cell aggregates which expressed different color fluorescent or non-fluorescent colored proteins and if these cells will also expressed conditionally induced pro-apoptotic genes then tattoo can be very easily removed just by consumption of tablet of antibiotic - tetracyclin which will induce cell death in this specially genetically designed colored cells.

There are several advantages of this new living removable tattoo making technology:
1) people can re-use their body surface for tattoo body art
2) if people do not like their tattoo (for whatever reason) they can be removed without any surgical manipulation just by consumption tablet of antibiotic which will induced pro-apoptotic genes.
3) it is possible also to create invisible tattoo which could seen only by using special form of lighth

Sometimes new technology create unusual originally unexpected applications. By the way, modern tatoo machine was invented by Thomas Alva Edisson in order to make paper copy of text by using pinching. See images of modified Edisson tattoo making machines on Wikipedia -
"Tattoo machine"

<http://www.tattooarchive.com/history_images/tattoo_machine_oreilly3_wm.jpg>
<http://www.patentlessons.com/modern%20tattoo%20machine.jpg>
<http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Business/DragonButterfly/MachineNeedle.jpg>
<http://www.spaulding-rogers.com/store/graphics/00000001/TAT-4G.jpg>

My questions are:
- Are there any social demand for such type of tattoo?
- Can living removable tattoo be considered as modern living BioArt?
- Is living removable tattoo socially acceptable and socially responsible practical application of genetic revolution? I will appreciate any coments or suggestions.

Vladimir Mironov

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Mironov: Vacanti Mouse

2007-03-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:53:44 -0500

Vacanti mouse (some people claim that it is a second most famous mice after Mickie-Mouse) was done from biodegradable polymer seeded with cells and it somehow ( probably as result of post-transplanatational polymer biodegradation and tissue remodeling and contraction) could not maintain ear shape after implantation in vivo. No any successful clinical translation after 10 years... We together with our Chinese colleages from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China are using non-biodegradable FDA approved polyurethane and results are much better. I mean we do not see any change in ear shape during several months after implantation. Cosmetic effect is obvious. Is it an art (bio-sculpture) or not? It is up to professional artists to judge.If we can define art as something whhat could be placed in museum then it is an art. I saw transgenic obese mice in San Jose science museum...See in attachment correspondent slide of printed ear prostheses implanted into athymic rat.

Vladimir Mironov

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Dombois: Session 1, 2, 3

2007-03-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

From: Florian Dombois
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:43:33 +0100
(Florian Dombois; Berne/Cologne)

Dear Suzanne, hi all,
it's quiet a productive symposium with so many contributions (yesterday it was 121), that it is difficult to catch up with all the different discussions. So I decided to stay close with your original questions:

----------SESSION ONE: IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE

1) What role do picturing practices play in your discipline of “knowledge production?”
I am an artist with a background in Geophysics investigating still mainly on tectonic phenomena and earthquakes but in artistic forms. I try to depict and formulate research results in different media, that usually cannot be named in scientific terms. I don't want to beauty scientific results and I don't want to borrow dignity or value from scientific research. That kind of illustration I am not interested in. I try to go further and to change the view on my topics.

In my work sound plays a main role. Using audification of seismic (and other movements) registrations I listen to the earth and its activity and develop from here most of my results. And on a second layer of understanding I intentionally change my media and forms of depiction to watch, how my research topic is changed/affected by the "Eigensinn" of the medium (cf. Ernst Cassirer "symbolic forms" or Nelson Goodman "languages of art" or Georg Picht "modes of depiction"). So far I worked with sound- and different other forms of installations, CD, DVD, concert, virtual reality, interactive art, published a patent, a picture book, wrote different text genres, gave talks etc. I am convinced that changing the form is affecting the content. (www.auditory-seismology.org, www.rachelhaferkamp.org)

2) How have your perceptions and attitudes of mind been challenged by current dialogues within the “Art-Sci” arenas?
Well, I am pushing the Art-Sci dialogue since about 1990. I am very happy that the dialogue is now much more accepted than fifteen years ago. But nevertheless we need to rise the quality of that exchange. It is not enough to bring artist into labs and scientists into ateliers. We need to take the claim serious, that art is also a knowledge production, and draw conclusions from that. Here is not enough space to explain the whole topic and my English is too poor for that. But I am concerned about a program, what I call "art as research", and try to influence here in Switzerland the conditions of research funding to allow artists to apply and work appropriately. The artistic research has a lot of open questions that need to be discussed. Therefore it is important, I think, to run it as a major movement with many players.

3) What role have new imaging technologies played in your conceptualizations of visual modeling or artistic application?
I have worked for a while at GMD / Fraunhofer Institute, a research institute in Germany (which had the first CAVE in Europe and also invented different display technologies). Here I developed (1999-2004) a few virtual reality installations using real time rendering of sound and images, 3D images and 3D sound, interactive technologies etc. I think, that visualization and sonification are a good starting point to convince scientists, how much other media of publication than a scientific paper in a journal can affect their research developments (cf. HJ Rheinberger's ideas of "Experimentalsystem").

SESSION TWO: ARTISTS IN THE LABS - space, studio, lab

1) What is a laboratory?
Maybe a place where "labor" (=work) is carried out. In that sense we would have scientific labs as we have artistic ones.

2) What case histories of artists working in the lab can be cited as having seminal significance in developing new ways to conceive of art practice?
I just started a research project "Neuland" at the University of Arts in Berne (Switzerland). Part of that project is to let historians collect examples of artists of different disciplines (visual, music, theatre, design, architecture) who had done or are doing research. I will probably be able to answer that question later this year.

3) In another sense, laboratory practices bring into focus a host of other questions and obligations concerning:
3.1) animal models for and in research
3.2 experiments with transgenesis in animals and plants
3.4) reproductive technologies
3.5) bio-hazards and public health
I am convinced that most of these questions are related to the scientific way of investigating and depicting their topic. Therefore I think it is worthwhile as an artist not to follow the scientific tracks of depiction but to think and develop new explanation models competing the scientific ones.

4) In a text edited by Jon Turney entitled Science, not Art: Ten Scientists’Diaries, scientists record their daily activities and thought processes. What is noticeably clear is that scientist’s efforts (similar to artists) in maintaining their practices is wrought with risk. Scientists in their journal entries, appear as human as anyone else. Therefore, to the scientists out there, can you talk about the problematics of being a scientist?

SESSION THREE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

Bioscience seems to be a good topic to show the relevance of different researches on life as "epistemic thing" (Rheinberger). Even though the scientific investigations has produced fascinating results, it does not seem to be able to catch up and explain adequately what life is. And many products of the life sciences are so irritating, that alternative ideas are obviously needed. Artistic resarch is, in my opinion, that alternative.

----------
I hope these contributions are understandable. I have to excuse my poor English. My main point - including sound to the discussion - I think is worthwhile to try. I wrote a few papers on that but all in German, so I can only name it.

Kind regards!
Florian

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Anker: The Animal in Art

2007-03-12T05:37:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:08:47 -0500

From the Paleolithic inscriptions of bisons on cave walls to the biofacts in our
laboratories, our relationship to the non-human animal continues as an open question.
Recently, there have been many texts and exhibitions on this subject, including our relationship to animals in zoos and circuses. Nato Thompson’s exhibition Becoming Animal:Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom, at MASS MoCA in the US, included the work of around twelve artists. The exhibition included work by conceptualist/eco-activist Mark Dion, and filmmaker Kathy High. Each of these artists create work that explores the animal/human connection.
Mark Dion’s work approaches the subject of the animal from within culturally designated institutional and environmental contexts. Issues concerning natural history, taxonomy, and extinction are looked at in ecological and philosophical terms. For Kathy High, two rescued lab rats, Echo and Flowers, become protagonists in her film. These transgenic lab rats injected with human DNA (in their embryonic state) and are in fact, biofacts, animal models as living tools (see: http:www.ps1.org., “The Bio Blurb Show.” Artists in the Lab episode.) Catherine Chalmers, who also works with animals has bred and employed the lowly cockroach in her work, pointing at once to culturally determined hierarchies within the animal kingdom. The big cats, lions and tigers, although genetically programmed killing machines have a much more revered
status in society than do rodents.

“Residents: Drinking”, Catherine Chalmers (2004), from her book Catherine Chalmers: American Cockroach, ed. Aperture.

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Twine: Science and Gender

2007-03-12T05:30:00.001-07:00

From: Richard Twine
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:08:18 -0000

Responding to Suzanne Anker's question.

I would say that the main issues remain some of the classic concerns from feminist science studies -

i) the masculinity of scientific practice - several participants have responded positively to the assertion that scientists are as human as the rest of the human race (sorry if I've misquoted that but it's come up a few times). Presumably then there is a context here in which this is a reaction against assertions of the inhumanity of scientific practice. Of course the issue suffers partly from a generalising meaningless but remains in tension with long standing arguments about the privileging of various values - the disavowal of empathy, mastery of nature (and the body essentialised as nature), anthropocentric and utilitarian ethics and so on. Obviously then - as I think Jill pointed out - the issue of gender is of special interest in art/sci interactions. Are there new exclusionary relations at play in terms of which artists are involved in these projects and so on. To what extent is gender an object of exploration in art/sci projects?

ii) the other main issue is that already expressed well in Catherine's post* concerning new modes of harnessing biovalue across reproduction and the consequences this has for women (and indeed the nonhuman female) and social/familial relations generally. Participants have already spoken about the socio-technological construction of foetal citizenship and we can point to other changes such the as the partial technological challenge to heterosexism. Generally we ought to tie in our contemporary analysis to historical work (I'm thinking for example of Adele Clarke's Disciplining Reproduction) and think through continuities/discontinuities with the classic modernist project vis-a-via the gendered biopolitics of bringing reproduction under 'rational' planning and control.

Cheers,
Richard

*in reference to her forthcoming paper with Melinda Cooper.

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Moura: animal art

2007-03-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

From: Leonel Moura
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:20:47 +0000

Just as documentation

...Congo at work

A painting

"Congo, who deserves to be called the Picasso of the great apes, was responsible for nearly 400 (paintings). Although most of the efforts consisted of scribbling, the patterns were far from random. Lines and smudges were spread over a blank page outward from a centrally located figure. When a drawing was started on one side of a blank page the chimpanzee usually shifted to the opposite side to offset it. With time the calligraphy became bolder, starting with simple lines and progressing to more complicated multiple scribbles. Congo’s patterns progressed along approximately the same developmental path as those of very young human children. "

in E.O.Wilson (1975), Sociobiology : the new synthesis

I see many similarities with my artbots. In particular with the first ones: http://www.lxxl.pt/artsbot/index.html

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Reichle: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-12T03:18:00.000-07:00

From: Ingeborg Reichle
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 06:10:35 -0400

Hi,

In my research group we try to analyse the social and cultural implications of the images and pictures produced in the live sciences in collaboration with The Zuse Institute Berlin. This institution is a research institute for applied mathematics and computer science (Scientific Computing - Numerical Methods (Prof. Dr. Peter Deuflhard):
Numerical Analysis and Modelling Visualization and Data Analysis; Scientific Computing - Discrete Methods (Prof. Dr. Martin Grötschel) Optimization, Scientific Information Systems; Computer Science (Prof. Dr. Alexander Reinefeld) Computer Science Research.

Our research interest is focused on the scientific production processes in which these images emerge and how some of these “beautiful” images are selected and used to communicated scientific research results to a public audience. But what do we see, when we look at these images?

With my contribution to this secession, I would like to draw your attention to two very different research projects at the Academy of Sciences here in Berlin, two projects, which both try to analyse the social and cultural (and economical) implications of biosciences (and neuroscience).

Though we all work on the same floor and meet and talk quite often, it is very difficult even to understand the questions, the “frame” through which the social and cultural implications of bioscience are looked at, because the appoaches are so differnt.

The first project is the so called “Gentechnologiebericht” (The Gene Technology Report). This research group aims to compile a regular report about the state of genetic engineering in Germany. (Many Academy members are involved in this project, also Hans-Jörg Rheinberger) http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/Forschungsprojekte/gentechnologiebericht/en/Ueberblick

“Gene technology, in other words recombinant DNA applications, have become well established in many fields of basic research as well as medical diagnostics, forensic science and the life science industry. It in extending its influence to ever new aspects of human life. These developments have led to fierce debates on principles and aroused emotions, particularly in Germany. What is desirable is an 'observatory'
to observe and describe the advance of genetic engineering. There have been, and still are, a number of activities which describe the state of genetic engineering in Germany. There was a committee of inquiry, and there are information systems operated by industrial associations, government bodies, political and party institutions. Although numerous reports have already appeared with useful information on specific issues, they are not of the broad-based, interdisciplinary nature, they are not free from particular interests and do not draw on the continuous observation of the state and development of genetic engineering, as would be necessary to sustain an objective debate. A working structure consisting of an interdisciplinary research group with staff and an expert network is to set up with a view to establishing a centre of expertise on gene technology issues at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Beyond the reports appearing at regular intervals, this will make it possible to respond swiftly to specific incidents, e.g. clones, accidents, unexpected problems and risks ¡V in other words, issues at the focus of public interest. These issues will then be included in the report and documented and assessed in retrospect.”

The second project is called “Funktionen des Bewusstseins“. This project about biotechnology and consciousness is organized by philosophers and neuroscientists. We have more than eight projects within this project, but I will draw your attention only to three of them, because these fit into our discussion:

http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/Forschungsprojekte/Bewusstsein/en/Mitglieder_Mitarbeiter

The issues of these projects range from the question about consciousness in the age of biotechnology til the search for brain images before Kant:

"The molecular person" and consciousness. A study on feeling and thinking in the age of neuro-science, on the basis of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology Dr. phil. Fiorella Battaglia

Philosophy has approached the "problem" of the human being in various ways. Today the concern is to outline a holistic conception of the human through the joint efforts of both humanities and natural sciences – a conception that, faced with the new challenges of the present day, may also be able to give us a practical point of orientation for our actions.
Taking as a point of departure Immanuel Kant’s attempt to capture what it is to be human, this project will then describe an arc taking us to the anthropology of the present day, taking into account the current state of knowledge in neurophysiology and the philosophy of mind (Gerald M. Edelman, Giulio Tononi, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Christof Koch, Bernard J. Baars, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Michele Di Francesco, and John Searle). Here the historical survey will place particular weight on that function of consciousness that can provisionally be characterized as "I- or person-function" that constitutes identity.
The research in the neuro-sciences, in particular in their investigations into the metabolic, molecular, and functional activity of the human brain, presents an interesting and unique structure. This stems from that fact that in ars medica theoretical and practical dimensions are interwoven – in the person who, with his or her knowledge and actions, contributes to the health of another human creature. There is no theory of consciousness without practical reason. Thus the debate over consciousness overcomes the separation between nature and culture, in that brain research is the field that distinguishes itself in treating of elements of both these dimensions. Within the human brain, as Joseph LeDoux has shown, the genetic configuration and the individual experiences express themselves in the same language. It was Kant who opened the way for a dialogue between science and philosophy, between natural sciences and humanities, in arguing for the mutual interconnection of mind and body in a larger whole.
His reflections on the scientific conceptions of the human being contain fundamentally insights into the conditions of knowledge in the natural sciences that are still current.

"Modifying Persons: Self-Conception of Persons and Biotechnological Manipulation"
Dr. phil. Katja Crone

In the past years, great progress has been made in the field of neuroscience, expanding the spectrum of biomedical possibilities. Insights into cerebral functions have made the brain as the biological basis of human consciousness increasingly accessible. Thus neurosurgical, pharmacological and genetic interventions impacting specific cerebral capacities have become increasingly feasible – capacities that correlate to specific functions of consciousness. Such interventions are likely to have repercussions for one's own self-understanding as an individual person, the way of conceiving one’s own past as well as one’s possibilities for future actions, the way one interacts with one’s social environment and the reactions of others in return.
This prospect calls for an assessment of the possible outcomes of these new biomedical methods and thus gives rise to the main concern of this project, which aims at forming a philosophical concept of the person that systematically integrates key features of personhood. Of central importance will be the notion of a practical self, focusing on the concept of one’s self-understanding as an agent and the ability to reflect and evaluate one’s own practical decisions. The notion of personal identity over time will be articulated, founded primarily on a consideration of the specific nature of the first-person-perspective as well as the capacity for autobiographical reflection (narrative identity). Additionally, a concept of interpersonal recognition will be identified as a core issue of self-understanding and personal identity over time. The integrated model is meant to function as a conceptual tool allowing us to assess more precisely how personal functions of consciousness may alter due to biotechnological methods.

Representations of the brain in the 16th century. Models of perception between physiology and psychology Tanja Klemm, M.A.

