COSMOPOLITICAL FUTURES, THE ANTHROPOCENIC HUMAN

Cosmopolitical Futures, The Anthropocenic Human series reflects my long time interest and research in foundational studies in theories of quantum physics and the nature of nature and the properties of living matter. In recent projects – Black Lace and the Stem Cell work in particular, I alluded to methodological approaches based on Barad’s theories and the counterintuitive interpretation of quantum physics; that an object of investigation cannot be accessed outside of human conceptual frameworks to address and provide insights into the nature of causality, identity and nature. Barad forms an emergent zeitgeist in cultural theory/philosophy (Stengers, Bennett, Braidotti, Latour,Haraway) making connections between vitalist materialism, science and politics and ethics. As environmental changes force themselves into our physical consciousness we find ourselves re-thinking connections between politics, nature and humanity. Stengers, term, Cosmopolitics, stresses the relationship between the political order and scientific models of reality. Barad proposes that agency does not originate in human intention but resides in all of matter, suggesting that matter bears the mark of human agency in ways that release human intention. Her radical ontology proposes the collapse of partitions between mind and matter; wanting us to re-consider ethics, sentience and values within the new diffractive methodology she calls “Agential Realism”. AR accounts for how we iteratively rework the ‘objects” that we study. Fixed notion of “humanness’ have been dramatically transformed by posthumanist theory and the advanced sciences of transgenics biomedicine and biomimesis. The philosopher, and founding quantum physicist Niels Bohr made account of ways in which words and worlds are inextricably linked as discursive and material practices. He understood the intentional state of mind as arising from complex networks of human and non-human agents and ecologies of material conditions that exceed an individual and he saw how the paradoxical challenge for humankind was to make meaning and intelligibility in the light of unintelligibility and in doing so he endorsed, trans disciplinary creative processes and practices of poetry and the visual arts.

Recent on-going artworks are based on an EPRSC funded, Pathways to Impact (PiA) residency at the University of Southampton in the School of Medicine on Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine exploring the use of stem cells in the area of Bone and Joint research. My research engages with contemporary debates in biotechnology and stem cell research and I have developed numerous works through art and science collaboration that contribute to public critical understanding and discussion of these domains. Engendering public engagement with biotechnological, stem cell and regenerative medicine research, my work engages with the impact of these life sciences on human identity, culture and society. I have harnessed elements regenerative medicine space to create a new body of research, developing this most recent artworks on an EPRSC funded, Pathways to Impact (PiA) residency in the School of Medicine on Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine exploring the use of stem cells in the area of Bone and Joint research.

The PiA (Pathways to Impact) residency was uniquely devised as a visual arts research project. The site-specific research was produced in association with Professor Richard OC Oreffo and the Bone and Joint Research Group at the Centre for Human Development, Stem Cells and Regeneration, Human Development and Health, Faculty of Medicine.

I co-ordinated regular visits to the department, thoroughly familiarizing herself with bone and joint, stem cell regenerative medicine. The research residency enabled close observation and artistic reflection on the science of osteo-specific differentiation, function and signaling pathways in stem cell populations. The aim is that my creative practice can contribute to a public understanding of the regenerative medicine space through art and science collaboration.

The work hints at ways in which transformative biological processes associated with evolutionary symbiosis can be harnessed as metaphors to interpret regenerative medicine. Exploring the different ways people might come to experience regenerative medicine, the work also reflects on how visual arts led research can improve public understanding of stem cell research.

PROCESS

Regenerative phenomena associated with stem cells touch on the deepest aspects of human identity. Stem cell transfer treatments replace non-functioning and dead cells at tissue sites within the body with healthy donor cells. The hope of medicine is that collections of induced pluripotent stem cells might one day come to form a biological resource for regenerative treatments and general medical use.

Kathleen is interested in how stem cell research can offer new generative metaphors for health and healing and how therapies suggest ways to extend the human lifespan and alter ourselves genetically. Her initial research looked at how stem cell utilization might delay and disguise the physical impact of ageing.

“Buckminster Fuller described the occurrence of structure in chemical elements not as things but as ‘patterns of inherently regenerative constellar associations of energy events’. The dynamic metabolism of each of our cells determines its growth or demise and the sustained presence of stem cells within the porosity of both the embryonic and adult brain, suggests holistic connections between periodicity, cell re-newel, cell death and the nature of mind itself.”

Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSC), can differentiate differentiate in vitro or in vivo into adipocytes, chondrocytes and osteoblasts the progenitors cells of human cartilage and bone. Kathleen began looking at the shape principles governing the structuring of bone, its emergent mathematics and the geometry of its growth. The structuring of cellular growth is beautifully exemplified in the emergent architecture of bone.

