The SHSYSY cells have been growing on silk fibres since 24th May 09. Today I removed the tangles of fibres with their attacehd cells and placed them into new wells with fresh media - just to see. Silky nerves, nervous silks. It’s all incredibly crude but I’m just following my nose.
Mel Grant introduced me to Eric Hill who has been working with neuron and astrocyte cells extensively. He’s made many spheres of neurons (known as blobs) by growing them on bacteria petri dishes, picking them up by pipette every two days so that they don’t attach and changing the medium - I think. I need to get the protocol but they grow in exquisite spheres rather than on the surface of the dish. Bacteria dishes are not tissue culture treated so not expecailly attractive to cells to attach to. This technique is called something like embryo spheres, Janet has done alot of it.
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June 11th, 2009
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An article in New Scientist, Hybrid Hearts Could Solve Transplant Shortage.
rat heart stripped of it’s cells and ‘reclothed’ with stem cells from another rat.
or a re-celled rat’s heart (Image downloaded from the New Scientist site and courtesy of the University of Minnesota)
This is a bioreactor profusion pump.
I’m utterly seduced by how incredibly beautiful this image is - and the engineering. The procedure sounds like one similar to ‘Claudia’s tachea‘, except that the trachea was from a human donor - and implanted into a human called Claudia. The idea of non human animal = virtually limitless supply is fraught with difficulty from my point of view.
See the video here.
These images really do fulfill a kind of contemporary gothic, fueled by biotech anxieties. The image has strong resonances of photographic representations of TC &A’s Victimless Leather whose framing, lighting and installing deliberately invoke a simimilar gothic aesthetic but one that is deployed in radically different directions. Victimless Leather asks profoundly provocative questions that assume nothing in reagrad to the use and coption of living bodies and materials as resourse, it both sets up and dismantles utopian dreams of that appropriation of life can ever exist outside of power chains that exploit one way or another - depending where on the food chain you are.
But I also wanted to put this image up a a great example of a bioreactor. Here is the Victimless Leather one as well.
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June 11th, 2009
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When researching art works that use fat for the previous entry I remembered INCUBRA, and it’s take on creating convivial environments of cell cultures.
INCUBRA, Fiannaca/Versparget, 2007
INCUBRA exploits the body’s natural 37 degree temperature - which of course in vitro bodies require as much as incorporated ones. I’m not sure how they did the CO2 though. Perhaps they didn’t. It has to be the most glamerous wearable lab kit I’ve ever seen.
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June 10th, 2009
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Mel Grant, ( see some links to her here, here and here) a molecular biologist School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, and I have begun some experiments to see if we can feed chocolate to fat cells in the eventual hope of feeding chocolate to lipsuctioned fat cells.
We also want to embed gold particles into fat cells - however this idea has been adjusted to coating fat cells with gold. Nano sculptures within and with out fat.
The evolved from incidental chats in the tea room of the 5th floor lab at the school of Biosciences. Mel mentioned that she was reading medicinal material from early books archived online, curious cures of extractions that seem both poetic and whimsical and not remotely similar to the dominant contemporary Western allopathic medicine. (Although Chinese Traditional Medicine and Homeopathic Medicine and no doubt many more, use highly poetic and metaphoric language and remedies. That is not to say that terminology in allopathic medical usage is not metaphoric but it’s relationship to material - pharmaceuticals etc. could be described perhaps as more categorical and reductive). We pondered the possibility that dismissal of these approaches and remedies might mean the loss of remedies that actual worked, that had some discreet active ingredient embedded within a vital but seemingly absurd material/object context that current conventional medicine cannot embrace. She mentioned chocolate as a cure for something or other and somehow we ended up with the idea of feeding chocolate - or rather it’s cocao solid component, to fat cells.
Mel has a colleague who has been working on obesity and has generously agreed to advise and contribute resources for our research, ie. cells -both primary and cell line, consumables - media, and protocols. So I’m hooked. Rachael Sammons has agreed to help us with SEM imaging of the gold fat cells.