Since the late 15th century, there has been increased interest in questions on the psychology and physiology of the human organism in regard to its perceptual faculties, not only in treatises of natural philosophy and theology but also in medical writings, encyclopedias, mnemotechnical texts and discussions of image theory.
Psychology was at this time not treated as an independent discipline but as the philosophical study of the soul, placed by philosophers and scientists in the broader context of natural philosophy (and so also of medicine and biology). Not until 1575 did the German Humanist Feigius first use the term in the context of the Aristotelian writings De anima and Parva naturalia. Physiology, in turn, was seen as a system of interaction between body parts, organs, fluids and the so-called spiritus.
This sensitive and subtle bodily substance floats from one organ to another, driving the natural (e.g. digestive), vital (e.g. affective) and animal (e.g. cognitive) functions of the body. Prior to William Harvey in 1628, this physiology of spiritus was the common conception of bodily
organization: spiritus running through the body, being processed from the liver to the heart to the brain (from spiritus naturalis to spiritus vitalis to spiritus animalis) where it dynamizes mental, perceptive and cognitive processes. In this conception of the body, the difference between mental and corporal processes is not categorical but gradual.
Taking this as a point of departure, my project aims to investigate two
fields: Firstly it will focus on the understanding of the physiological implications of (visual) perception. Even though the subject here is the human brain with its imaginative, cognitive and motive functions, I always consider it in relation to the whole body, its organs and functions. As the highest organ, though, the brain is by this time already seen as the seat of the soul and of the inner senses or virtues, sensus communis, imaginatio/fantasia, vis aestimativa, vis cogitativa and memoria (protected by the head, where most of the sensual phenomena arrive). One of the hypotheses here is that the conception of the psycho-physiological interplay between these senses is fundamental for an understanding of artistic concerns and pictorial theory of the time – and so also for questions concerning image production, the transfer of images, and their reception. A second field of research consists in the analysis of visualizations of the brain since the mid-15th century. Here, questions concerning the relation between two modes of visual representation of the brain/body are at the center of interest: the diagrammatic mode of representation (based on the traditional medieval psychology of faculties) on the one hand and, on the other, the representational mode based on sensual certainty (promoted e.g. by early anatomists). One aim of these analyses is to contribute to a differentiated view on current tendencies in the neuro-sciences which put emphasis on visualizations and on the rhetoric of images. A historical perspective on these practices seeks to provide a sharper look on questions concerning the roles of images in the production of knowledge on the one hand and on the relation of brain visualizations conveyed by the media and the production of new knowledge of the brain and its functions on the other hand.

All the best,

Ingeborg
http://www2.blogger.com/raw%20text/www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle

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Moura: Anthropocentrism

2007-03-12T03:05:00.000-07:00

From: Leonel Moura
Date:Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:20:40 +0000

I don't wish to polemize.So perhaps someone else can intervene on anthropocentrism.It should be interesting to see if there is any distinctive perception between artists and scientists on this issue.

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Mironov: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:29:01 -0500

1. What shall we and what shall we not do with regard to the alteration and manipulation of life forms?
- Evolution is based on alteration of biological forms and DNA. It is a fact. If we want to stop evolution we must try to block it, if not - we must rationally deal with this. Agriculture was always based on genetic manipulation, breeding and selection. Transgenic plants and animals is nothing new from this point of view, just continuation ongoing technological and evolutional process. The main reason why people afraid new technologies is misleading media hype, inferior education, lobbing activities and unscientific propaganda of special interests groups. There is nothing more constant in our life then constant changes. We must not afraid or block changes but rather learn how to deal with this and how socially accomodate new emerging technologies.

2. What are the social consequences of the genetic revolution.
- Genetic revolution is dramatic but also strongly overhyped. FDA approved overhyped gene therapy still does not exist at least in USA. There is no FDA approved drugs based on overhyped genomics discoveries. The sad truth is that after adoption by BIG PHARMA all these overhyped gemonics, proteomics, metabolics, system biology and other -omics the actual number FDA approved drug was reduced (not increased), because technology is too expensive and not deliver what it originally promised at least in short term. It will probably take several decades until society will get all benefit from genetic revolution. It takes a time to build a village. The potentially most dangerous consequences of genetic revolution is designing of novel type of biological weapon using synthetic biology in case if parallel designing of countermeasure will be delayed... In case of catastrophe or war with using novel bioweapon humans could be eliminated or human population could be dramatically reduced. But humans can, must and will survive.

3. How shall we manage the social consequences of scientific facts?
- I think scientists could not be a part of lobbing groups for "micromanaging" social acceptance of specific technology because they have obvious conflict of interest. The job of scientists is to provide maximally objective information about potential social outcomes of any evolving technology. The whole Society not just educated elite with special interest must decide what is socially acceptable and what is not for given specific society and given historic time. Religious leaders (if it is not a theocracy state and if religion and state are legaly separated) also have doubtfull legitimacy and also not very impressive records of rational dealing with scientific and technological innovations. Religion tried to block development anatomy as a science which is basis of modern surgery. I did not l read any apology for this from any religious leaders, who meatime have no any ethical probvlem in using modern advances of anatomy based surgery...

Thus, I think that the whole society rather then special interest based lobbing groups must decide how to proceed using as many democratic approaches as possible including public debates, transparency and accountability of any lobbing group with mandatory public disclosure of any possible conflict of interest. Dealing with social consequences of scientific facts must be maximally evidence-based and not religion or believe based. However, consensus usually does not work in science. The truth is that science is highly undemocratic, elite-based or meritocratic enterprize. Nobody can vote: Is Sun moving around Earth or vice versa.Moreover: Consensus in science is nonsense.However, if science could not provide objective evidence and predictive outcomes, then common sense or decision based on common values are the best ways to manage social consequences of scientific facts. That is why religion or ideology which provide common shared values for specific society will never die. History of technology teaches us that luddites are usually loosers.This is my formula of social consequences of scientific facts:If something is technologically possible to do, and if there is social demand for this technology, then usually nothing and nobody can stop this technology from eventual implementation. The key words are: "social demand"

4. From your particular perspective, please identify the issues, values, and ethics involved in these transformative bio-practices.
- issue of embryonic human stem cells versus adult stem cells- issue of genetic modifications of germ cells
- issue of human identity after total replacement of stem cells or many organs
- issue of human "chimerization" using animal cells or xenotransplantation ( transplantation of living animal tissues and organs from transgenic animals to human)
- issue of tissue engineered brain and person identity
- issue of life and death and human identity if we will one day be able can clone or/and bioprint whole complete humans on demand

Finally:
I would like to give one FUTURISTIC scenario of possible outcome of genetic revolution:
- Acephalic (without head) human embryo and fetus is not compatible with life and abortion of such organism at late stage of pregnancy is legal.
- Somatic nuclear transplantation allows to transplant cells of any adult person into denucleated human embryonic stem cells.
- Gene therapy can induce acephalic genes in this embryonic human stem cells.
- These genetically modified autologous (no immune rejection) embryonic human cells can be implanted into surrogate mother. Surrogate motherhood is already legal.
- If society will accept and permit genetic modification of germ and human embryonbic stem cells then we can TECHNOLOGICALLY create acephalic embryo.
- Person without brain technically could not be called person or even human being. No person - no ethical problem If acephalic body can be called human being , then organ like kidney or groups of organs is also human being. It is obvious nonsense.

Question:
Can we use this acephalic technology to grow autologous embryonic human organs for clinical transplantation? Will such technology be SOCIALLY acceptable?Some leading UK embryologist even suggested to use animals as possible "surrogate mothers" for such acephalic human embryo. So this idea is not mine ... I just communicate it.

Bottom line:
We will never escape from new ethical, social and political discussion and debates created by new emerging technologies. I think the role of artists to formulate this problem and associated controversy in dramatic impressive way and encourage general public to think The job for scientists to provide maximally objective evidence and logical sequences of implementation of emerging transforming biotechnologies and bio-practices. In order to make rational judgement and informed decision general public and society as a whole must have right for objective information from different sources.

Vladimir Mironov

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Hauser: Epistemology versus Ontology?

2007-03-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

From: Jens Hauser
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:17:13 -0400 (EDT)

In the in-between of session two and three I would like to interject some remarks that are mainly refering to comments posted by Suzanne Anker, Eugene Thacker, Ingeborg Reichle, Oron Catts, Jill Scott and Miriam van Rijsingen.

They are dealing with the dialectical construction of the interrelations of"epistemology/ontology", "representation/presence" and "lab context/lab(re)presentation". I find Eugene's following question, in reference to Rheinberger's notion of "epistemic things", really excellent and fruitful: "Why exactly are we assuming that epistemology supercedes ontology inthe lab or the studio?"

In the context of "wet bio art" (which I'm most interested in) this question contains multiple layers:

Does the "lab" context refer mainly to the way that artists gain knowledge in a laboratory set while considering their practice as "art as research", or do they need a laboratory set in order to display works/biofacts in order to communicate with an audience
Is the display of a "biofact" more an effect of presence or of representation
Is the display of a "biofact" (and even the experience to produce it) meantto stage shiftings in ontological categories (semi-living, or else), or tothe hermeneutic production of knowledge?

A lot of what Jill has been presenting refers almost to the experience of "artists in the lab" embedded in a context enabling them to gain insight in scientific contexts in a strategy of "art as research", and only secondarily to the displays, or mediating instances, through which this insight then would be expressed in a form that audiences may engage with emotionnally or cognitively. Therefore, we are not suprised that a lot of this "art as research" work is then presented as documentation (video, writings) of the research process, which means that the heuristic dimension to approach "epistemic things" becomes more important than the staging of ontological difference, let's say in artworks/installations. Has the "nature" of art to be qualified through the

learning period of the artist or through the concretization that can be experienced by an audience? I feel that this question indeed is all but new, and can be traced back to previous reflections on "the blurring of life and art" (if we take Kaprow), and ends up in Boris Groys' argument that "art has shifted its interest away from the artwork and towards art documentation as art becomes a life form, whereas the artwork becomes non-art, a mere documentation of this life form." (see Groys: Art in the Age of Biopolitics. From Artwork to Art Documentation. In: In: Documenta 11_Plattform 5.Ostfildern, 2002; pp. 107-113.) My problem here is that then the documentation/representation of the process of "art as research" becomes itself again a representational sign that only refers to "art as life itself", thus becoming the representation of epistemic things rather than their presence that can be experienced by those whom the artists are supposed to communicate with(an "audience"), because of their status as artists - which in turn gives themacces to the lab in an art/science context.

The question of the "lab" pops up differently when we speak about the staging of a lab in the context of a gallery display. A good exemple is "DisembodiedCuisine" by the TC&A. See: http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/archives/no_23/en/oeuvre5.htmorhttp://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/disembodied/dis.htmlUnlike in other installations focussing on the topic of biotechnologies, theartists here have hidden the lab away (though it was technically needed) undera black dome, and emphasized the public's view on the semi-living entities rotating in bioreactors, and thus insisting on the ambigious ontological status of those "biofacts". The lab condition itself here has not been visually placed in the center of attention in terms of simple theatre props, or as the represented context of knowledge production. In the "continuous process of signification" then we find another point that Eugene has adressed in a provious post: "There is no picturing in the traditional sense with bio-art. One works with the very "stuff" of life, as it were. But then there's also the notion that what paint is for the painter, DNA or cells are for the bio-artist. The latter position makes it possible to view even a cloned mammal in terms of representation (painting, sculpture, etc.), while the former position, it seems, posits a kind of materiality that works against representation." Is it so? This again refers to the difference between representation and presence, and to the domination of epistology over ontology. Could we simply "paint with stuff"? It might not be coincidence that Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in their displays often use tissue culture techniques that infact exist since decades (Alexis Carrel lab) so that the "ontologicalstaging of stuff" could be seen as the representation of epistemic things andat the same time as the presence of biofacts. In this interesting twist reliesa lot of the potential of TC&A's work, to my opinion. This may echo in whatRheinberger himself picks up from N. Goodman when talking about the notion of"representation", that, in his terms, would less "reflect" than "grasp andproduce." (see: HJ Rheinberger: Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge.Frankfurt/GÃ¶ttingen 2001/2006; p. 133). Can xeno-transplantation bere-presented by co-culturing of pig and human cells in the context of art? In the very McLuhan sense that a new medium might be reflected even in terms of older media ("television paintings"), the staging of (earlier) tissue culture that artists can handle as a material placeholder for the epistemic things in high end research seems to be a good example. Wet transgenic art employing GFP may be read at a comparable level, as the GFP technique iself is very basic, while its staging of presence/ontology may strongly communicate with audiences, unless we would really believe artists to be the geniuses that can make present ie systems biology otherwise than through representation. But: What such kind of displays that stage biological presence can do is engage the viewer emotionally so strongly so that s/he may raise epistemological questions of even higher complexity that what can be obtained through art relying on a pure hermeneutic approach. Another question in the context of "artists in the lab" and "social and cultural implications of biosciences" is what Roger Malina often mentions as the artist's capacity of "making better science". This notion is of course based on a primarily cognitivist and not on an aesthetic approach, and it has a dimension of utilitarisme and (institutionally) framed meaning-making that we need to take into account. On the other hand: Refering to the post by Susan Squier, what is the status of the chicken that Belgian artist Koen Van Mechelen cross-breeds to produce thesuper-bastard -or the animals to be produced in Wim Delvoye's forthcoming"pet shop"? As a result, I feel that the classifying grid of "art(ists) from/in the lab "does not adress the crucial issues, especially when we think of the progressing democratization of tools. How to construct a sterile hood for 15$ out of a vacuum cleaner and a hamster cage!

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Waldby: Science and Gender

2007-03-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

From: Catherine Waldby
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:15:48 +1100

Re the social implications of new biotech and the multiple intersectionswith gender

An excerpt from a forthcoming article of mine and Melinda cooper's about female reproductive biology as an investment site for regenerative medicine and Biocapital.

Catherine Waldby & Melinda Cooper (2007) ‘The Biopolitics ofReproduction: Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women’s Clinical Labour’ inAustralian Feminist Studies vol. 22 (54) special issue The TwoCultures (in press).

Throughout the OECD, birth-rates are in decline. Women in the majority of the developing nations are delaying childbirth and having fewer children, a trend that has precipitated considerable anxiety among states concerned with the dwindling proportion of their working populations and the complex economic and political consequences of anaging citizenry. ……The reasons for this shift in reproductive prioritiesare complex, intertwined with transformations in the biopolitical ordering of life.These transformations could be summarized as the neo-liberalization of life, both in the sense of the everyday life of citizens, and the biological life of populations. The decline in reproduction demonstrates these two forms very succinctly. In the realm of everyday life, we see the effects of a shift in state-market-citizen relations. The post-warform of state-centred biopolitics (Ewald 1986) – national health systems, social security, Keynesian full employment policy and economic regulation – gives way to what is sometimes termed the Competition State(Cerny 1997) – concerned with the attraction of finance capital, the deregulation and privatization of production and the devaluation of its workforce to achieve global competitiveness. The Fordist model of family life (male breadwinner, family wage, full time mothering) has necessarily given way in the face of deregulated wages and the need forthe two-wage family, the financialization of everyday life (Martin2002), the decline in social security, and the increasing cost of healthcare and housing as they are opened to global investment markets. These changes dramatically increase the economic and emotional costs of reproduction, and lead women, especially middle class women, to delay childbearing or avoid it altogether. The wide dissemination offeminist-influenced civil society also means that state exhortations tohave more children are unlikely to find much purchase.It is evident,then, that one of the unintended consequences of neoliberalism has been the state’s loss of traction over female reproductive biology and its disengagement from nation-building projects. At the same time, women’s reproductive biology has become the focus of extensive biomedical research interest and global commercial innovation.This constitutes another form of neoliberalized life, this time situatedat the level of biological processes, and part of a much largermarketization of biological vitality (Waldby & Mitchell 2006; Cooper2007). Effectively, we would argue, the processes of reproduction havebeen deregulated, privatized and made available for investment andspeculative development. This investment takes two major forms. First,since the birth of the first IVF baby in 1978, medically assistedreproduction has become a huge global business. Middle class couplesincreasingly turn to Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) (IVF, donorgametes, PGD) to facilitate conception late in a woman’s reproductivelife, once they have achieved economic security. Increasingly, access toART and donor gametes is through reproductive tourism, the purchase offertility from poor women in the developing world.Second, and more recently, many of the new technologies associated withregenerative medicine – embryonic stem cell research, saviour siblings, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), cord blood banking – rely on female reproductive biology as a generative site. These technologies utilize the autopoietic capacities of embryogenesis and the fetal-maternal blood system to generate therapeutic stem cell tissue that is itself autopoietic. That is, unlike whole organ transplant, that substitutes a working organ for a faulty one, regenerative medicine aims to transplant tissue that is self-organising and self-generating onceinside the body, able to repair and regenerate diseased sites. These technologies effectively convert the generative power of female reproductive biology into regenerative therapy. Hence, they position reproductive biology as one of the most important machines for the bioeconomy – especially as a promissory machine, working through appeals to biological potential and the future regeneration of the body (Waldby2002; Franklin 2005).