THE WORK

During the residency I was granted access to biological donor materials associated with embryonic, fetal and adult stem cell research. I produced over 2000 photographic studies of human donor derived tissue as the conceptual basis of a multi-screen video installation. Her visual research demonstrates how embodied, sensory encounters with digital media are intrinsic to the visual literacy of medical research. The resulting multi-screen, six-channel video and sound installation, Intra-actions and re-configurings, consists of horizontally aligned screens designed as a panoramic, landscape. Viewed in partial darkness, the work provides an audience with a reflective space and the work offers an emotional engagement with both the clinical and ethical dimensions of stem cell research.

The independently titled episodes dramatize biological procedures: Screen 1 Matter, Screen 2 Vascular, Screen 3 Viscera, Screen 4 Ossify, Screen 5 Primordial, Screen 6 Lacunae.

I applied poetics, moving image and sound to draw every day audiences to the science and art of stem cell research.

“The structural grammar of my work was inspired by the theoretical work of the Philosopher of Science, Karen Barad. Inspired by her concepts I applied graphic and text layering methods to examine how time based, visual and linguistic systems can regulate and dictate interior and exterior perspectives of objects. Dual streams of words composed from descriptive notations, poetry and genetic science are used to suggest parallel images, like labyrinths and mirrors. The work exploits the visual aspects of language and I use imagistic repetitions, tonal variants, scale and magnification to create a contemplative space. Virtual shadows and the sound track, composed of visceral heart pulses are used to invoke the infinite levels of reproduction of living cells in the human body. “

In addition to the installation I produced 15 photographic e-sketchbooks containing hundreds of images drawn from her visual research. These digital sketchbooks presented in landscape format echo the conceptual methods of the moving image installation. Thematic titles are conceptually re-versioned and the form is fluidic: pages may carry a single image or mirror pages found elsewhere; a text frame may directly relate to an adjacent image or may be repeated or carry references to a later image.

Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway – Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning,
Duke University Press

Produced as part of an international contemporary art and craft exhibition, Black Lace is a site-sensitive video and sound installation commissioned for the UK Crafts Council 50/50 funded international lace textile exhibition, Lost in Lace, for the Birmingham City Art Gallery and Museum. Museum lace archive conservator support enabled an off-site destructive micro-visual analysis of silk lace from a unique sample of antique Chantilly lace. The donor sample is beautiful virtuoso piece of 20th century lace, bought from Steinman’s in Piccadilly London forming part of Lady Cadbury’s archive collection. Hundreds of hugely magnified studies were produced using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in collaboration with scientific imaging specialists from the Biomedical Imaging Unit, School of Medicine at the University of Southampton. Using complex, digital methods these were post produced and re-composed to create a continuous, slow panning shot of lace montages arranged along the Z axis in virtual 3D screen space. The resulting continuous scrolling lace landscape is set against a multilayered, stochastic sound composition of larval silk moths devouring the mulberry leaves that fuel the production of the silk protein fibers.

The Black Lace project breaks customary patterns of approaches to the material culture of lace, re-framing it as a complex biomaterial with bio-economic and bioethical dimensions. Black Lace alludes to the lurking fault lines between nature and culture and the work follows on from my wider research themes that also make cultural and artistic connections to the practices and narratives of contemporary biosciences.

The dramatic acceleration of scientific fabrication techniques in the life sciences, wherein the structure and function of biological systems are designed and engineered into biomaterials and molecular machines is culturally pervasive. The fixed notion of “humanness’ has already been subtly transformed by advancements in transgenic technologies and medicine but most of us are not able to realize the fullness, meaning and impact of these scientific practices that reconfigure life