Our first investigations - when I say “our” I mean that I have significant amounts of enthusiasm and conceptual ideas but little “how to do”, especially with ordinary lab bench work. Mel has significant bioscience research experience but also considerable artistic experience - so it’s an entirely asymmetrical partnership!
a note from my lab book that reads:
subcutaneous obese female 1° Adipocytes
visceral adipo - obese female 1° Adipocytes
These were the labels on the two dishes of human primary cells. The cells were contaminated with a variety of bacteria - filements, rods and cocci, and so had to be destroyed immediately. The bacteria would of come with the cells - from the donor body perhaps of the someone who’d has the cells removed during an operation of some kind. My first task after looking to them was to sprinkle the wells of infected cells with virkon to kill the bacteria and the cells. Knowing that these had come from a human female, woman, person, individual who I could of passed in Sainsburys, sat on a us beside dramatically altered my viewing of them and positioning. They were far more entering an area of subject as opposed to mere material matter like the 3T3 - L1 cell line we were also given. This ongoing destabilising and recapitulation of bodily matter and it’s circulation within and around institutions, ethics and classifications is one of my ongoing preoccupations. I need to work Butler’s Bodies That Matter into this and my other activities in the lab, and Karen Barad but more on that later. (But do read this if you have time Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, Karen Barad )
We grated Green and Black 85% dark chocolate and added the following to about 0.5 ml of chocolate.
water
ethanol
DMEM F 12 (a liquid medium used to grow certain types of cells in)
FBS (foetal bovine serum)
Then put it in the 37 degree oven to melt, meld and mix.
FBS
FBS, DMEM F 12, grater, dish with grated 85%.
More of each was added to make up 5ml and to encourage dissolve.
Chocolate was also added to DMSO.
A combination of 2:3 ethanol:FBS was also tried.
Butanol was added to the chocolate H2O - but not alot happened, apart from the suspended chocolate forming a barrier between the butanol and H2O and my getting a little woozy.
Cremofor - a sun flower oil derivative was added to the H2O one as well, I think, and a glutinous mess formed around the stick.
More of each was added to make up 5ml and to encourage dissolve.
They were centrtifuged and redissolved to try and get another more lipid extract.
We had discussions about whether the lipids (fat) was the cocoa fat of perhaps lipids for the FBS for example. FBS is also full of albumin, a generic protein that lipids attach to, so it’s a good carries as we want to fat cells to uptake the cocoa solids from the media.
We tried liposomes which are used to deliver material into cells, like DNA, their membrane is bi-lipid so it is not antagonistic to the cell membrane.
Liposomes reminded me of Protocells (it’s a bi-lipid thing) and Rachel Armstrong’s great talk and research on living architecture - she was recently awarded a TED global fellowship. But that’s an other story.
Add all other links.
Write the plan for the next day.
Ethics of using human primary cells.
Cultural ideas around fat and chocolate
Cite fat as feminist issue etc. Fat is Feminist Issue.
Chocolate and gold.
Precedents for use of fat as an art material.
Elanor Antin, Carving, A Traditional Sculpture, 1972.
Janine Antoni.
Joseph Beuys’ use of fat
Orlan, fat reliqueries.
Stelarc and Nina Sellars, Blender
Adam Fiannaca and Cynthia Verspaget’s INCUBRA held a test tube containing adipose cells from Stelarc and Sellar’s Blender.
Croatian artist Zoran Todorovic, soap made from the artist’s liposuctioned fat. See Suncica Ostoic discuss Todorovic’s work here.
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June 8th, 2009
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Dear F,
This did begin as a thank you email for great book recommendations . . . my index of lostness and unfathoming continues to take me on some gorgoeus wordy travels.
Once again Solnit has taken me towards more treasures which with a little digging include, it might be A Field Guide to Getting Lost but there are treasure maps a plenty available, I guess all good treasure yarns include a few juicy ‘lost’ chapters. She quotes Zizek countering Rumsfield wonderfully about the unknown knowns, which she and he ring within that fabulous notion of ‘the unconscious’. When I was in Australia listening to the altruistic motivations of fellow technoscientific artists in resident at SymbioticA, all I think from ‘new worlds’ (and feeling hugely admiring of their intents) I became acutely ware of my relationship to this unknown and perhaps fictional terrain of the unconscious. I didn’t necessarily buy it as any kind of reality but so far from Europe I became aware of felt a deep affinity with it and it’s shaping of some kind of me - associated with the Western European geographic/cultural location. The unconscious - as Jung said on some telly program I caught a moment of in Ireland, is precisely that, unconscious. My own bioartistic motivations felt (before even words could describe them) neurotic, dark, something from the cellar, dremt, unformed (formless?), and undefined - or differentiated from incorporated gut entrenched unknowing known.