Female reproductive biology is thus undergoing a complex rearticulation. New reproductive technologies like IVF have disaggregated it from its invivo location, and stem cell technologies have diverted it into

biomedical domains unconcerned with the production of children. Reproductive potential is now bifurcated. In vitro embryos and in vitrooöcytes can be transplanted to produce another human life, a child; and they can be biotechnically reconfigured in a laboratory, diverting their pluripotency into the production of embryonic stem cell lines. In both cases, however, reproductive industries require proprietary control ofhigh volumes of difficult-to-donate reproductive tissue, either to supplement the failed fertility of the IVF patient or to perform the tricky task of creating stem cell lines. Hence, the compliance, negotiability and general agency of female populations is a central issue in the development of the reproductive bioeconomy.

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Mironov: response continued on SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mironov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:58:27 -0500

I could not imagine person who will call to animal right specialist when these persons see rats in their house. In this situation people usually call for deratization experts. So what is all this fuss about blocking legal mandatory experiments on rats and other animals during drugs testing and drug toxicity. Illegal activities against mandatory federal rules and regulations established by democratically elected government is not a democracy. It only increases cost and delay drug discovery processs. As result people are dying waiting for new drugs or could not afford new drugs. From another point I do not see substantial and sufficient investment from multiple well funded animal right organizations into development drug toxicity assays based on using human cells or in silico model of drug discovery. Bioprinting technology can help to print such miniorgans and 3D human tissue based drug discovery and drug toxicity assay. Instead of this university and scientists are forced to spending time and money on unnecessary time consuming paper work and protection our research lab from animal right criminals. If animal right organizations want to be consistent and not hypocritical they must invest in animal free tissue engineering meat technology ( See this website for detailes: <http://www.new-harvest.org/resources.htm>) and in human cell based drug toxicity and drug discovery assay. I do not see this happening at least at sufficient and necessary scale. Empty hypocritical rethoric and illegal criminal activities is not the way how civilized people must deal with problems. Artists who promotes animal rights views and associated criminal activities and thus undermine evolutionally advanced antropocentrism based religion and promoting return to more primitive religions already overcomed by historic human development must be socially responsible for their actions.

Vladimir Mironov

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2007-03-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Mironov: Response to Thacker
From:Vladimir Mironov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:26:25 -0500

Please, do not worry too much about bioprinted organs functionality. FDA and other state regulatory agencies will not allow to implant bioprinted organs without proven safety and functionality. From another point, assumption that living cells or tissues have no function is just an assumption. There is no any scientific rationale behind this statement. I personally never saw such cells in my whole scientific life. The level of function, the level of maturation and the level of cell and tissue differentiation can be variable but we are working on this and we know how to do this. Moreover, we have clearly formulated, measurable, testable and I believe achievable specifications. Yes, the bioprinted organs and tissues must be maximally possible authentic to natural human organs from position of both form and function. But sometimes perfectionism is an enemy of good. I mean "good enough" is good enough. If it is safe and can help patients and have proven positive clinical effect - it is already o.k. Synthetic implants and prostheses from ceramic, metal or plastic or polymers are not perfect substitutes and not even close in functionality to natural human organs, but they improves and saves millions of human lives. Bioprinting will allows us to escape not very desirable scenario when human organs will be gradually replaced by mechanical parts and devices and humans will become looking more like robots then humans. From another point, xenotransplanation organ from transgenic animals also not the best option because every organ contain resident adult stem cells and they can migrate into the brain and potentially differentiate into nerve cells. Human with porcine neural cells in the brain may be very interesting biological experiment but "chimerization" of human is definitely not the most desirable goal. Bioprinting of human organ from autologous human cells will allow human not only be healthy but also will allow human to continue be human. It is definitely most desirable goal.

Vladimir Mironov-

On Sunday, March 11, 2007 1:17 PM -0400 Eugene Thacker wrote:
Hi all -Maybe we can suture together the questions about "epistemic things" thatIngeborg raises with Suzanne's questions concerning the sort ofgovernmetnality of those things?There's been alot of talk about epistemological issues andknowledge-production so far. Let me ask a dumb question - why exactly arewe assuming that epistemology supercedes ontology in the lab or thestudio? Maybe someone can clarify this for me - in Rheinberger I don'tget why the language of epistemology enters at all - it seems to be a"soft ontology," in which artifacts are not quite Heideggerian "things"but not simply abstract ideas either. I understand how the phrase"knowledge-production" enters the picture, largely because of howscientists and artists are situated within a larger political economy ofideas (which in both cases are privatized). So in an example likepopulation genomics - which we can really call biocolonialism - the issueisn't so much what count as knowledge, but how the concept of an "essenceof life" (a certain percentage of genetic variability and distribution)is linked to a political concept about foundational group identity (be itin terms of race, nation, or population - or all three).Among Suzanne's points (and by the way Suzanne, the RP images aregreat!), the notion that non-scientists are playing "catch up" isprovocative, not untrue, but also not completely accurate. On one level,yes, this does seem to be the case in academia, but only in certainfields. Depending on how cynical one is, one could say that the biotechindustry has inadvertently made possible a whole host of science studiesbooks. A more attenuated view would say that there is a kind ofintellectual "ressentiment" in the way that academics respond, reply to,and react to events that are already happening. It seems that this is oneproblems of thinking about how bioethics can be truly effective.Now, I find learning about new scientific fields and technical innovationas sexy as the next person. But I also feel that, at the end of the day,there are often basic and quite familiar concepts that emerge from them.For example: RP technologies, tissue engineering, and "organ printing."Great stuff - better than science fiction. But it raises a question aboutthe relation between "life" and "form." Is the key to engineering aneffective, functioning, histocompatible organ in the computer-based model(eidos) or is it in the actualization of that model 'in vitro' or 'invivo'? (These are arguably, the two most valued froms of zoe orbiological life in biotech.) We might assume that for tissue engineringthe proof lies in the actual biological organ - it functions or itdoesn't. But it is the former (the model, algorithm, eidos) that is, inpart, rendered valuable as a patent or as part of a technology. It seemsthat it is necessary to distinguish "form" from "life" while admittingtheir intermeshing (is this not the premise of Aristotle's De anima?)So let me also suggest that science and technology are at the same timeplaying "catch up" to issues raised by classical philosophy....?-Eugene

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Mironov: response to Moura

2007-03-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

From:Vladimir Mironov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 17:38:53 -0500

"The same antagonism that generates abuse, exploitation and slaughter of all non-human life forms.."

From biological point of view anthropocentrism is just "evolutional competitive advantage of human as biological species". From social perspective believe in equality of human and non-human life is basically return to oldest primitive forms of religion. I mean: believe in Mother Earth... sanctuary of animals... do not kill animals and better die from hunger... ants and insects are also must have public lawyers and so on...In Soviet Russia during NAZI occupation of Leningrad people eat not only all possible animals like dogs and cats but even people ... just to survive. So animal killing and eating is not so much question of phylosophy it is also sometimes question of species survival. I think from position of anthropocentrism (which is the essence of all modern dominated forms of religion) at first people must eliminate human hunger in whole planet and then and ... only then... start to talk about animal rights with reasonable sense of morality and social responsibility. Saving animal lives and ignoring demands of human life is probably most counter-productive idea both from scientific evolutional point of view and from position of most popular religions which is based on anthropocentrism. I assume that more advanced religion provides evolutional advantage to humans as species. Thus: going back to more primitive form of religion is regress and not a progress. Finally, many forms of animal right extreme activism are just illegal and un-civilized and unacceptable form of social behavior and activities. I think it is much more moral to help people in Africa who are dying from hunger and low protein diet by providing them with affordable animal meat... then teach then how to be vegetarians.

Vladimir

On Sunday, March 11, 2007 2:18 PM +0000 Leonel Moura wrote:

Mistreatment of non-human life forms is based on anthropocentrism and itsdiscourse of human superiority. And we don't need to go very far to learnthe reasoning of that kind of ìphilosophyî. For example Vladimir Mironov,a panelist of this debate, on an early post (08-03-07) stated that wehumans are the ìmost sophisticated species on this planetî. Conclusionthat he delivers in his paperhttp://www.musc.edu/bioprinting/html/bioprinting_art.htmlwhere among other things we can read:" What makes us humans? Humans, according to definition, are not animals.One can call humans bio-social creatures, but what makes us reallydifferent from animals? The answer is very simple: humans have somethingthat animals do not. Animals do not have religion, art, science andtechnology. Shortly speaking, animals do not have culture. "Humans are not animals? Curious... Bio-social? What about ants? Althoughit is not clear if (non-human) animals have religion, which to be truewould be very fortunate for them, or science which would be a temporarysetback in evolution, it is evident that many of them have behaviors andskills that easily can be consider as art and technology. Anyway the factthat some people, and a lot of them, need to demonstrate that we areunique and superior just reveals a profound and dangerous antagonism inregard to life in general. The same antagonism that generates abuse,exploitation and slaughter of all non-human life forms. Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, just to mention a well known few, explain brilliantly the process.

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Mironov: Tissue Engineering and Bio-Printing (Catts and Mirinov)

2007-03-11T15:29:00.000-07:00

From: Vladimir Mirinov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 16:50:26 -0500

Can you tell us more about the research you are engaged in?

We want to print living human organs suitable for clinical implantation. Our most ambitious project is Charleston Bioengineered Kidney Project. Organ printing is basically biomedical application of well established rapid prototyping technology. Suzanne Anker was probably one of the first artist who successfully employed rapid prototyping technology in her art. The difference in our approach that we do not print plastic scaffolds or biodegradable temporal supporting framework and then seed it with living cells in bioreactor. It is so-called two step approach. We print living cell and biodegradble stimuli-sensitive hydrogel simultaneously. It is so called one step approach. Bioprinting of living tissue of desirable geometry is definitely new form of sculpture or better say Biosculpture. The principal difference that this sculpture is living sculpture and it can growth evolve and undergo changing and remodeling. We can use as a building block living cell aggregates or clusters of different color. In such approach it can look like three-dimnesional painting. Famous painter Paul Klee wrote that painting is putting right color in right place. Similary, bioprinting can be described as is putting the right cells into the right 3D space. In this context "Bio-sculpturing" especially when one will use cell aggregates of different color can be called "three-dimensional pointillism"

Where does the idea of bio-printing come from?

The idea of using rapid prototyping technology or computer-aided layer by layer additive manufacturing was originated from our flustrations with unsucessfull attempts to put living cells into porous 3D biodegradable scaffold with required high level of cell density and with desirable level of precision. We do not grow organs as many wrongly believed - we are assembling living tissues and organs from cell aggregates using bioprinter or robotic computer-aided cell dispensing devices. Living cells have unique capacity to self-assembly into 3D living human tissues. We just put them in right place at right cell density. Cell viability promoting and tissue fusion permissive supporting biodegradable hydrogel allow to keep these printed cell aggregates together. then we are using accelerated tissue maturation technologies in order to finish job and transform printed viable tissue constructs into living 3D tissue and organs. It is interesting that cell can undergo cell sorting process or preferential adhesion . Thus artist can use flat Petri dish or flat perfused minibioreactors with projector and place cells with different color ( green or red fluoresecnt proteins) and then observe dynamic living paintings or Biopainting" and observe ( by projection image on the screen or wall) how cell pattern evolve and change with time. Evolving cell and tissue biopatterns can be as beautiful as flowers. There are no technological problem in creating minibioreactor with projector. Biopainting can be very popular art if artist or painter will have bioink of different color. There are already identified and analyzied types of genes responsible for expression of florescent proteins, These genes after introducing into cell can expresse 7 types of fluorescent colors. All these tools are waiting to be explored by creative artists. L

Can we one day realize Pigmalion's Dream and bioprint (bio-sculpturing) complete living human being?
Only future can answer on this provocative question.I am afraid that human printing technology (if one can imagine logical possible social implication of broad adapting of this technology) can induce hotest political debate in the future. In this recent debates on stem cells is only beginning... I think artists can help to promote these (I believe inescapable) forcoming future debates already now. Bottom line: living BioArt both two-dimensional or bio-painting (living dynamic biopatterning) and three-dimensional or bio-sculpturing ( bioprinted 3D dynamically evolving living tissue of desirable shape) is already technically possible.

Vladimir
Vladimir A. Mironov, M.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Director of MUSC Bioprinting Research Center.
Medical University of South Carolina

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Flach & Arends: Response to first three questions

2007-03-11T15:25:00.000-07:00

From: Sabine Flach and Bergit Arends
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:21:02 -0400

Dear all

Sorry to have been a little absent from this symposium. Sabine Flach and myself have been at a conference abroad and are actually now sitting in front of the computer in London before dashing to the Big Apple (from where we will do a posting early next week) So, thank you all very much for the interesting debates. We had hoped that a paper we sent earlier for the first session could make a contribution to the discussion in the role of images and science. We are not sure if you all saw this paper and attach here again.
Now, we would like introduce ourselves and then make a response to Session Three.
Sabine Flach is Head of Research for Arts and Sciences at the Centre for Literature and Cultural Studies in Berlin and has become known for her lecture series ‘Wissenskuenste (The Arts of Knowledge and the Knowledge of the Arts) in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Arts Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Sabine is historian of art.
Bergit Arends is now curator of contemporary arts at the Natural History Museum London. Beforehand I headed the arts and science funding programme supported by the sciart Consortium and later by the Wellcome Trust.
At the time of the sciart programme I was lucky to be able to fund a collaborative project by artist Jacqueline Donachie and scientist Darren Monckton entitled ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’. The work was shown recently at the Hunterian in Glasgow and a publication followed. The project deals with the cultural and ethical prejudices and the undoing of these prejudices in the study of ‘anticipation’, a genetic condition that determines Huntingdon’s and Myotonic Dystrophy as well as Fragile X syndrome. http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n1/donachie.html
Currently Sabine and I are developing an exhibition on the basis of recent advances in neurosciences and scientific research into emotions and its interrelations with the arts and literature. This research doesn’t directly spring out of the work in the life sciences, but is an example of cultural coding of the body and how this is read through the sciences and in this case the boundaries of the neurosciences, i.e. where the sciences seek recourse to artistic production to further their research.
A brief description attached. (Sorry I now realize that this is in German, I’ll send an English Version from work at the earliest opportunity)

Sorry, all the best, more from NY, The cab is outside.
Best wishes Bergit and Sabine

[second post]
Dear all
I am adding a couple of texts to the discussion. Not having checked the current status of the debate we hope this makes a relevant contribution to this stage of the discussion.
One of the papers entitled ‘Knowledge in the Arts – Life Sciences – Art – Media’ talks about the knowledge production within the arts by drawing on the installation ‘Genesis’ by Eduardo Kac.
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Knowledge_of_the_Arts_PDF.pdf
Images of the installation are not included in the paper, but can be viewed at http://www.ekac.org/geninfo2.html
The second paper ‘Thought Experiments’ deals with the discussion about the knowledge generated by brain images.
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Thought_Experiments.pdf
All the best
Bergit Arends and Sabine Flach

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Carnie : Embryonic Entities as Codes, Discourses and Anatomy

2007-03-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

From: ANDREW CARNIE
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 09:36:25 -0000

I had a spell before my dialogues with scientists of making work related to scientific imaging. I had spent a couple of years previously studying zoology before moving into the arts. Among the images I made was this work called ‘Twins’. It’s reference point for me was the embryo, or two embryos in fact. ‘Twins’ never courted any negative response though I think in many ways I thought it quite disquieting. The work is a photograph of two slices of bacon.

Twins. 1994 Duratran. 36 inches by 48 inches. Photograph by Andrew Carnie

Andrew Carnie

Artist and Lecturer

Winchester School of Art

Southampton University

Web site http://www.andrewcarnie.co.uk/

Carnie: ARTISTS IN THE LABS, SOME OBESERVATIONS

2007-03-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

From: ANDREW CARNIE
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 08:56:42 -0000

SESSION TWO: ARTISTS IN THE LABS, some observations Andrew Carnie

Within my artistic practise I have the experience of visiting many labs. However I have not spent much time working in the lab alongside scientists. When I did work with Richard Wingate
on one particular occasion I do remember rather messing up the ‘staining’ I was carrying out of chick embryos; I figure it was just lack of practise. On most visits to see Richard it has been to spend lengthy sessions in discussion on the topics Richard has mentioned in his previous postings. There has always been this talk based around the theme of the science and then much talk on technical matters, video editing and computers. During the course of these talks visits would be made form his office to the long shared lab of the developmental neurology unit part of which he occupies with his research team, to look at progress on particular projects, to view prepared slides he was excited about or to see new material through the confocal microscope.