The decisive factor in using SEM was to visually evidence the underlying mathematics and structural torsions and twisting of Chantilly lace in close conjunction with the theoretically unfathomable and unimaginable complexity of the silk fibers. The human Chantilly net maker mimics polygonal networks found in nature but in the film, immensely magnified details reveal the lace’s intrinsic “otherness” and silkworm origins. The atoms, molecules and ecosystems deployed by the silk worms appear to operate like forces swelling out into shattered spirals. Each layered image in each scrolling scene of the film was technically drawn line by line by the deflections of a scanning electron beam operating in a vacuum. Each scene is intrinsically an image of lifelessness and the film is like a fossil. Human vision involves the register of light in the retinal nervous system and brain. The non-optical electron materialization of the Chantilly net in the installation alludes to processes of biophysical metamorphosis and other lurking frontier narratives drawn from the contemporary biosciences and synthetic biology. In the biotech context, the chemical co-alliance of humans and the insect species is spectacular in its imagination but in many ways can be seen to follow on from the 5000-year scientific techniques of Sericulture industry in Asian countries. Sericulture refers to the production of silk from the larval cocoon of the silkworm Bombyx mori. The silkworm has biosocial significance and vast economies and whole communities depend on the molecular proteins of its cast off capillary structure. The industrial killing and utilization of the silkworm can make us lose sight of the intrinsic mystery around its morphological developmental stages from egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa (cocoon) to adult moth and the fact that these intricate developmental mechanisms of metamorphosis are little understood by modern life science. Black Lace alludes to the lurking fault lines between nature and culture and the work follows on from my wider research themes that also make cultural and artistic connections to the practices and narratives of contemporary biosciences. The research outcomes represent a unique artistic, experimental approach to scientific imaging methods using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and fluorescing CLSM (Con-focal Laser Scanning Microscopy) building on paradoxical optical and quantum principles of image processing to forge a synthesis of hidden forms, wavelengths, signals and the instrumentation of matter. The project has resulted in transferable knowledge by extending the experimental use of non-optical microscopy as a “plastic” technical media for the production of art. The project extends the presentation of scientific imaging to encourage public engagement with the physics of non-optical bioimaging concepts and synthetic biology. The research engages in novel imaging production that extends the use of scientific imaging in the production of high-resolution HD video quality moving image display.

The work aims to provides an accessible public engagement platform for public debate and awareness of ethical and cultural issues arising from the biosciences.

Media:Video Projection and Sound Art
Duration: 8 minute - HD Video 16:9

Sound Z'ev
Editor Simon Allmark

International conference presentation for Crafts Council UK- Framing Dark Space.

Invitation from artist Barbara Steveni to participate within an international group Sculpture (a term used by the Artists Placement Group in 1971) to denote a discursive/panel/discussion/seminar/conference-like intervention into an exhibition programme as part of the current APG exhibition at Raven Row, London.

The Sculpture, entitled Education: not knowing was at Raven Row Gallery 13th November 2012. Five themed seminar/panels ran simultaneously. The intention is not to dwell on the history of APG, but to explore how some of their mutant DNA is being reinstalled in the present. Each seminar/panel is inspired by the theme and the working practices of APG; Placement, Education, Galleries, Contract and Not Knowing.

www.ravenrow.org

2010, INTERNATIONAL THAMES AND HUDSON BOOK PUBLICATION - ART + SCIENCE NOW
Art/Science convergence as a major arena of emergence in 21st century art.
Editor : Professor Dr. Stephen Wilson, San Francisco State University
Publisher: Thames and Hudson, 200 + pages with 270 colour illustrations. ISBN 9780500238684

UK contributor presenting full page frontispiece – photo-documentation

An international visual survey of artists working at the frontiers of science and technology. Focus on work since 2000. Covers experimentation in fields such as biology, ecology, medical research, physics, geology, robotics, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, information visualisation and body and sensing computer interface.

Further infohttp://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500238684.html

Cocoon is a dual video projection installation developed for the context and architectural setting of the glass atrium as part of Crossing Over at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. A series of exhibitions were installed throughout the newly refurbished building, located at Albemarle Street.

Also featuring the work of Material Beliefs, Anne Brodie, Alex Bunn, Eggebert-and-Gould and Phoebe Von Held. Curated by Caterina Albano and Rowan Drury of ARTAKT exploring exchanges in art & biotechnologies.

The Londonist

CO-PRODUCER - REGIONAL EVENT FOR THE BRITISH SCIENCE FESTIVAL 2009

JAM ! – ART, SCIENCE AND BEYOND
Concept, development, production and venue management in collaboration with Adrian Holme for Art, Science Culture Research Cluster with consultancy from Bronagh Ferran.
Jam – Art, science and beyond, featured invited artist, Tina Gonsalves, scientists, UCA artists, and student participation in multimedia event produced as part of the British Science Festival for UCA Farnham. A free public event, with invited speakers, VJs, and opportunities to encounter artists and to socialize in a friendly informal atmosphere. Supported by the University for the Creative Arts, the UCA Art Science & Culture Research Cluster and GaiaNova Productions, Jam, was part of this year’s British Science Festival, hosted by the University of Surrey.

Artist presenter at the interdisciplinary conference Sensual Technologies at the ICA, London. The event was a one-day international symposium from The Brunel School of Arts, Sensual Technologies. It explored alternate and aesthetic uses of technology that extend artistic practice beyond the expected, into realms of unusual and heightened experience.