So I dug up the entire Zizek article that has this fabulous opening line:
“If you want to understand why the Bush administration invaded Iraq, read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, not the National Security Strategy of the United States.”
Zizek, Iraq’s False Promises
So I’m heading back to Lacan some day and why not. There’s fun to be had with them fellows. Navigations between language and syncope, under and over, making room for strangeness.
But also Solnit must be about the same age as us, there’s post punk, post industrial aesthetic that’s given to intricate literary grace but also a kind of recognised sensibility of body - text relationship that I wonder about and whether it is generational. I don’t know. I’m curious.
Love to you,
Kira
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June 8th, 2009
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June 8th, 2009
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Whilst I prepare for the work I am making during Marina Abramovic Presents . . . I’m also thinking about some of the other important individuals and activities in Manchester ouside of Manchesters Internations Festival that I relate to my practice, concerns and cares.
Professor Amelia Jones currently holds a chair in the University’s Schools of Arts, Histories and Cultures, her writing, editing and theorising in works such as Body Art, Performing the Subject, has been crucial to many artists, scholars and students such as myself. I’m hoping she might be able to come to the event and perhaps share an opinion over a cup or glass of something.
UK Base artist Ansuman Biswas will be hermit in resident in the Manchester Museums gothic tower, simultaneously artist and anchorite, he will be cloistered away for 40 days engaged in Vipassana practice and an exploration of the museums collection, concering his investigations with memory, embodiemnt and the museums role as holder of cultureal memory. There will be a blog on which he communicates his concerns and how they develop over the 40 days.
And of course there is the utterly fabulous David Hoyle, who I last saw perform and be MC at Visions of Excess during SPILL Festival of Performance. David also works with young lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans homeless people in Manchestester.
The Manchester and District Institute of Iynegar Yoga is the oldest Iyengar yoga establishement in the UK and was the creation of many of the earliest students of B.K.S. Iyengar such as Jeanne Maslen who has now retired. I’m very much hoping I’ll get a chance to attend a class during the course of the work, the strengthening, recouperative and mental effects of Iyengar yoga will all be fundamental to how I get through makeing the work.
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June 7th, 2009
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and 99% cocao solid experiment with Mel Grant.
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June 5th, 2009
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This conversation about bioreactors and incubators was a tangent to a conversation with Mel Grant yesterday about another tissue culture project.
Mel had a couple of thoughts re: the rotating bioractor idea (as well as talk to Eric)
Tumbler
Gyroscope
Made me think about enclosed spaces and different materials, environments and so on, and the polymer bioreactors of Zbigniew Oksiuta
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May 30th, 2009
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sodium bicarbonate for CO2 with tartaric acid, maybe add a weak acid vinager or lemon juice - then use to bake soda bread
hygrometer - in wine making - measures water, used to release Co2, equals pressure, can put anti backterial in it.
Pressure valve provides pressure.
glass tube, bung - 2 holes
equaliser
stand
motor
spindle
stand
hybridisation oven @ 37, westerns, dna, rna, protein sticking, used for
spindle movement of bioreactor
rotating, easiest
double spindle movement back and forth as in distaff and spindle for twisting thread
(Janet’s describing this whilst handling a spindle and giving me wool to culture onto)
in diving technologies chemical scrubbers remove CO2
workshop
glassblower
mechano
William Morris - arts and crafts
crows and cell scrappers
rooks and scapers
ravens and broom sticks
more difficult to find food in more changeable climates
anthropomorphic interpretations, human centricities pretending impartial objectifications
Jackie - crow paper in Nature
Graham Martin
Later, espresso in garden, imaginings of further third spaces
Tissue culture laboratories at the bottom of gardens that occupy the garden shed territory, not just to potter and tinker but to think and make and write (poetry in), next to the mutiple organisms of the garden and adjacent to the kitchen with it’s biotechnologies and crafts of cooking, baking, fermenting.
lists and ides text superimposed onto a paper
A very simple trick to produce controlled CO2 concentrations in the gas phase overlying cell cultures
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May 26th, 2009
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