I would have liked more time in the lab, but money and the finance to free up this time to do this, has always been limited. But as I suspect as cited in the scientists diaries previously there are many aspects to life, science, and art, and many things come in the way of a smooth progress. This bumpy changing route has lead for me to all sorts of serendipitous events leading to new practises, unexpected visual adventures and fortuitous discoveries.

I suppose in part I also fear spending too much time in any one particular lab, being engaged and absorbed too much. I wonder how many interesting and strong works I could necessarily make embedded in a lab for a long period, say anything over a year. I have often been looking for the particular essence of the science I am approaching, the idea and sometimes this is quite quickly gained. Further time in the lab might be wasted in my case. However in general I would love to see more integration between the sciences and the arts, as I would in fact for all fields of study. What I have been able to do is to swap and move between collaborators and this jumping about has its benefits. It has brought refreshment and new ideas to the artistic endeavour each time. On route I have worked with neurologists and geneticists and currently I am working with a neuro-psychologist on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and then with a heart transplant team with Margrit Shildrick.

One big defining aspect in this research process is the actual time spent on any resulting artistic work. Making the work I produce is often very labour intensive. The piece I completed for the Art and Mind Festival, Winchester, http://www.artandmind.org/, last year with the production of some 648 images to make the complete time-based slide dissolve piece, ‘We Are Where We Are’, was about six months fairly solid labour. This is not an uncommon amount of time to spend on any one work which involved photography drawing and endless computer manipulation. It is obviously an aspect controlling the amount of time I could spend in any lab. The reverse is true for scientists finding time to discuss their work is always very difficult. Richard Wingate has always been very generous and we continue to meet to talk despite our projects have been completed a few years back.

In my visits to science labs there are elements of practise which I have seen which I would like to bring back to the studio. Some of the organisation has been impressive. My own applications to funding bodies have always been sporadic but I liked the organised manner in which I saw scientific teams have the expectation they would always be making applications, it was a more automated continuous process. Obviously the number of participants in a team and the different skills they offer allow this. I certainly like the experience of the labs I have been in, often quite open plan in nature there seems to be a good deal of interchange between professionals. Artists tend to be quite lone individuals isolated from others. The common sense of purpose in Richard’s lab has always seemed comforting, more minds working towards one goal is exciting. I have since experiencing these various labs been much keener on joint projects and working within interdisciplinary teams. The Heart project with Margrit Shildrick mentioned above involves 3 other artists an anthropologist and philosopher.

Andrew Carnie

Artist and Lecturer

Winchester School of Art

Southampton University
Website www.andrewcarnie.co.uk
andrewcarnie@tram.ndo.co.uk

We Are Where We Are 2006, for the Art and Mind Festival, Winchester. Eight projector slide dissolve work. Five photographs one diagram of the layout. Images by Andrew Carnie.

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Anker: Tissue Engineering and Bio-Printing (Catts and Mirinov)

2007-03-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:42:54 -0500

To Oron's nameless "taxonomy of models" of artistic engagement with the life sciences, I would like to add a few others:

13. the moralist
14. the activist
15. the careerist
16. the "no talent" ist
17. the justifier
18. the didactic ist
19. the salvationist
20. the alarmist
21. the narcissist
22. the "wanna be" ist
23. the whore de culturist

With 23 pairs of human chromosomes in tow, I think I will stop here. To this Duchampean model of types, Oron brings into public view the very serious issues embedded in live laboratory practices. As phenomenological and sensorial experience, working with life forms in real time gives one pause about the complexity and fragility of living systems. And as Oron introduces else in his philosophical texts he brings attention to such concepts as the "semi-living" and "aesthetics of care." Tissue engineering, bio-printing and bio-scaffolding remain on the edge of the ways in which the body can be conceived of as harboring its own repair kit. At a time when the formerly abject (umbilical cords, circumcision tips, etc.) garner renewed value the future has arrived.

Additionally, I am interested in knowing more about laboratory practices as experienced by scientists and/or artist/researchers.

Vladimir, can you tell us more about the research you are engaged in? Where does the idea of bio-printing come from?

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Thacker: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:17:04 -0400 (EDT)

Hi all -
Maybe we can suture together the questions about "epistemic things" that
Ingeborg raises with Suzanne's questions concerning the sort of governmetnality of those things?

There's been alot of talk about epistemological issues and knowledge-productionso far. Let me ask a dumb question - why exactly are we assuming that epistemology supercedes ontology in the lab or the studio? Maybe someone can clarify this for me - in Rheinberger I don't get why the language ofepistemology enters at all - it seems to be a "soft ontology," in which artifacts are not quite Heideggerian "things" but not simply abstract ideas either. I understand how the phrase "knowledge-production" enters the picture, largely because of how scientists and artists are situated within a larger political economy of ideas (which in both cases are privatized). So in an example like population genomics - which we can really call biocolonialism -the issue isn't so much what count as knowledge, but how the concept of an"essence of life" (a certain percentage of genetic variability anddistribution) is linked to a political concept about foundational groupidentity (be it in terms of race, nation, or population - or all three).

Among Suzanne's points (and by the way Suzanne, the RP images are great!), the notion that non-scientists are playing "catch up" is provocative, not untrue, but also not completely accurate. On one level, yes, this does seem to be thecase in academia, but only in certain fields. Depending on how cynical one is,one could say that the biotech industry has inadvertently made possible a whole host of science studies books. A more attenuated view would say that there is a kind of intellectual "ressentiment" in the way that academics respond, reply to, and react to events that are already happening. It seems that this is one problems of thinking about how bioethics can be truly effective.

Now, I find learning about new scientific fields and technical innovation as sexy as the next person. But I also feel that, at the end of the day, there are often basic and quite familiar concepts that emerge from them. For example: RP technologies, tissue engineering, and "organ printing." Great stuff - better than science fiction. But it raises a question about the relation between"life" and "form." Is the key to engineering an effective, functioning,
histocompatible organ in the computer-based model (eidos) or is it in the actualization of that model 'in vitro' or 'in vivo'? (These are arguably, the two most valued froms of zoe or biological life in biotech.) We might assume that for tissue enginering the proof lies in the actual biological organ - it functions or it doesn't. But it is the former (the model, algorithm, eidos)that is, in part, rendered valuable as a patent or as part of a technology. It seems that it is necessary to distinguish "form" from "life" while admitting their intermeshing (is this not the premise of Aristotle's De anima?)

So let me also suggest that science and technology are at the same time playing "catch up" to issues raised by classical philosophy....?

-Eugene

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Anker: Multiple Choice- Fictions/Facts/Phobias

2007-03-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:08:32 -0500

In what ways do critical fictions a.k.a the cultural imaginary, function as rhetorical sources for the creative imagination in both studio practice and laboratory immersion?

Citations: Thomas Gruenfeld, "Misfit Series (Pig/Bird) 2001 (top image) made from recycled taxidermied animal parts Zony, cross between a horse and a zebra

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Catts: "Hands on" Immersion for Oron Catts

2007-03-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

From: Oron Catts
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 01:37:50 +0900

Hi Jill and all
The hands on approach can be read on different levels and artists are approaching it in different ways. From my perspective, getting into the lab does not always entail getting ones hands wet…
I once made up a taxonomy of models of artistic engagement with the life sciences and came up with twelve non exclusive ways (I will not attach names to the categories but I am sure that you will know the types…):
1. The illustrator
2. The commentator/representator
3. The visitor/guest/onlooker
4. The appropriator
5. The entertainer
6. The user
7. The industry worker
8. The Hoaxter
9. The hobbyist/amateur
10. The after hours/under the table
11. The mail order/ready made
12. The researcher/embedded in science/technology setting

I am particularly interested in the last model, but deliberately inserted the somewhat loaded term embedded in it, as I think that in the same way that the integrity of reporters embedded in military (such as in the war on Iraq) should be questioned so is the case with artists. Saying that, my own experience, and observing more than thirty residents coming through SymbioticA and “getting their hand wet”, it is important for some non biologists to enter the life science lab and engage with the manipulation (not just visualisation) of life in the most direct and experiential way (literally the phenomenological way…). The knowledge one gains by the multi-sensorial experience of dealing with life in such a way is something that neither text book, nor image can provide. The major thing that SymbioticA provides our residents with is getting equitant with the tools and techniques of the life science (this is not the same as science making…) so they can research their projects (and in some cases produce the work) themselves.
As for your questions:
Why do you think that the artist can become this very valuable 'outsider'?

The notion of the outsider is valuable to some degree but it is not my main interest – is the embedded reporter in the war on Iraq is also a valuable outsider? Is it about the artist providing fresh perspective to assist the scientist in her pursuit as suggested by you? My answer is that this is problematic.
Your example seemed to infer some hierarchy in the artist/scientist relationship; artists collecting the empirical evidence needed by scientists for their research may not be the best (or most beneficial) way to start working with scientists. For me it seems that it cements the position of the artist/research as inferior to the scientist, something that might be carried on in the type of relationships they form. In SymbioticA, we appoint our residents as honorary research fellows in our school (Anatomy and Human Biology); this position put them on equal footings with the other researchers (scientists) they are working with. The relationships that are then formed are those of mutual mentorship at the start and colleagues as the project continue. It is not so much about being in the service of the other; although in some cases we get some of the scientific collaborators complaining about the fact that they feel used… but this is more to do with the different ways the art and science worlds treat egos…
Is important is it for the artist to really understand the methodologies and methods of science and why?
I think that in the context of artists working with living systems, it is not just important for the artist to understand the tools of science, it is imperative for the artist to gain the skills that will allow her to do the work herself. However, following scientific methodologies is something I recommend our residents not to do. In my experience, it is really important to delineate to some degree the ways our artistic researchers operate from the way the scientists work. It is not about artists doing science or scientists doing art- my experience show that in most cases when this is being attempted the result is bad science and not so interesting art.

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Duster: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

From: Troy Duster
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 12:12:12 -0400

In a later posting, I will respond more specifically to Suzanne’s question about core issues, but this post is to address an underlying assumptions in her query: “How shall we manage the social consequences of scientific facts?” -- and indeed, are the rest of us simply “playing catch-up”…

Today’s (Sunday) New York Times has two pieces on the Opinion Page that are germane to this discussion. They both refer to the recent announced discovery that the different national groups of the United Kingdom and Ireland are much more closely related genetically than previously thought. One of the authors uses this as the occasion to suggest that such research has the potential of uniting us in our common humanity – bursting the bubble of ethnic and racial essentialism that is often the source of warfare, strife and of course, a long-standing rationale for oppressive social domination. The other author documents the history of that domination of the Irish by the English, using literature and quotes from essayists of the 18th and 19th centuries to reveal just how deeply embedded was the idea that the Irish were an inferior race.

The problem is that social domination is not dependent upon demonstrated genetic or biological similarities or differences – but upon the capacity of one group to control the resources, politically, culturally, economically, and of course, militarily. My case in point is a study, now nearly a decade old, that compared the DNA of Arabs, Jews and Welsh subjects, and concluded that the Arabs and Jews shared much more of the DNA patterned markers with each other than either did with the Welsh. To say that these findings did not much "budge" or destabilize patterns of control or domination in the Middle East would be a wry rhetorical understatement. In a similar vein, the study of the DNA of the priestly line among Jews was used to try, at the laboratory level, to establish a group in sub-Sahara Africa as one of the lost tribe, and thus "essentially" Jewish. Many things come to mind about the impact (or lack of it) from the study, but "the primacy of biological ties above all else" -- is definitively not one.

The purpose of my bringing this to the fore is to counter the notion that the bio-sciences are somehow in the lead, or at least should be in the lead in determining what really constitutes human genetic variation and diversity, and if the rest of us just followed that lead, we would come to some better understanding of the human variation among us – which until enlightened by genetic analysis, is flawed, imprecise, and certainly not scientific. We may well be informed that Strom Thurmond, Thomas Jefferson, and countless others dipped into another gene pool (read this as socially framed, not genetic), but the Thurmond and Jefferson families have no more “budged” than have the Israelis, the Arabs, the British and the Irish – and the reason is simple enough: genetic analysis will not adjudicate policies that sustain long-standing practices of human social and cultural stratification.

More in a bit on core issues.

Troy Duster

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Back to the Future: Neuroscience and Numerical Imaging (Solomon et al)

2007-03-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:42:19 -0500

At a time where the “self” has been characterized by philosopher Daniel Dennett as a “responding, responsible artifact, what role do images play in activating memory traces?All images conjure up undercurrents of emotion. Mirror neurons reflect the outside

worldsomatically bringing it back inside. Sometimes these somatic responses trigger feelings of empathy or fear, pleasure or even panic. Although we know that what we are looking at is a “critical fiction,” somatic responses in many cases trump intellectual stasis.

As processes of signification change, as you have stated, with regard to the ways in whichMRI technology creates pictures from numbers, I am interested in the ways thatscientific iconography, defunct or otherwise, can be repurposed for aesthetic and cultural consideration. What intrigues me most about the early 20th century psychological projective test, the Rorschach, is that not only has it become a cultural icon, but from a scientific prospective, the enormous extent to which these plates have been studied and employed. (Peter Galison.)

By experimenting with 3-D software programs, I wanted to see what would happen if I turned the Rorschach inkblots into objects. Would they still appear as if randomly generated?Would they allude to possible new connections between the ways in which 3-dimensionality becomes a value-added strategy in both artistic practice and regenerative medicine ? (see Vladimir Mironov and bio-printing on this site.)

What in fact resulted in my experiment, were a series of sculptures that appeared to be very reminiscent of the natural world. The sculptures in some cases looked like animals and in other cases body parts and bones. Holding these sculptures in my hands, generated within me, an uncanny feeling of embodied imagination. That perhaps is my interest in sculptural form.

Images: Rapid prototype sculptures (2004-2006) from Anker's Rorschach Series

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Anker: Science and Gender (Jill Scott)

2007-03-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 08:40:01 -0500

Discourses on gender and society abound in the cultural and scientific literature. In this symposium there have been several references to social issues regarding gender identity and its power politics. As new technologies reconfigure the sexual revolution into an asexual one, Susan Squier’s initial comments about trans-sexuality and reproductive rights target an aspect of this circumspect and unchronicled territory. Lee Silver in Remaking Eden goes into full detail about the conceivability of male pregnancy. He also cites a time when human embryos may be created from the fusion of cells from same sex parents. Brad Davis further engages the ways in which the female is erased by the imaging practices of sonograms. These images focus only on the fetus itself as if it is located somewhere else. The new technologies of sex selection raise serious questions issues concerning female fetuses, particularly in China and India. Recently the American College of Obstetricians and Gynocologists (ACOG) released a statement on the non-medical use of sex selection as a sexist practice (Committee Opinion #360, “Sex Selection” February 2007, Obstetrics & Gynechology.) However, this Committee Report also raises questions about the nature of an individual’s reproductive rights. What I do find so compelling in this symposium, that as soon as it begun, reproductive rights and embryonic images flooded in. In what way, are we engaged in updated variations on gendered anatomies? Or on the other hand, is the fetus a “primal marvel” that still remains opaque to us? Are there any sociologists out there? Richard Twine and Troy Duster, what do you think are the core issues regarding gender, society and technology at this point in time?

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Moura: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

From: Leonel Moura
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:18:38 +0000

Mistreatment of non-human life forms is based on anthropocentrism and its discourse of human superiority. And we don't need to go very far to learn the reasoning of that kind of “philosophy”. For example Vladimir Mironov, a panelist of this debate, on an early post (08-03-07) stated that we humans are the “most sophisticated species on this planet”. Conclusion that he delivers in his paperhttp://www.musc.edu/bioprinting/html/bioprinting_art.htmlwhere among other things we can read:

" What makes us humans? Humans, according to definition, are not animals. One can call humans bio-social creatures, but what makes us really different from animals? The answer is very simple: humans have something that animals do not. Animals do not have religion, art, science and technology. Shortly speaking, animals do not have culture. "

Humans are not animals? Curious... Bio-social? What about ants? Although it is not clear if (non-human) animals have religion, which to be true would be very fortunate for them, or science which would be a temporary setback in evolution, it is evident that many of them have behaviors and skills that easily can be consider as art and technology. Anyway the fact that some people, and a lot of them, need to demonstrate that we are unique and superior just reveals a profound and dangerous antagonism in regard to life in general. The same antagonism that generates abuse, exploitation and slaughter of all non-human life forms. Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, just to mention a well known few, explain brilliantly the process.

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SESSION THREE: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF BIOSCIENCE

2007-03-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:32:55 -0500

In 2003, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watsonaccepting an award at the New York Academy of Sciences talked a bit about the residual after-effects of his seminal scientific findings. He explained that after the paper he co-authored with Francis Crick in Nature (April 2, 1953) not much of anything happened. Although DNA’s structure had been exposed, its application to the fields of the biological sciences was still uncharted territory. Fast forward fifty years plus, and alternative dilemmas are upon us. What shall we and what shall we not do with regard to the alteration and manipulation of life forms?