The conference was led by Stelarc, Johannes Birringer and Susan Broadhurst, and featured presentations from theorists and practitioners of performance, dance, music and electronic media arts. The contributors to this event were leading practitioners and theorists offering diverse perspectives to the debate. They included Roy Ascott, Roger Malina, Jill Scott, Gary Hall, Rachel Armstrong, Paul Brown, Louis-Philippe Demers, Marta De Menezes, Kira O’Reilly, Kathleen Rogers, Paul Sermon, Theodore Spyropoulos, Atau Tanaka and Andrea Zapp.
Brunel's School of Arts on-line Journal: Body, Space & Technology

Mutamorphosis Challenging Arts and Sciences
Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Presenter in the framework of the Leonardo 40th anniversary celebrations concerned with current directions in art and science.

Joining international conference presenters with essay/text, Bacteria, Geology and Blood, based on artworks exploring themes of developmental biology and evolutionary symbiosis.

MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences International Conference organised by CIANT as part of the Leonardo 40th anniversary celebrations.

Publication of text in aminima. Art journal focusing on contemporary, conceptual, new media art. The magazine follows a methodology which resembles that of scientific magazines and the website contains an archive of texts written by people whose work reflects on aesthetic, technological and political issues.

We Make Money not Art

Exhibition of installation, Tremor within international group exhibition, Genesis - The Art of Creation, Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne, Switzerland.

Genesis – The Art of Creation was an international exhibition located at the PAUL KLEE MUSEUM in Bern, Switzerland and curated in the ethos of interdisciplinary artistic expression. The exhibition theme described historical parallel developments and interactions in artistic and scientific methodologies.

The exhibition featured artworks by, Jean Arp, Aziz & Cucher, Joseph Beuys, Christine Borland, Jaq Chartier, Agnes Denes, Mark Dion, Charles & Ray Eames, Mark Francis, Herbert W. Franke, David Fried, Fritz Glarner, Antony Gormley, Thomas Grünfeld, Mona Hatoum, Georg Herold, Floris Kaayk, Eduardo Kac, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee , Thomas Kovachevich, Sol LeWitt, Aaron Marcus, Larry Miller, Vera Molnar, Piet Mondrian, Frieder Nake, Bruce Nauman, Georg Nees, Michel Paysant, Marc Quinn, Dieter Roth, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Tomas Schmit, Lillian Schwartz, Karl Sims, Rudolf Steiner, Koen Vanmechelen, Woody & Steina Vasulka

Genesis, Analysis, Code, Playing Games and Chaos – these are the five dramatic focal points of this exhibition. They connect and combine scientific and artistic aspects of genetics and creation in a dramatically designed presentation of paintings, interactive installations, light installations, video projections, cartoons, photographs and sculptures by international artists.

Curator, Fabienne Eggelhöfer proposed that these heterogeneous exhibits were designed to convey the most significant research results of the 20th and 21st centuries, placing them in an artistic context that confirms this issue's relevance to society, its wide emotional spectrum and its decade-long, unchanging political importance.

In August 2006 I was a guest of the Centraal Museum, Utrecht in the Netherlands and stayed at the Amilisweerd house for two weeks to establish a project with the University of Utrecht. The Centraal Museum manages this 18th century country villa as a national monument. Over the years many guest artists have resided here and made projects in and about the house. The Amilisweerd house is famous for its original and beautifully preserved hand painted 18th century Chinese Wallpaper. The Chinese rooms in the house are treasured, closed and protected from daylight. Ludwig Napoleon once owned the house and this adds to the ghostly atmosphere of the place. The Amelisweerd Estate is now a protected regional park and is comprised of beautiful 18th-century mansions tucked alongside the curved Crooked Rhine River.

Bacteria, Geology and Blood
Ideas about the origins and evolution of life get constantly reversioned by the sciences. In 2005 I made a road trip with Oran Catts, Ionat Zurr and Paul Venouse to pay homage to the most ancient microbial ancestors of life on earth in a remote corner of Australia. Thrombolites and Stromatalites are living fossil communities of earliest bacteria occurring around the coast and within salt tidal lakes in Western Australia. The Thrombolites at Clifton Lake are rare archaeobacteria; these colonies of cells are the pre cursors of all living organisms on the earth. They sweat out layer upon layer of mineral limestone and these mats like some filthy swollen quilt appear in the shape of soft mounds. Billions of years old, these subtle generators of matter and photosynthesis opened a door to oxygenate the earth and in doing so left a geological trail of iron banding within the earth. This iron is a pre cursor of haemoglobin in our own red blood cells. Photographs and written descriptions give little indication of their scale or poetic impact. They have a strangely soothing presence and are curiously mesmerising. Watching their benign forms nesting at the edge of a lake you almost expect their creature like forms to move and speak. Evolutionary biology has inspired scientists and designers to explore the creative potential of “smart materials,” man-made materials modeled after nature that can adapt to changes in their environment and physically transform.These mutualistic bacterial communities are the key example of how symbiosis works.