In this session, our discussion will focus on the social consequences of the genetic revolution. This technology, like others before it, is Janus-faced and relies heavily on risk assessment data, interpretive models and underlying principles in bioethics. Furthermore, the plasticity of the DNA molecule itself, makes it possible to slice and dice, recombine, insert, or knock-out gene sequences at will. One can conceive of the biological and technological sciences as forming a free-floating, yet diaphanous backdrop, intervening into the activities of human life . From the food and the medicines we ingest to the tests that screen our interior bodies to its use in criminal investigations and social hierarchies, DNA technologies continues to alter the ways in whichwe inhabit the world.

Artists and writers, and especially sociologists, philosophers and ethicists continue toplay catch up from a humanist point of view in assessing the uses and abuses of these fast-paced technologies. How shall we manage the social consequences of scientific facts?

Each discipline has its own set of practices with regard to this question. From your particular perspective, please identify the issues, values, and ethics involved in these transformative bio-practices.

Picture caption: Map of legalization of compulsory sterilization laws in the US during the1920’s and 1930’s

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Scott: Epistemic Objects

2007-03-11T04:50:00.000-07:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 11:32:47 +0100

1. What is a laboratory?

For us the main reasons to place artists in a wide range of science labs did not change. These are: To give artists the experience of immersion inside the culture of scientific research in order to inspire their content and develop their interpretations. To allow the artists to have actual “hands on ” access in the lab itself, as well as attend relevant lectures and conferences. To help scientists gain some insight into the world of contemporary art, aesthetic development and communication channels between science and the general public. To encourage further collaboration between both parties including an extension of discourse and an exchange of research practices and methodologies. As "art researchers" who are running the program, we are learning, comparing and shifting according to the results. What is central, indeed crucial, is that researchers in both art and science fields still retain a commitment towards the public and their subjects of study.

2) What about seminal significance in developing new ways to conceive of art practice?

We have had failures and successes in collaboration, but what is very obvious is that many artists may never have the opportunity to meet nor work alongside any scientists unless there is a growth in lab residency programs. We would also claim that we have fostered the development of new approaches to art and science research collaboration rather than art practice. If science educators are looking for more sensitive and poetic metaphors and communication skills, then art can help. For contemporary artists 'real' information is not taboo and they particularly like more socially conscious scientists. As the general public is mostly uninformed about scientific debates in many fields, we claim that trans-disciplinary approaches may provide "art researchers" with solid raw materials, pertinent debates and unique potentials in order to encourage critical analysis in the public realm and perhaps even affect social change. This requires that "art researchers" learn more about science so that they can produce more highly skilled, interpretive and reflective artworks, ones that might not only gain more respect from science but also be more relevant for future debates in the public realm. Scientific research has such a large impact on the future of humanity that it would seem irresponsible to not consider these potentials.

3.3) Laboratory practices bring into focus a host of other questions and obligations concerning: to what extent is hyperbole employed by both artists and scientists?

The concept of "shock value" needs more discussion in relation to art and science. We think that an artwork has to be accurate about scientific content, otherwise the science community will not be engaged with the resultant work. One interpretational approach, which is very much rejected by science researchers, is the use of "shock value" (i.e. Stelarc). In these cases, scientists see certain artists as uninformed and problematic, not only because they misrepresent their research, but also, because they are reminiscent of tabloid style journalism. This damages the image of scientific research. Instead, they preferred artists with more considered goals who were excited about the specific research being undertaken in the lab itself. Science also has it radicals or mavericks like Marvin Minsky and Hans Morawec or Eric Drexler, who have reputations of creating problematic fiction to shock the public and illustrate their points. These scientists are not often taken seriously by our artists-in-labs research partners, as our scientists see themselves as standing in the middle of any informed debate.
We claim that the artist has to first be exposed to the every day activities of a particular scientific inquiry before they can interpret the results for the public. Historically, more informed interpretations have already had a valuable role to play if they were backed up by solid claims from the science community. (E.g. Hans Haacke’s work “Rhinewater Purification Plant” which conducted grey water reclamation in 1969; or Harrison’s “Sustainable Food Source” 1972). It seems that informed interpretations can not only help to explore art as a catalyst but also improve public relations for scientists. Furthermore art researchers' interpretations of ethical and social issues within scientific research may also help to generate a new level of discussion within the scientific community itself.

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Frazzetto: a scientist’s perspective

2007-03-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

From: Giovanni Frazzetto
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:51:55 +0100 (CET)

Dear All,S
orry for lagging behind.
As a practicing scientist, in this second phase of the symposium, I feel summoned to first address the question introduced by Suzanne Anker concerning the problematics of being a scientist. In one sentence I think the main problem for scientists is the difficulty in coherently mixing three main activities, that of ‘knowing, ‘doing’ and ‘being’. In other words, how much of their knowledge and practice of their profession clashes or in general coexists with their way of being in the world. Is a scientist’s field of expertise influencing his/her world view and actions?In “Science as Vocation” (1917) Max Weber states: “Natural science gives us an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to master life technically. It leaves quite aside or assumes for its purposes, whether we should and do wish to master life technically and whether it ultimately makes sense to do so”. Let us go one step further: is science, more strictly biology, also a means of self-clarification? Is biology the way to true being?Michel Foucault stressed the inseparable and problematic link between subjectivity and truth in Western culture. How intrusive is the subject in this process of objectivisation? Does this truth define me or tell me whoI am?There is no doubt about the pervasive power of new discoveries in biology on society and on individuals. Biological knowledge is employed to define individuals in biological terms. For scientists, who are at the same time producers and consumers of this knowledge, the identification with it is more problematic. The question is whether science practice is an ethical activity that can be ascribed to a pattern of conduct, a ‘Lebensfuehrung’ or self-regulation. For instance, the dissection of the neurochemical mechanisms underlying emotions brings forward a more ‘disenchanted’ visionof them of which scientists are the producers and with which they need to deal with in their own lives when they return home from the laboratory. Perhaps this holds true for artists as well. Having read the collection of scientists’s journals edited by Jon Turneyand having kept a journal myself documenting the evolution of my daily experimentation, I can hardly agree more with the conclusion that scientists are as human as anyone else. This type of self-writing (as opposed to experimental notes or laboratory records) promotes ‘reflexivity’ and traces the intersection between ‘knowing’, ‘doing’ and‘being’ that I introduced at the beginning. Coming back to the issues presented by Carl Djerassi at the start of this session-I agree that narrative and theatrical representations can certainly be very powerful means to describe scientists’ dilemmas or idiosyncrasies. All the plays mentioned, and many others, do this exquisitely well. However, I agree with Suzanne Anker when she reminds us that the public perception of scientists is not necessarily equal to the vision scientists cherish of themselves. Also, I am not sure I can agree with the statement that hidden among lines, graphs and pictures of a laboratory notebook are often burning personal issues. When generating results, an experimenter’s personal issues do not cease to burn or exist in parallel. However, they are supposed to remain invisible to the reader of those lab protocols. Detailed historical analysis of objectivity (Daston, Galison) speak to the rise of an ‘a perspectival objectivity’ as the ethos of the interchangeable observer and operator, unmarked by style and idiosyncrasy that might interfere with the generation and communication of results. More later.
Giovanni Frazzetto

Giovanni Frazzetto, PhD
'Society in Science'
Branco Weiss Fellow
(www.society-in-science.ethz.ch)
European Molecular Biology Laboratory

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Reichle: Epistemic Objects

2007-03-11T00:13:00.000-08:00

From: Ingeborg Reichle
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:02:07 -0400

Hi,
I would like to come back to Suzannes remark about the term "epistemic object" which was important for my writings about artists in labs and the effects of these "new" approaches in art on the reception to a wider audience. At the same time when I started to work on "Kunst aus dem Labor"(art emerging from the laboratory) in the field of art history, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger ( Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, MPIWG) began in Berlin a project called THE EXPERIMENTALIZATION OF LIFE:Configurations between Science, Art, and Technology (http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/exp/index_e.html). Contemporary art projects were not on the agenda, but the effects on the "objects" under investigation in the laboratory (from the 18th Century onwards). In this working group, Rheinbergers research was focused on recombinant DNA technology, which was for me very interesting, because I was interested in transgenic art at that time.

With this contribution I will post some ideas I have about "epistemic things" and "biofacts" in the context of "bio-art"

"Epistemic Things"

Molecular biology as well as other fields in the life sciences to a large extent construct and design the objects of their research today themselves, thereby producing technological artefacts which owe their existence to the culture of experiment and the expanding technological systems of the laboratory. At the same time these organisms in the laboratory often now have an epistemological status in terms of knowledge models that merely serve as representational models. In this way the technofacts of the 'third nature' have, today, to a large extent replaced life forms of the first nature as the reference objects of the laboratory. Reports of experimental results as well as the discourse of research organisations are therefore primarily focused on these manufactured, epistemic objects, whose modelling takes place within the immense science complex and the physical infrastructure of the laboratory. Such an implementation of model realities without a reference makes possible a controlled technical manipulation of the processes of life, which then leads to a denaturalisation or artificiality of the object under investigation.

The development in the 1970s of recombinant DNA technology led to a fundamental change in the way molecular structures and processes of living organisms could be made available for scientific experimentation. From an epistemological perspective this new access to organisms represents a break with previous methods and approaches in molecular biology: Macromolecules themselves became manipulative tools of recombinant DNA technology and thus were transformed into technological entities. The nature of these is such that are no longer distinguishable from the processes in which they intervene, and in the molecular biology lab they begin to resemble industrial production systems, becoming in effect molecular machines. As a consequence of this development the organism acquires the status of technological object; the organism or even the molecule itself becomes a laboratory. The entire range of modern life sciences are on their way to becoming a new science that not only treats, dissects, processes, analyses, and modifies its materials - living organisms and parts thereof -but rather constitutes and constructs these as biofacts, which can no longer be described as being a part of a "natural nature". This construction, however, does not correspond to an understanding of the production of matter as a form of 'creation' in the sense of the bringing forth or generation of life, but is rather to be seen as a process of transformation and conversion of matter.

The neologism biofact - combining "bio" with the term "artifact" - was - combining "bio" with the term "artifact" - was developed by the philosopher Nicole C. Karafyllis as a hermeneutic concept, which allows to ask for the differences between "nature" and "technology" in the area of the living. "Life" thus is examined by her in an intermediary perspective between subject and object and is outlined by reflecting on the term "growth", because not only by recent biotechnological progress, where "life" is regarded as a quality applying to epistemic objects within scientific categories, but also by the anthropological concept of hybridity, the borders between the natural and the artificial become vague on the phenomenological level: Artifacts are artificially devised and created objects. Constructed things were until now always in the category of objects. An artifact, referring to something man-made, serves as a collective term for such diverse, artificially created objects as buildings, art works, and machines. Artifacts generally are dead or inanimate. Biofacts are biotic artifacts; that is they are or were once alive. The categorization of the technical treatment of life is certainly not new, nonetheless there was until now no systematic term to include the technological manipulation of original natural growth. This terminological lack occurred, among other reasons, because philosophy of technology focused, first of all, on systematically classifying technology and always viewed nature as 'the other' and the 'opposite' of technique, something from which one could distance oneself.

This is a translation of a chapter of my book: "Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience".Springer, Wien/New York 2005.

All the best,
Ingeborg

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Rijsingen: about the epistemic

2007-03-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

From: Miriam van Rijsingen
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:48:00 +0100

Dear all,
I am happy to hear that the conference has been extended until the 15th, as I was not able to contribute much in the first 4 days due to an unexpected busy schedule.

I want to join in again and think some further about the epistemic value of the art practice, specifically when engaged with bioscience. I am also very interested in Marvin’s and Nancy’s thoughts concerning Suzanne’s question. As for Suzanne’s question about the ‘epistemic’ applied to performativity and process in both lab and studio, I think this is a very important question indeed. I do not think many artists think about the epistemic a lot, or about their work having epistemic value. Jill does when she talks for example about e-skin consortium. But that’s also a specific case of ‘go native’ in my view.
Rheinberger’s view on the scientific production of epistemic things is based on the idea that what experimental scientists do is ‘taking and making’, that is ‘making available’. He defines this further as related to Piece’s sign system, but specifically understood as a fluctuating system, defined as a ‘continuous process’ of signification.
I could think of artists in bioscience as experimental researchers, who could define their practice as one of taking and making, and of making available. Not in the sense of a definite object, but precisely as a practice of signification.

I think also for example that the (beautiful, yet disturbing) images of Karl Grimes are a clear case of this process of taking and making, making available. I would call them perhaps instances of signification, that I think generate knowledge, not only about the objects in the archives, history etc, but also about ourselves, our psychologies etc.

More tomorrow. Have to think al lot over.
Miriam

PS
I like the stuffed plush too! But I cannot see the 'true version of a nioghtmare' or evil eye in Cthulhuu.

Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Dept. of Art History, University of Amsterdam

Scott: comment from the public post

2007-03-10T10:52:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:42:19 -0500

Dear All
The last comment of Rogers is worth considering- Are any other participants out there interested this gender discussion?
Cheers,
Jill

roger malina has left a new comment on the public post "Scott: for Susan-before you go-and Suzanne for now...":
Jill
Let me pick up on your gender question which is part of a much deeper one about how scientific laboratories and science institutions in general are 'connected" to the societies that they are part of.Staying on the artists in labs topic, the UK arts council with Leonardo co sponsorship has placed 5 artists in the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley.Of the 5 artists 4 were women (one was a wife husband team).The lab itself is dominantly male,but not the science education group that served as "broker' for the residencies.The selection juries were gender balanced.It is my observation that in the art and technology community in general there are numberous outstanding women artists and scholars= yet when they work with the science instutions we are faced with organisations that are dominantly male especially in the management levels ( and tenured faculty )

It would be naive to think that these cultural diffrerences don't affect the way that art science collaborations work in laboratory contexts and in the bio sciences- so much of the discussion bears on the nature of life and our responsabilities towards life forms, that as we talk about visual culture and the biosciences there must be gender differences in approaches.

roger malina

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Scott: Trans-disciplinary efforts-respone for Eugene

2007-03-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:14:24 +0100

Yes I agree with you Eugene,

I really share your concern about the struggles of "getting" any Trans-disciplinary programs, co-teaching or project collaborations going between disciplines in Universities. I have to say I still tend to value those lunch dates with the scientists in relation to the artist-in-labs program.
But in this light you wanted me to comment on Z-node.
What I am trying to develop here is a 60%theory 40%practice-based PHD program in Art and Science. (http://www.z-node.net/). The only solution I could think of is to actually pay the scientists to be second supervisors for the Phd Canditates. So far this seems to work. The artists are mainly media artists and the science disciplines range from the biological to the psychological, however, I sill employ 50 percent media-art historians in this role. Therefore, the aims of our group are: to explore and define new cultural epistemologies between design, art, science and technology, to search for original hybrid combinations of media and art practice and scientific theory by focusing on critical and ethical discourses, and to discuss the future of the arts in relation to the cultural and social impact of technology on society. Consequently, the contextual aims are quite different from the base station at the University of Plymouth.

Cheers and please keep trying...

Jill

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Scott: "Hands on" Immersion for Oron Catts

2007-03-10T10:50:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 19:38:14 +0100

Dear Oron,
Hi there, your program looks great and I will spread the infomation around.
However for this Symposium-I would be really interested in tackling an old discussion which we have had together further here:
----the value of "hands on" immersion in the lab context.
Beside having a look at the posts by the Andrew, the two Richards and Eugene, I have jotted down some notes for your reaction:
Immersion is revered in both art and science as one of the most valuable ways to transfer knowledge from educational facilitator to student. According to Sandra Caravita, the lab context in any discipline is so fundamental for learning and for the exchange of information that education is problematic without it. (1995). Reframing the Problem of Conceptual Change, Learning and Instruction, 4. p.89; Caravita, S.(1995). Immersion for artists in the science laboratory is an excellent starting point for new educational approaches to trans-disciplinary practice. Caravita also suggests that a scientist must actively build knowledge through the personal interpretation of her/his experience, but must share this experience not only with peers but also with 'outsiders'.

Why do you think that the artist can become this very valuable 'outsider'?

Generally, from our experience with the life sciences, the most beneficial way to start working with scientists is to assist them to collect the empirical evidence they need for their research. For example, in the artists-in-labs project at the Centre for Microscopy, artists were given a 'hands-on' education on tools like the Scanning Electron Microscope. The mastering of skills like these requires a very exact level of mimicry as part of the learning process.

Is important is it for the artist to really understand the methodologies and methods of science and why?

Looking forward….

Jill

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Extension of Conference

2007-03-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

To All Conference Participants:

Due to popular demand we have extended our Symposium run through Thursday March 15th.
All posts will be accepted through March 15th, 11:59 PM EST

JD Talasek
Director
Office of Exhibitions and Cultural Programs
National Academy of Sciences

Anker: Audience Response to Art-Sci/Critical Response to Art-Sci

2007-03-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:13:17 -0500

Audience Response to Art-Sci/Critical Response to Art-Sci(Heiferman and Princenthal)

Marvin Heiferman has curated several exhibitions centered around “art works that are science based.” Particularly known is Paradise Now, a seminal exhibition on this subject which he co-curated with the late Carole Kismaric. In addition to its venue at Exit Art in NYC, the exhibition traveled to many other university art galleries and museums within the United States. Pamela Auchincloss facilitated these arrangements, and the exhibition’s outreach was impressive.

It is interesting to note that this show received an enormous amount of press coverage:The New York Times, The New Yorker, Science News, etc. There were alsoT.V. interviews and other e-media postings. What was curious to me at the time(and still is) is that the critical response from the art-world per se, and its allied agenciesof cultural consensus were, if not totally absent, then at least frail in their capacities to engage this subject. The major art magazines, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, etc. did notwrite any significant feature articles on this conceptually engaging internationally driven theme. What accounts for this erasure is speculative at best. Certainly many art historians and cultural theorists from Barbara Maria Stafford, Donna Haraway , Christiana Paul, Mark Dery, W.J.T. Mitchell, and James Elkins to site a few, are significantly ensconced in this dialogue.

The questions at hand address a possible incompatability between current institutional frameworks and experimental art practices. The notion of art’s epistemic value is presently comatose within the artworld’s established hierarchy. At a time in which art consumption is on overload, collecting art has become the latest trend in cultural cache. As the writer Anthony Hayden-Guest has so aptly stated, the Air Fair has become “the new disco.”

Marvin and Nancy. What are your thoughts on these matters?

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Thacker: Plushie Chimera

2007-03-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:28:15 -0500 (EST)

Ha, that's a great image Suzanne. As soon as the NIH ELSI program gives us a grant we can begin our, um, research. Two other examples sent to me via JD: http://www.giantmicrobes.com;(are these guys funded by the CDC?)http://weebs.org/weeberworld/index.htm And my personal favorite, the Cthulhu plush:http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/7cb0/Ah, consumer culture is great, isn't it? It can cause you to post messages that have nothing to do with the list whatsoever...

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Thacker: response to Jill Scott

2007-03-10T09:50:00.000-08:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 11:17:45 -0500 (EST)

Hi all - I'd like to pick up on some of the helpful comments that Jill hasmade. In response to Andrew Carnie's post, she notes:"I also wonder if art should only be a catalyst for science to reach the public or should it maintain a purely interpretative role? In the AIL project we hoped that matched pairs of art and science researchers who collaborate on very particular problems could help to promote the production of artworks that are based on scientifically robust knowledge.[...]As Donna Haraway suggests, ifscience is really neutral then artistic interpretations might also reflect about how cultural factors through feed back from the public might have an influence on science research itself."

I definitely agree here that context matters a great deal. I'd be interested to hear from others who've dealt w/ similar experiences (Jill, perhaps you can also talk about your work with Z-Node?). Being at a tech university, I've found the art-sci thing to be very erratic. It can be really easy to have lunch with a colleague from the Biomedical Engineering school, but quite a different matter to collaborative apply for a grant or work on a project - or, for that matter, to co-teach a course. Often it boils down to institutional framing, disciplinary flexibility, and budgets. A colleague of mine in the Biomedical Engineering actually did collaborate with SymbioticA a few years back (his rat neurons controlled a robotic arm over the Internet that made drawings). I went to visit him once and, in passing by his lab I saw that he put up a huge poster/publication of his work with SymbioticA. I really respected that, it was a little gesture, yes, but it was saying "*this* is my research" (almost every other lab was working on NIH-funded stem cell research). Of course I think he has tenure and plenty of prior, um, "legitimate" research...I find the institutional context for this kind of collaboration to be at once intriguing and frustrating. There's a lot of double-talk. On the one hand you can create new degree programs and hire innovative faculty to teach in those programs. But on the other hand you're given strict guidelines from above on what is or is not "tenurable." So you can create your crazy art installation as long as you publish that scholarly monograph. But many artists simply don't self-identify as theorists or writers. I've seen many media and visual artists leave their jobs because this double-talk has imploded. ...Sorry to raise such an unexciting issue!...

-Eugene

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Scott: for Susan-before you go-and Suzanne for now

2007-03-10T04:46:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:26:14 +0100

Dear Susan and Suzanne,

Just a thought and hopefully we can extract some parts to share now in relation to SECTION 2-the artists in labs section or pick it up another time!

I dont necessarily want to put a spanner in the works but one of the things I would have liked to bring up in relation to this section is
the obvious gender imbalance in the hard sciences and the problems women artists might encounter in such environments.

In Europe as elsewhere it seems that entirely new creative approaches as well as relational and societal impact assessments are sorely needed to entice women to become more interested in the hard sciences. Last year, our artists-in-labs project team conducted a gender survey with Arts Catalyst (http://www.artscatalyst.org/index.html) in London and The Art and Genomics Centre in Amsterdam (http://www.artsgenomics.org/) Differing attitudes towards creativity seem to be the cause of an enormous gender imbalance in many Northern European countries, especially in biological systems, biotechnology, computer science, physics and engineering departments (The Helsinki Group on Women and Science. http://www.cordis.lu/improving/women/helsinki.htm).

Of course, in relation to this science and gender discourse, the science writers in the US are leaders in the field. For example, in Evelyn Fox Keller’s book ('The Century of the Gene' (2000 Harvard University Press) she proclaimed that the few women who are engaged in genetic research always provide a much "more creative social approach". The science question in feminism has also been raised very thoroughly by Sandra Harding (1986). The Science question in Feminism. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press) Harding clearly states: "Perhaps we should turn to our novelists and our artists for a better grasp of what we need, because they are professionally less conditioned than we (scientists) to respond point by point to a culture's defences of ways of being in the world." She claims that artists who acquire solid information about science bring very sensitive issues to the public for scrutiny.

Currently we are in the process of forming “ARTSACTIVE”, a worldwide Art and Science Network (http://www.artsactive.net/), which can explore solutions to the issue of shared creativity by training more artists in science. Perhaps, we can also harness the potentials of trans-disciplinary practice to involve women in more creative approaches to science.

If mature women artists were trained in scientific fields, could they produce mediated art and design works that emphasise the creative potentials of scientific inquiry?

Could these artworks then be distributed to art departments in secondary schools, where alternative role models are sorely lacking?

Cheers and love to hear both your comments?

Prof. Dr. Jill Scott
Institute for Cultural Studies,
University of Applied Arts
Zurich.

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Scott: response to Richard Wingate

2007-03-10T04:42:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:41:02 +0100

Yes and thank you for your thoughtfull response.

I agree that literal visualization evidence is a questionable quality, especially if it is related to success. But I also think, that different approaches to communication often help or hinder the understanding of research. From our experience one of the main differences between art and science researchers is in their use of metaphors. This concerns the value of visual poetic metaphors compared to a more literal use of metaphors. Often scientific researchers have not had any formal training in the development of visual metaphors, and educators in these fields tend to use language metaphors because they feel that they minimize ambiguity and seem to be understood by most people. However, language in itself can be very ambiguous and full of clichés and triviality and these metaphors can cause conservative judgements and really affect the levels of respect.

This is an issue that may need to be taken into account in relation to the future of art and science collaboration, because I have the impression the basic scientific researchers are ambiguous about the value of metaphors. A literal interpretation of a metaphor can easily lead to a wrong understanding of the subject at hand. Some examples include; a visual metaphor of an atom as a solar system consisting of a sun (the nucleus) and it's planets (the electrons) http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_5_29/ai_n15734306or how biological evolution corresponds to the metaphor of climbing a mountain in a three dimensional fitness landscape, http://www.morphostasis.org.uk/metaphors.htm. This lack of training and consequent miss-representation in visual metaphors seems ridiculous when some of the most complex and beautiful metaphors can be found in science.

Instead of using metaphors based on generalizations and language, the contemporary poetic metaphor is more based on thought and conceptual associations. As Lakoff suggests (Lakoff, G. (1993). The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor. http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~market/semiotic/lkof_met.html) artists and writers learn that there are many conceptual types of visual poetic metaphors. There are structural metaphors related to the concept of dimension, whose dimensional associations may change with differing cultures. Another type of metaphor is about orientation and occurs when structures are experienced in terms of spatial orientation. A third might be ontological metaphors, which occur when our experiences are related to abstract phenomena or in terms of concrete textures, forces or objects.

As you said these perspectives may help to reflect the cultural load that we all bring to perception and interpretation. So here are two questions to which I would love to have your response again-

It would be interesting to see what would happen if scientists were to start to explore more poetic metaphors, (rather that those found on the front cover of Nature. What do your think about this?

Could more discussions about metaphors between artists and scientists actually contribute to a highly skilled, critical and reflective artwork, which might gain more respect from science?

Cheers,

Jill

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Catts: response to Artist's Residencies at Symbiotica

2007-03-10T04:24:00.000-08:00

From: Oron Catts
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:51:28 +0900

Dear people

Sorry for the long delay in posting my response.

As I told you I am currently presenting one of our living installations Victimless Leather as part of the show Free Radicals at the Israeli Centre for Digital Art. Showing something living is somewhat different that visualising it… and requires quite a lot of time tending to it. That said, the tissue seems to grow well and I now have time to finally focus on this very interesting exchange, I would like to comment in a later stage on some of the points raised in session one. But now I will concentrate on Suzan’s request to describe SymbioticA and our residency program.

First, I would urge you to check our website
www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au <http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/>

As for the residency program – maybe the best way to introduce it is to take some passages form an introductory document we prepared for potential residents (not currently on the website). If you read between the lines you will most probably realise that we needed to address some issues that were raised in our seven years of hosting artists in biological labs, and our attempts to maintain the type of research culture we developed:

SymbioticA is a unique organisation that has developed many programs, one of which is to provide great opportunities for local, national and international artists to work in a scientific setting. We have regular queries from potential residents every week and this is set to increase given the growing profile of SymbioticA.

Ideally we would like potential residents to visit SymbioticA for a short period to see what facilities are available. The first short visit is intended for artists to refine their project after assessment of the availability of local resources and discussion with scientists and artists in SymbioticA. If this is not possible, please research the web to familiarise yourself with the University.

SymbioticA realises that a Science Faculty may be a foreign environment for most artists. The School of Anatomy and Human Biology has numerous possibilities and potentials for collaboration. We recommend you look at www.anhb.uwa.edu.au <http://www.anhb.uwa.edu.au/> and the University of Western Australia site www.uwa.edu.au <http://www.uwa.edu.au/> to familiarise yourself with the experts you may wish to collaborate with.

A search for special research interests can be done at: www.directory.uwa.edu.au/specialists/

A residency at SymbioticA should be for a period of at least 3 months and can be up to one year in length. Projects can take on a variety of forms; it is important to remember that SymbioticA is a research laboratory and not a production studio. This, however, does not exclude you from developing a finished work as part of your residency. Whilst Directors like the initial project proposal to be researched regarding its feasibility - there is the expectation that the time in SymbioticA may result in the project diverting from its original course.

SymbioticA is a small organization and is able to provide working space, access to resources and other laboratories within UWA, introductions to UWA staff and WA organizations relevant to your project, but much of what you do as resident must be self motivated. While we support your project with as much “in kind” support as we can, SymbioticA cannot subsidise your project in any financial capacity. We request you ensure that you have adequate funds to cover your project and your own living expenses during the residency. For the ongoing funding of laboratory activities, expensive laboratory consumables must have been budgeted for. Please consult with SymbioticA regarding the preparation of your budget for funding bodies.

Every Friday at 3pm SymbioticA has open discussions on various relevant topics around the science, arts and humanities. The forums are open to anyone interested. As a SymbioticA Resident you would be expected to attend as your perspective and participation would be beneficial to other residents and visitors.

There are safety rules that must also be followed within a science department. Information on this is found within the student guide at www.safety.uwa.edu.au.

Whilst SymbioticA is able to give our support towards applications, this does not automatically mean the University of Western Australia Ethics Committee will grant approval to your project. SymbioticA Directors will guide you in applying for ethics clearance for your project. This must be sought prior to commencing your residency and information about this can be found at:

Human ethics:
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au/ethicsacu/welcome/ethics_animal_care/human_ethics

Animal ethics:
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au/ethicsacu/welcome/ethics_animal_care>

SymbioticA aims to foster collaboration and to facilitate unhindered exchange and developments of ideas. We advocate the ethos of Open Source and Creative Commons.

As part of the University of Western Australia, SymbioticA follows the University IP guidelines as found at http://www.legalservices.uwa.edu.au/welcome/copyright/features> . SymbioticA has adopted the Creative Commons ethos of the accumulated knowledge generated in SymbioticA being shared and credited amongst researchers and residents. The copyright on the artwork is retained by the artist; however, there are still some uncertainties in the legal and artistic communities in regard to whether the outcomes of some artistic biological processes can be copyrighted. Projects researched and developed during a residency should acknowledge scientific and artistic collaborators and SymbioticA. As a new resident you will have access to the cumulative knowledge already gathered by SymbioticA researchers. You are expected to contribute to this common knowledge pool by providing an acquittal which includes documentation (of protocols, procedures, lab book), an artistic report on your project, financial summary and any comments about difficulties and suggestions for SymbioticA’s future residents. SymbioticA perceive this as an important aspect of your residency as we are regularly approached by academics, journalists and other artists regarding our programme of activities and this acquittal ensures you are represented in our archive. It also ensures other artists coming into the space become aware of the process other residents go through. We request that the acquittal is received within 3 months of completion of the project.Applications are assessed quarterly by the Directors of SymbioticA. Specialists and appropriate SymbioticA artists in residence are called on should their expertise be required in the assessment. Should you become a Resident you may be called on to assess, in confidence, other applications. There are no deadlines for application but please note that it may take up to three months to process your application. This is in order to ascertain each applicant’s project and feasibility in relation to all the other applicants for this period. In many cases the application will be returned for revision based on the comments of the directors and external advisors.

Send your application including all of the above to email:
sym@symbiotica.uwa.edu.au

Or mail to the address below:
SymbioticA Residency
SymbioticA
School of Anatomy and Human Biology
Mailbag M309
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling HighwayCrawley. Western Australia, 6009.T

he projects are assessed quarterly and are selected based on:

Quality of concept
Quality of past work· I
nnovative nature of the project·
SymbioticA’s ability to contribute to the project.·
Suitable funding being sourced by applicant.

More soon

oron

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Anker: Live "Bio-Art" Exhibitions

2007-03-10T04:11:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:58:53 -0500

Dear Panelists.

FYI, here are two live “Bio-Art” Exhibitions currently on going and receiving considerable on-line coverage.

It’s Alive! A Laboratory of Biotech Art
Montserrat College of Art Gallery,
February 16 - April 7, 2007(From the Press Release) :
Biotech art is an emerging and diverse field that is still in the process of defining itself. This exhibit is an investigation of the current intersections of biology, technology, and art. In a world rapidly transformed by science and technology, it is proving difficult to keep up with current developments. With news of genetic engineering regularly making headlines, a growing number of artists have perceived the cultural and aesthetic significance of biotechnology. Artists play an important role in our understanding of the biotechnological world, making it emotionally and intellectually accessible enough for discussion or debate.
Participating artists are Adam Brandejs (Toronto, ONT), Shawn Bailey (Montreal, QC), Brian Burkhardt (Boston), Jennifer Hall (Boston), Blyth Hazen (Boston), Steve Hollinger (Boston), Kevin Jones (New Orleans), Brian Knep (Boston), Hunter O¹Reilly (Chicago), Tanit Sakakini (Boston), Jennifer Willet (Montreal, QC).

Panel Discussion: Friday, March 16, 6-8 pm at the Unitarian Church, 225 Cabot St.,Beverly, Massachusetts

Image credit: Brian Burkhardt, Embryo, 2006

BIOTEKNICA: Live Life Lab
Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery, Montreal
February 27 until March 23, 2007.
BIOTEKNICA, an artist collective founded by Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet, began as an art project that projected its viewers into a future where designer organisms are generated on demand. Since 2004 BIOTEKNICA moved from the virtual laboratory into real biological science labs, growing organisms modeled on the Teratoma, an unusual cancerous growth containing multiple tissues like hair, skin, and nervous systems. BIOTEKNICA both embraces and critiques biotechnology, considering the contradictions and deep underlying complexities that these technologies offer the future of humanity. BIOTEKNICA’s most recent project, LiveLifeLab is a propositional performance and installation, taking place at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery (ground floor, room 1-715, 1515 Ste. Catherine St. W.) A vernissage will be held Tuesday, March 13, 5:30 to 7:30.www.bioteknica.org

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Squier: reluctant goodbye

2007-03-10T03:27:00.000-08:00

From: SUSAN M SQUIER
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 23:33:45 -0500

I hate to leave this virtual conference in the middle of such ferment: love the idea of the virtual plush pets (though of course I worry about the Gundification of resistant science studies), and wanted to spend some time talking with Miriam van Rijsingen about the chicken art of Koen van Mechelen. I did know his work, have been following it for a couple of years, though the website does seem to be a dead-end for the last year or so. (Has he switched websites? ) There are a couple of artists working on chicken breeding, which in the worst case scenario seems to me to fall in the category of "bespoke animals," and to produce a queasy sense of undifferentiation between the poultry industry and the art industry.