Extraterrestrial Life

Liquid salt water on Mars is in the form of highly-concentrated brine may support a "salt-loving" type of bacteria, says Geoffrey Landis, a space scientist and science fiction writer at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Halobacteria, is a form of extremophile, archaeobacteria, adapted to surviving in saturated salt solutions. It is possible that this ancient bacteria is preserved in salt deposits on the planet.

"Retrieval of ancient life from Mars would answer many questions about the origin of life, and the relationship or independence of Mars and Earth biology," Landis recently reported in the new journal, "Astrobiology".

NASA scientist Chris McKay, suggests that these Martian life forms could be retrieved, then cultivated in a suitable medium for growth back here on Earth.

In late autumn 2005 I had a semester academic research sabbatical as a visiting artist/researcher at Symbiotica TC&A at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth.

Overview
Symbiotica is an artist run laboratory that can facilitate international artists via proposal and independent or grant funding within a science department and supports artists in learning practical lab work. The Tissue Culture and Art Project was established in 1996 to look into the use of tissue culture as a medium of expression. The TC&A lab was set up by artists Oran Catts and Ionatt Zurr with Stuart Bunt. There are other research groups with different acronyms (MEART, BIOKINO) and their membership evolves in relation to their research themes and objectives. An interdisciplinary culture and intellectual dialogue is developed in and around weekly open house meetings and presentations and a mailing list managed by the anchor woman of the team, Jane Coakley who keeps a growing on-line community informed of events. Symbiotica offer undergraduate and MA studies in art and biology and organise workshops worldwide.

Blood and Bone
I planned to use visit to refine a proposal working with DNA metaphors and the materiality of blood cells. I went to find out more about cell dynamics and tissue culture techniques. I also brought work concerned with bone cell differentiation and the regeneration of deer antlers. This project helped me define specific questions to cell biologists that were useful. I wanted to know the techniques used to grow deer antler using tissue culture and the methods involved in grafting these onto human tissue. I had a meeting with bone expert Miranda Grounds who suggested, with irony, that I try wrestling a deer to the ground to get some velvet antler or review the project. She showed me some work on antler bone grafts on mice that showed tiny lumps like boils on their foreheads. The Neorobiologist, Stuart Bunt talked me through the fundamentals of cell structure and cell membranes and generously described previous examples of TC&A projects. During my stay I had asked to be led on a tour of the basement dissecting rooms, the mortuary, the anatomical collection and teaching rooms. This took in a visit to the plaster casting facility; the refrigeration units for donated corpses and zoological specimens and the networked clinical surgery and virtual operating theatre. The importance of the history of medicine as culture became very clear during my stay and I realised that having a social and historical perspective of the body in medicine is crucial for artists working with human biological subjects as art..

Reflections
Symbiotica is an inspiring place that raises more questions than it can answer. How can one know if artefacts fashioned from biological tissue materials and made by artists are breaching the cultural gap between the arts and sciences? It is difficult to measure and assess. Interestingly, critical art theory is still in its infancy and mostly written by artists themselves and sees them struggling for a coherent context. Can these biological and proposed, semi-living products be part of a counter culture of art activism or are the results another case of deliberately bad art relying on comic phrasing and narrow distribution? Can artists and scientists agree and collaborate to the extent that their efforts and recipes impact on a broader and more inclusive culture without resorting to kitsch or a dumbing down of the art or further obfuscating the science? Then again, is the role of art to make the science more explicit or accessible? Many artists are aware of these contradictions and working with them directly as the major discourse.

Medical scientists, clinicians, bioengineers and biochemists routinely use biopsy and living tissue as part of their work. Skin cells grow are known grow like weeds. Genetically engineered organs developed via stem cells regularly get front-page news. The metaphoric aspects of art are highly persuasive and seductive and this is their unique power. The animistic suggestion that a cluster of cells has a half-life has a poetic resonance that scientists have to chuck out with the bathwater. At Symbiotica artists can pick up the fragments of discarded tissue like scavengers after a blood fest and reversion them as cultural artefacts. Working with cell and lab techniques is close to cookery and many artists take their materials direct from the butchers and sometimes from their own bodies in order to comment on the contradiction and hype and address the minefield of ethical debates and affront the sensibilities of the artworld and popular culture. Some artists get arrested for simply being informed and being artists. The games these artists are playing here carry serious and provocative messages about our biological status as artefactual/toy-like human beings.

View the Symbiotica Gallery