But I'm off to a zone with no email, so I'll wish all of you well and look forward to checking in at the end of the symposium (if it's still up on the 18th) to see what has emerged. I do hope some of those graphic fiction writers have checked in, perhaps to talk a bit about the pluripotentiality of graphic fiction images, in contrast to the specificity of biomedical imaging.

Susan Squier
Director, Science, Medicine, Technology in Culture Program
Brill Professor of Women's Studies, English, and Science, Technology and Society
The Pennsylvania State University

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Anker: Artist's Residencies at Symbiotica (for Oron Catts)

2007-03-10T03:09:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 06:02:50 -0500

Oron Catts, Artistic Director of Symbiotica has rigorously worked on developing a unique laboratory/artistic residency and educational program for artists engaged in “wet-ware” practices. Oron, can you describe the ways in which artists, who may or may not have had experience in “wet-ware” media begin to develop his/her project? What guidelines or teaching tools or workshops are offered to aid the laboratory novice reach his/her artistic goals. How does your residency program work?

[image: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Victimless Leather A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific "Body", biodegradable polymer connective and bone cells, 2004. The Tissue Culture & Art Project is hosted in SymbioticA: the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, the University of Western Australia.]

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Scott: response to Richard Twine

2007-03-10T02:08:00.001-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 09:59:39 +0100

To Richard Twine:

I would like to react to some of your points as I have been thinking along similiar lines:

What happens when the artist enters the scientists' space and starts working with the same materials as the scientist?

Once science critic Sandra Harding defined, the word 'method' as a pre-determined technique for the gathering of evidence or a set of materials used in order to carry out research, but the term 'methodology' describes a theory and evaluation of choices about how research does or should proceed. Currently, these two categories cause debates among art and science researchers. These debates suggest that sharing methods might be easier than swapping methodologies and that learning in consortium teams leads to new discussions about these issues. While between computer science and media art a great deal of tool sharing is already taking place, (see the art of Tiffany Holmes www.tiffanyholmes.com), the different approaches to methodology often creates very different results. This is also the case for bio-artists who are working directly with materials from the lab. What happens when artists and scientists work on the same projects? Difficulties.

What is the relationship between artist intrusions here and those by anthropologists/social scientists/ethicists?
Many academically inclined art researchers are beginning to use ethnographical studies and workshops to analyze social questions and to combine the results into something called "proof of practice". This combination might also further legitimize the studies of art researcher on a scientific level. For example, in the e-skin consortium, art researchers have learnt to test participants responses by using social science methodologies learnt from the Department of Psychology in Basel. (www.e-skin.ch). Here science researchers are helping art researchers to empirically assess the navigation, information and communication potentials of the users in relation to their particular levels of tactility, proprioception, hearing and cognitive mapping. This testing can accurately identify inherent problems and inconsistencies in order to build the e-skin interface. In return, the media artist can benefit from the output of recording these tests and edit them into something digestible for the general public. Thus user tests about perception might empower the public with a deeper level of shared awareness, intimacy and emotion. If one of the main aims in combining art research with the gathering of empirical knowledge is to “humanize science” for the general public, then perhaps these combined strategies are worth pursuing!!

Why are we there, will we 'go native'?

Yes probably but it is an experiment which might yield interesting results and research in both fileds certianly need some thinking "out of the box". Perhaps we could be called hybrids. I know quite a few artists by now who love to gatecrash natural science conferences. Why? Well - Its inspiring.

About your other questions. Please see my posting response to Suzanne about our artists-in-labs project here in Switzerland.

Orlan: From the Minitel to the biotech

2007-03-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

From: Orlan
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:18:52 -0800

Hi everybody! I'm sorry I'm late,I have been overwhelmed by the work for my
Retrospective and my book. A few words that will answer some of Suzanne's questions from different cessions:

New imaging technologies have always play a significant role in the conceptualization and the visual modeling of my work. I have always seized upon new technologies from every side. France before Internet we had the Minitel, I created a Minitel Journal "Art Acces Revue" which goal was to open a space of creation where artists could take into account this new technology, interrogate it, in its lack, in its limits : only seven tons of gray where available and the definition was very low with very big pixels. From Buren to Nam June Paik, from Cage toChiari, all invited artists created specific works, appropriating and decoding a space which was saturated by horoscope, porn chat, cooking recipes and the like. Thus sometimes my work, as Suzanne's work, is about questioning, testing out energies and giving the impetus to confront thoughts, creations, about objects pointed out by artists or their peers in other fields.

I made the first series of my digital self-hybridizations working with a graphic designer based in Montreal when I was in Paris. In France it was the beginning of the spreading of Internet. The digital images were entirely conceived through email exchanges - I would receive the sketch and send them back with my corrections and so on until the image was matching my expectations.

I have always subdued the choice of my tools to my artistic project. Biotechnologies are part of the environment I put into question. An important reference was for me the text of Michel Serres "laicité" the preface to the "Tiers - Instruit" where the metaphor of the Arlequin is used to defend multiculturalism and interdisciplinarity.* I used this text for one the my surgery performance and in a series of reliquaries made of bullet proof glass and iron frames with a few milligrams of my flesh. In collaboration with Oron Catts and Symbiotica I will create an installation : a light-table in the shape of an arlequin coat made of petridishes filled up with colors from different origins, some of the petridishes will contain skin culture samples hybridizing my own skin cells andthat of other humans and animals (fixed or in-vivo).This experience will inscribe in the real and the living theself-hybridizations I have undertake with digital images.I have always enjoyed working on the fake and the real, the living and theartificial. I always think and work with the "AND" instead of the "OR"dominating our Judeo-Christian culture, that is trying to introduce a formof complexity.

ORLAN

*Michel Serres, Le tiers-instruit, Paris, Bourin-Julliard (9 août 1994)

"The current tattooed monster, ambidextrous, hermaphroditic and mulatto, what can it make us see, now, under its skin? Yes, blood and flesh. Science speaks of organs, functions, of cells and molecules, only to admit at last that it's high time we stopped speaking of life in laboratories; but science never mentions the flesh, which, quite rightly, signifies the conflation, here and now, in a specific site of the body, of muscles and blood, skin and hair, bones, nerves and diverse functions, that inextricably binds that which pertinent knowledge analyzes."
[…]
"Now already for a while many spectators will have left the auditorium, tired out by ineffectual theatrical effects, irritated at the turn from comedy to tragedy, having come to laugh and deceived at having been made to think; there will be some even--knowledgable specialists no doubt--who will have understood on their own terms, that each portion of their knowledge resembles the coat of the Harlequin, since each one works at the intersection of many other sciences and at the interference point of almost all of them. Thus their academy--its encyclopedic institution--formally rejoins the comedy of art."

Images/Captions

African -
TITLE : Masque de société d¹initiation Fang Gabon et photo de femmeEuro-Stéphanoise, 2002 (124 x 155,5 cm)

Precolumbian
TITLE : Refiguration / Self-Hybridation n°5, 1998.100 x 150 cm.

American Indian Self-Hybridization #1 : painting portrait of No-No-Mun-Ya, One Who Gives No Attention, with Orlan's photographic portrait, 2005, 48 x60 in.

Reliquary : "Ma chair, le texte et les langages" n°10. 199390 x 100 x 12 cm.
TECHNIQUE : Métal soudé, verre anti-effraction, 10 grammes de la chaird'Orlan, inclusion de résine.

Surgery Arlequin :5e opération-chirurgicale-performance, 6 juillet 1991,décor et accessoires:Orlan, costume Frank Sorbier. Lecture du "Tiers Instruit" de Michel Serrescibachrome collé sur aluminium, 110 x 165 cm.

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Anker: For Eugene Thacker: Plushie Chimera

2007-03-09T19:10:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:23:40 -0500

[Thacker wrote: Personally I'd like to see a whole line of plush stuffed animals based on biotech - the Vacanti mouse, Dolly (which could be a play on the problems with cloning and mechanical reproduction - each stuffy would be a tiny bit different), even Kac's GFP Bunny.]

Great idea! When shall we start this project?

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Thacker: ARTISTS IN THE LABS

2007-03-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 20:13:05 -0500 (EST)

The example that Troy mentions is noteworthy - and the rationale even more so. I assume most on the list have heard about the so-called Vacanti mouse which, if you can believe it, has its own Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouse
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1949073.stm

Oron, maybe you can add another angle on this, since as I recall you workedwith Vacanti some time back? Personally I'd like to see a whole line of plush stuffed animals based on biotech - the Vacanti mouse, Dolly (which could be a play on the problems with cloning and mechanical reproduction - each stuffy would be a tiny bit different), even Kac's GFP Bunny. Is this bio-sculpture?

But Troy's example brings up science fiction again. Elsewhere I've argued that SF is a kind of arbitrating discourse between the biotech industry and the general public; Critical Art Ensemble have referred to this as the "promissoryrhetoric" of the biotech industry. Here I mean "science fiction" not so much as a set of narrative genre conventions, but as a kind of "imaging" practice that involves imaging the future or possible future scenarios. There is a naive wing that unflinchingly practices the utopian version (Monsanto promising unlimited free rice for all underdeveloped countries). But there is also the more critical - but still conservative - wing that uses the dystopia to both caution but also support the idea of a biotech industry (I would say that the StanfordIRB example might fall into this category). And then of course there is the good-old-fashioned struggle of the free human spirit against instrumentality (I would put 'Gattaca' here). But in all cases there is a certain kind of "visioning" practice involved which, arguably, is the core of what takes place in SF...

Finally, for those who still think that biology is unfashionable: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4070522.stm

-Eugene

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Thacker: Embryonic Entities as Codes...

2007-03-09T17:08:00.000-08:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 19:52:28 -0500 (EST)

Suzanne's comments concerning the "naturalization" of images - and others havealso mentioned this - is worth talking more about. Now, as I understand it,"naturalization" here means "getting-used-to" or "becoming-accustomed-to"something that may at first seem alien or strange. So, for instance, a medical student in a gross anatomy lab must become accustomed to not only the dissected cadaver, but the correlated images of CT/MRI scans and - nowadays - 3D models of anatomy on a computer. Similarly, I as a non-doctor may see so many popular representations of CT/MRI images in TV shows like 'Medical Investigation' or 'House' that they may simply come to stand-in for "high-tech tool" to me as a casual viewer. But how is this kind of naturalization of images related to ideas of "nature" itself? The interesting thing about the discussion thus far is that we're
asking about the "naturalization of nature" via these images (e.g. of the fetusor embryo - and here I also think about the posthuman space-fetus in the lastscene of '2001: A Space Odyssey,' as well as the references to oceanic wombspace in Tarkovsky's 'Solaris' - and coffee-table books like Nilsson's'Behold Man'). Does nature need to be naturalized? And if so, does this make it "ideological"? So this naturalization of nature entails a mode of training the viewer(specialist or not) to view in a certain way - or at least to become accustomed to the image so as to *not* question the act of viewing itself. Then the question is: what idea of "nature" and/or "life" must be assumed in order for someone to even be capable of being accustomed to such images? I'm interested in hearing from the visual artists here - what do you as an artist assume that the viewer will bring to the image in terms of preconceived ideas?I also wonder if, in addition to naturalization we should be talking more directly about "aestheticization" or what it means to render biological life as aesthetic (as opposed to understanding biological life as sensory and phenomenal). Or if, in a sense, nature is precisely that which is aesthetic...

-Eugene

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Cuir: To elaborate on Suzanne's comment on the scientist in film

2007-03-09T16:52:00.000-08:00

From: Raphael Cuir
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:20:33 -0800

Hi everybody,
It is striking to notice that the scientist is killed, or murdered in movies such as Metropolis (1927), Blade Runner (1982), Terminator 2 (1991) orI-Robot (2004). In Metropolis, the scientist Rotwang, is pictured as a kind of mad alchemist whose laboratory looks like a strange gothic house in the midst of the futuristic metropolis. His character is as dark as his project is supposed to be : creating life artificially. Alchemists attempting to create the homunculus have long been purchased by Church as they were seen as usurping God's power to create life. I wonder if this religious "blasphemy" is not still behind the picture? And both Metropolis and the Terminator series revolve around the theme of the saviour no need to say he is never the scientist

Raphael Cuir

Image : Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927. Rotwang creating the "Machine-Man" in the likeness of Maria (note that the Machine-Man is obviously a woman!).

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Duster: ARTISTS IN THE LABS - space, studio, lab

2007-03-09T14:15:00.000-08:00

From: Troy Duster
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 17:00:30 -0500

Imagining and then imaging the outcome of chimeric research as a barrier to permission to conduct such research.

There is both a large body of fiction/literature and a plethora of pictorial images (art/film) of human and non-human fusions that go back for thousands of years. So what makes these last few years special is that we are no longer simply “imagining” centaurs and chimeras. Laboratories are producing chimeras. When review committees consider permitting or denying such research, they must imagine the possible outcomes.

In the early months of 2006, biomedical researchers at Stanford asked approval from the Institutional Review Board in order to proceed with a research project in which they proposed to inject fetal mice with millions of human brain cells. The purpose was to study processes in the developmental brain that might shed light on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. The Institutional Review Board approved the research. The chair of the IRB committee later commented to the press – disclosing some of the reasoning behind the decision. He said, “we didn’t see a problem – because once the mice started to act human, the scientists could kill the mice.” This, it seems to me, would/could/should (and inexorably will) animate an artist’s imagination about chimeric research, and what it would mean to conjure up and represent some imagery of a mouse that was “acting human.” What would this be? Envy or jealousy? Compassion or greed or altruism? What might be a behavior that constitutes the image of “acting human?” Attacking other mice when they accumulate more cheese than they need? Accepting that accumulation as the natural state of mouse evolution?

No one knows. Carl Djerassi’s reflections about, and his experience of bridging the worlds of scientific and artistic production might make him especially well positioned to “imagine” such a representation. However, I suggest – depending upon that imagined image – future IRBs could be greatly influenced by it in their gate-keeping decision-making. Building on a wing of Eugene Thacker’s post, the image of the Frankenstein monster has long played a pivotal role in reducing the capacity of scientists to pursue certain kinds of human experimentation, long before IRBs surfaced in the 1970s. Movies like Gattica and novels like Brave New World have played their roles in imagining and imaging a eugenic future. But now we have IRBs. What artistic representation will help shape their cognitive-emotive maps of futuristic chimeras? They will certainly be coming our way!!

Troy Duster

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Anker: Scientist's Diaries (to Carl Djerassi)

2007-03-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:43:25 -0500
To Carl Djerassi:
Perhaps your reading of my comment concerning the public perception of scientists suffers from a too literal interpretation. Let me explain my statement more fully. Issues of public perception of both artists and scientists are relevant to our discussion.

Depictions in films, literary works and visual art have represented scientist’s personasin less than favorable terms. Usually pictured as individuals seeped in hubris, the image of the “mad” scientist is still pervasive within popular culture and mass media. In these narratives, scientific experimentation usually goes awry and culminates in disastrous effects for communities at large. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:Or the Modern Prometheus (1816-1818) to H.G.Wells’ The Island of Dr, Moreau (1896) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Ape and Essence (1948,) the early modern period is ripe with reproach for the righteous scientist. This attitude of mind of the sinless scientist who feels his work is “for the good of mankind’ is further personified in more current work. From Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003) to Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s opera Three Tales (2002)similar archetypical tropes are in play. Is this merely a coincidence or is the public’s perception of the scientist still a skeptical mix of fallen angel and rational soothsayer? Certainly the recent controversy concerning the legitimacy of Woo Suk Hwang’s research with cloned human embryos creates a “public image-problem” for the scientist.

With regard to scientist’s diaries, I am not referring to process notes, laboratory records or other procedural record keeping documenting the day-to-day working of an experiment. Instead, I am citing Jon Turney’s (ed.) text Science, Not Art: Ten Scientists’ Diaries published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 2003. Sian Ede, who unfortunately has not been able to join our interchange at this conference, wrote the forward to this volume. In her absence, I quote her text thus: "The science world, as these diaries clearly show, is almost brutally competitive and those on their way up are often obsessively occupied at their laboratory benches, computers, conferences and field trips Only when they have made it to the top have they the time to be spokespeople for science in general. We wanted to avoid-the elder-statesmen stereotype and to find scientists from a younger generation who, though high flyers, had perhaps emerged from less conventional backgrounds. The result is an extraordinary frank and sometimes poignant collection of personal narratives.”

I cite one such scientific diary entry from ecologist and meteorologist Yadvinder Malhi ,to clarify my point thus:

Thursday 17 January
“ In the morning we mark out old forest plots in a floodplain and dry-land forest, delighting in seeing armadillos, squirrel monkeys, giant millipedes, ground turkeys. In the afternoon I hike with Pedro, a likeable local Quechua guide, up and down trails to find a remote plot. The forest gradually soaks into my skull and I feel healthier and more centered than I have during the whole British winter. It’s hard to explain. Something to do with being part of a world ancient and mysterious and feeling it in your skin and senses, not just in your intellect. I wish that Rachel, my fiancée, were here to share this.”

Sunday 20 January
“I go home tomorrow but the expedition continues for another five weeks. Despite exhaustion, the field team drags itself out for a farewell drink at a near-by snack bar. The bar turns out to be closed, but no one minds the effort. We laugh our way home beneath a crescent moon peeking out between the tall silhouettes of the forest trees, the heavy air with the fragrance of white ginger flowers.”

Tuesday 22 January New York
“After a week of forest isolation, I connect back into the global mind while changing planes here. The talk is of war: it rumbles on in Afghanistan and may move to Iraq; the Israel-Palestine conflict continues and there is the threat of nuclear war over Kashmir. Much of my wider family lives a few miles from the India-Pakistan border. The big world and its tragedies suddenly overwhelm me. Returning home means facing an enormous backlog of tasks. I have to submit a paper on “Carbon in the Biosphere and Atmosphere in the 21st Century” to a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by the end of next week. Then there are long delayed revisions to another paper and two reviews to deal with, all of which should have been finalized months ago.”

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Grimes: Response - Embryonic Entities as Codes, Discourses and Anatomy

2007-03-09T12:36:00.000-08:00

From: Karl.Grimes
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 15:12:53 -0500 (EST)

Responding to Suzanne’s, Aguilera-Hellweg’s and Catherine Waldby’s points on the Science-phobic/Image-phobic/Content-phobic, particularly in relation torepresentations and Suzanne’s questions on "naturalization" of the embryo and foetus in visual culture.

In 1997, I first exhibited my project, “Still Life”, large colorphotographic portraits of late foetal and neonatal bodies with a range ofcongenital abnormalities, at the MacLaurin Gallery, Scotland, the Gallery ofPhotography, Dublin, and later at the Art Exchange in New York. My interest was to look at (and show) nature's asymmetry and question my own disquiet andfascination with these tender beings, bringing them to light and into the light from the historic medical collection and research laboratory. In each countrythe reaction to the images followed a similar path. The gallery in Scotland was closed following numerous complaints and incendiary media coverage and finallyreopened following the intervention of the Scottish Arts Council, for viewingby adults only with the caution, “viewers may find these photographs deeplydisturbing”. Dublin’s Gallery of Photography blacked out their large publicwindows and insisted that visitors read a descriptive outline of the showbefore entering the galleries, also cautioning that the work may be“upsetting” and “not suitable for children”. National tabloids followed with headlines such as, “How Low Can You Sink” and “The Grimes Reeper”, etc. The experience for me was not pleasant but it did enable me to map the boundaries and survey heterosexuality’s fortifications surrounding this “primal marvel”, to quote Suzanne Anker, at first hand.

Over the course of this project I spoke to hundreds of gallery visitors anddifferent representative groups about the work’s content. Their positionsranged from supportive to accusatory. The majority were in the latter category, including many scientists, who viewed the work as an exploitative and violent infringement on the sanctity of our being (interestingly, other animals notconsidered) and/or the sanctity of the institutions of science and art. It was, in their view, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, an insult to women, to fatherhood,to beauty, to hope, to people with disabilities, to pregnant women, and deeply suspect on an ethical level.

The sight of strange corporeal figurations inspires contradictory responses: recognition and denial, fascination and fear, identification and rejection, contagion. When a form departs from our preferences and desired fantasies, we gaze with unrest and suspicion. Comforting distinctions between what is human and is not become confused. Catherine Waldby in her recent post reminds us“that we are all just one step away from monstrosity”. I agree.

Margrit Shildrick’s, “Vulnerable bodies and ontological contamination”(Routledge 2001), offers a further insight on the anomalous human body and thesubjects in Still Life, “The encounter with the others who define our ownboundaries of normality must inevitably disturb for they are both irreduciblystrange and disconcertingly familiar, both opaque and reflective. They enableus to recognise ourselves, they are our own abject. As Grimes himself notes, 'Images of what we have denied turn towards us.' And once the initial shock ofconfronting what is usually excluded had passed, I found myself not repulsed,but moved to tears by the unaccountable beauty of the bodies. Beyond the marksof a violent and violating science that were evident in the confinement, both materially to specimen jars, and discursively to the category of abnormality,it was possible to acknowledge a siblingship which claims us.”

In the end, it was and is just our mutated body on display in a culture whereengagement with pathology and our bodies is highly problematic, save where that visual engagement is imbued with narratives of success and maps of past and impending conquest. Images from the biosciences feed well into this, they do not confront, they are “other”, we see the precision bombing screen effect, not ourselves. We invite a good science story, we like it to deliver in dayglo. Our inner colonial travels from micro to nano continents demand knock out home
movies and travel snaps to communicate to diverse audiences and potential funders. Pain and mortality are triumphed and progress is assured.

http://www.karlgrimes.net/html/stilllife.html
http://www.karlgrimes.net/html/fnature.html
http://www.karlgrimes.net/html/mutter.html

Karl Grimes
Artist, Lecturer
Dublin City University
Ireland

Images: Karl Grimes. Untitled, from Still Life, Chromogenic Print. 6x4ft. 1997.

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Anker: "Epistemic Things" (Rijsingen and Reichle)

2007-03-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

From: Suzanne Anker
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:06:31 -0500

“Epistemic things” a term coined by Hans Jorg-Reinberger has been mentionedby Miriam van Rijsingen and Ingeborg Reichle thus far. It is a term that many of our colleagues however, may not be familiar with. This term has migrated from the natural sciences into the plastic arts and humanities as a novel way to think about discovery and flux. An “epistemic system," to my understanding, relies on the intrinsic properties and “power of material objects” as generators of possible outcomes in experimental practices. How can this term be applied to performativity and process in both the laboratory and studio?

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Scott: Answers to Suzanne questions-also for Richard and Andrew

2007-03-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

From: Jill Scott
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:44:49 +0100

1. What is a laboratory?

About the artists-in-labs program in Switzerland (2003-2010). For us the main reasons to place artists in a wide range of science labs have not changed. These are: To give artists the experience of immersion inside the culture of scientific research in order to inspiring their content and develop their interpretations. To allow the artists to have actual “hands on ” access in the lab itself, as well as attend relevant lectures and conferences. To help scientists gain some insight into the world of contemporary art, aesthetic development and communication channels between science and the general public. To encourage further collaboration between both parties including an extension of discourse and an exchange of research practices and methodologies. As "art researchers" who are running the program, we are learning, comparing and shifting according to the results. What is central, indeed crucial, is that researchers in both art and science fields still retain a commitment towards the public and their subjects of study.

2) What about seminal significance in developing new ways to conceive of art practice?

We have had failures and successes in collaboration, but what is very obvious is that many artists may never have the opportunity to meet nor work alongside any scientists unless there is a growth in lab residency programs. We would also claim that we have fostered the development of new approaches to art and science research collaboration rather than art practice. If science educators are looking for more sensitive and poetic metaphors and communication skills, then art can help. For contemporary artists 'real' information is not taboo and they particularly like more socially conscious scientists. As the general public is mostly uninformed about scientific debates in many fields, we claim that trans-disciplinary approaches may provide "art researchers" with solid raw materials, pertinent debates and unique potentials in order to encourage critical analysis in the public realm and perhaps even affect social change. This requires that "art researchers" learn more about science so that they can produce more highly skilled, interpretive and reflective artworks, ones that might not only gain more respect from science but also be more relevant for future debates in the public realm. Scientific research has such a large impact on the future of humanity that it would seem irresponsible to not consider these potentials.

3.3) Laboratory practices bring into focus a host of other questions and obligations concerning: to what extent is hyperbole employed by both artists and scientists?

The concept of "shock value" needs more discussion in relation to art and science. We think that an artwork has to be accurate about scientific content, otherwise the science community will not be engaged with the resultant work. One interpretational approach, which is very much rejected by science researchers, is the use of "shock value" (i.e. Stelarc). In these cases, scientists see certain artists as uninformed and problematic, not only because they misrepresent their research, but also, because they are reminiscent of tabloid style journalism. This damages the image of scientific research. Instead, they preferred artists with more considered goals who were excited about the specific research being undertaken in the lab itself. Science also has it radicals or mavericks like Marvin Minsky and Hans Morawec or Eric Drexler, who have reputations of creating problematic fiction to shock the public and illustrate their points. These scientists are not often taken seriously by our artists-in-labs research partners, as our scientists see themselves as standing in the middle of any informed debate.

We claim that the artist has to first be exposed to the every day activities of a particular scientific inquiry before they can interpret the results for the public. Historically, more informed interpretations have already had a valuable role to play if they were backed up by solid claims from the science community. (E.g. Hans Haacke’s work “Rhinewater Purification Plant” which conducted grey water reclamation in 1969; or Harrison’s “Sustainable Food Source” 1972). It seems that informed interpretations can not only help to explore art as a catalyst but also improve public relations for scientists. Furthermore art researchers' interpretations of ethical and social issues within scientific research may also help to generate a new level of discussion within the scientific community itself.

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Thacker: ARTISTS IN THE LABS - space, studio, lab

2007-03-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

From: Eugene Thacker
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 12:03:14 -0500 (EST)

Hi all - I was thinking about this relation between the artist's studio and scientist's lab. For some resaon I was reminded of the string of Frankenstein creature-features produced by Universal pictures in the '30s and '40s. Was still fascinates me about those films are the lab scenes - all bells-n-whistles, neon lights, and Tesla coils - what are all those bulky machines doing? (The one in the original James Whale-version of _Frankenstein_is perhaps only outshadowed by the one in _Frankenstiein Meets the Wolf Man_.)If I saw that exact set up now in a gallery I would probably like it quite abit (especially if it was "interactive"). It seems that the space of thelaboratory is oftentimes regarded as a space of alienation for then on-specialist. Can the same be said of the artist's studio? We have,similarly, a popuar image of this (how many shoddy films of Van Gogh vs. Gaugin have been made?), but one thing I see first-hand is how these two spaces - laband studio - are changing in the context of work in fields like new media, HCI, games, etc.

I know that the obvious question here is how the Latourian laboratory is replicated, transformed, or questioned in bioart. I'd like to hear others on this...

I'd also like to thrown in the question not of the space of the lab or studio, but what it means to "dwell" in the lab or studio. Heidegger's essay is in many ways too mystical for me ("Building Dwelling Thinking") but he does point to the consonance between building - dwelling -inhabiting: "Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings." What if we take this phrase "growing things" quite literally?

But this leads not just to what it means to build or to dwell or to inhabit, but how space is enscribed by those acts. There's a short passage in Marx's Grundrisse where he talks about the difference between ants and humans. Both build, but only humans (he says) make models before actually building. Curiously Marx doesn't connect this modeling to commodification. But in what way is the lab or studio a space of property, or better, a space of propriety?Labs are expensive, so is equipment, and so are ideas. *So how do scientists and artists dwell in relation to propriety?*
-Eugene

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Rijsingen: to Susan Squier and session 2 questions

2007-03-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

From: Miriam van Rijsingen
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 17:33:41 +0100

When you mentioned your chicken project, the way you question the different authorities attached to different (chicken photographing) practices, I thought you missed the artist approach to chickens, say, for example the work of Koen VanMechelen, the Belgian artist who cross-breeds chicken to produce the ‘super-bastard’ in his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (see: www.koen-vanmechelen.be ) Part of his project is photographing his chickens, but also drawing them, making objects from them, eating them etc. I would be interested what kind of authority is revealed in his work.

Subject: Session 2

authority (ex)changes, unity or framing processes in collaboration
Thinking about collaboration projects I think there are already several (and very different) views on that in the postings, mostly when talking about the core issue of art-science practices. Giovanni Frazzetto mentioned the ‘immutable mobile’ and authority changes, which is an inspiring notion I think. But Vladimir Mironov’s concept of ‘unity’ as well as the idea of the hybrid academic flattens the issue to a non-issue. And please explain hybrid. My own view is based more on ‘difference’ and differences in discourses. I investigate the interactions of art and science, but also collaboration projects as processes of ‘framing’. Dialogues or collaborations as well as art works that are produced through those practices re-frame, take the other practice and review it with different ‘eyes’ as it were. The viewer or audience of the work will become an edgy reader/viewer, forced to switch between frames.
In relation to this I would have a question for Richard Wingate (and Andrew Carnie) about their collaboration. I liked the way in which you, Richard, described the importance of pictorial representation in/for your scientific practice. The nuances you formulated, the practice of sketching. How, would you say, are these nuances looked upon in your own scientific field, how much have you changed your disciplinary frame through the collaboration with Andrew? How, for example, is ‘beauty’ discussed, if at all? At the same time you stated that collaboration became possible through the ‘resonance associated with particular words’ – through language. I have the idea that also in Jill Scott’s collaboration projects, language is also the first level of framing and re-framing.

New ways of art practice
I have difficulty with the concept of ‘new ways’. Apart from your (Suzanne’s) investigations and perhaps Jens Hauser’s, little research has been done (or published) about the embedded-ness of these particular practices in artistic traditions. One of our PhD students (Danielle Hofmans) is working on that issue, and her first findings are that most works are (much more) heavily embedded in arthistorical traditions (as we assume), for example the neo-avant garde (think for example Alan Kaprow). It needs much more consideration.

production, perception and embodiment in practices.
Nancy Princenthal asked earlier for neuroscientific answers to the issue of the unconscious processes of perception (and production). David Freedberg’s response to that posting is very interesting, specifically as he is referring to “embodied simulation”. I am not sure exactly what he means by that, but I am interested because I think that we should look more to the issue of embodiment in perception and production. It is related to what is said earlier by some of the panellists about the issue (and importance) of ‘presence’ and ‘staging’ (for example by Jens Hauser) and what I would call ‘performativity’. These are not just issues that can be investigated in relationship to the perception of the ‘works’ (that is fundamentally part of my own research), but also how these are working in the scientific laboratory as well as in the artist studio (or the exhibition space for that matter). The work of Viennese artist Herwig Turk, for example Blind spot or Blind date (www.herwigturk.net ), in collaboration with scientists Günther Stöger and Paolo Pereira, are really investigations into these issues. His work reveals that the laboratory is a specifically staged practice, in which both the scientific objects and instruments as well as the researchers possess performative qualities. It is an embodied space. Also most of Jill Scott’s artist-in-the-lab projects reveal that same qualities, as I watch the documentary of those projects on her DVD.

In the line of this I could try to say something to Suzanne Anker’s question (Session 2) about the kind of ‘things’ that are produced in the laboratory. I would say that not only ‘things’ are produced – ‘epistemic things’ as Hans-Jörg Reinberger would say – but also bodies (see Herwig Turk’s Blind Date) and subjectivities (as revealed in Jill Scott’s projects).

Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Dept. of Art History, University of Amsterdam

Moura: Session One - A Pragmatic Curator's Point of View (response)

2007-03-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

From:Leonel Moura
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:30:11 +0000

I agree with Jens Hauser as many art-sci works are too complex and need some kind of explanatory complement, loosing in the process the ability to communicate with large audiences. But this happens also with many contemporary art not science based. I would even say that some art broadcasts incomprehension as a way to gain importance. As less the viewer understands the better the artwork must be. And this was never a problem, on the contrary, for the art scene.

I would consider another point. The fact that art-sci emerged from media art schools, labs and universities and not so much from conventional art schools, bohemia and art communities. The tough communication between the two worlds is not so much a question of code but more of object.

Finally I also agree with Jens on the question of presence, which I consider very important. That is why from the beginning and even more today I am interested in bringing algorithms to the real world and not just to stare at the computer monitor. I have chosen conventional painting as a strategy. But the fact that autonomous and smart robots create these true paintings, in the sense that they exist physically and we can witness its construction generates a critical questioning about art, intelligence and the human.

Here, the question of the audiences pop up. Leonel Moura and Andrew Carnieargued that the fact that "sci-art" is often shown in science museums andsuffering from the predominance of commercial art structures is due to the lackof science litterary of curators and critics that cannot comprehend it yet.Another way to see it would be that work in this area often is reduced to its inherent signs and may not oscillate between meaning effects and presenceeffects.

Painting by the robot ISU, with its signature

http://www.leonelmoura.com/isu.html

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