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

I just put some SHSYSY cells - which are a neuroblast cell line onto silk fibres, in preparation for working with them on spider silk. I’m enjoying the movement of language between the materials, circulation of signs and tipping of relations as the fibres are tiwsted and tangled in my foreseps, placed into wells and the nervy solution poured on with a pipette.

The airflow within the hood played havoc with the fragile wisps of silken fibres, I really need to figure out a better way of handling them, or to at least practice. Twisting the silky bits into tangles with the foreseps resembles some tiny crafty practice. The tangles are slight and beautiful and inclined to move out of the well onto the underside of the lid, perhaps reacting to slight static charges.

The cells were confluent and I counted and failed yet again to work out the cell solution, I hazarded a guess which I felt was realistic and wondered at my blankness and inability to master this pretty simple numerical manouver. I also wondered at not trying, perhaps to work with another number system, something utterly outside of trying to count and dilute and getting it right.

I was horribly clumsy tonight, as much as I find the tooing and froing of movement and fluency of ritual around the tissue culture hood,  I dropped and fumbled and grew anxious.

Nervy silks, silken nerves, the word play reminds me again of the J.G. Ballard short story in which garments retain emotional residues and imprints of their wearers, empathetic and traumatised by past violences. They ripple and undulate as anxious tissues of material memories.

I’m imagining a series of rotating bioreactors designed by

Louise Bourgeoise
De Selby
Kathy Acker
David Cronenburg
William Burroughs
Angela Carter
JG Ballard
Honour Fell
Lois Fuller
John Cage
Maya Deren
Cathy de Monchaux
Helen Chadwick
Groucho Marx
Rebecca Horne

and the list goes on and on

as part of Marina Abramovic Presents . . .

falling down the stairs backwards over four hours, repeated daily for 17 days
one descent per day

From the top, your flights of stairs go:
7 short
1 long step
9 short
1 turning long step
5 short
1 turning long step
9 short
1 long step
9 short
(FLOOR)

as written by Mary Griffiths, contemporary art curator, Whitworth Gallery

riser: 16 cms        6 1/2 inches
tread: 31.75 cm    12 1/2 inches

Stone steps
flights
wooden banisters with iron spindles
The stone stairs are smooth and slippery, no real purchase
if I really fall down, I’ll break my neck, there is a fabulous set of banister rails that I think I’ll use to grasp as I make my descent.

The movement needs to be so very slow, allowing for gradual progression, but there needs to be rest points, still points, especially for the hands which will get tired with the grasp.
So I need to find ways to come down, to be upside down alot in a kind of legs over head, to do that on a descent, and to sustain.

I’m concerned to find
• ways of moving that protect my neck – as well as everything else
• Ways of organising skeletal frame on the stairs to create balances that can be moved between like lots of svangasana (shoulder stand) to halasana (legs over head)
• Ways to prepare from now until the piece begins
• Ways to warm up before each daily session
• Ways to warm down and address aches and pains that allow for the next day

At the moment I’m imagining making the work naked
The skin slipping on stone is an issue but I think fabric is more hazardous and skin leaves slight marks, the stone/skin pressure will presumably redden the skin
I would like there to be a cumulative effect, so that someone coming in on day 11 will have a sense of build up, of a deposit of effort, or of travel.

Artists I’ve had or am about to have conversations with into and around this developing this work are:

Fiona Wright

Amanda Brown

Doran George

Yann Marussich

Empress Stah

 sKu-mNyé

Iyengar Yoga, asana and pranayama practices

 Here are a couple of pages on the history of the gallery and about it’s unique and special position in the history of Manchester.

It’s founding vision emrged out of the Arts and Crafts movement to  ‘Secure a source of perpetual gratification to the people of Manchester & and cultivate taste and knowledge of the Fine Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.’

Camera Lucida & tissue culture drawings, looking and drawing, felt drawings, blind drawings (the latter inspired by Anna Lucas’ blind drawing practice)

Haptics and eyes, how to feel what is down the microscope, (your gaze hits the side of my face)

Again bodily perceptions and languages that slide between senses, primarily visual and touch, digits and tact, skin receiving and transmitting, eyes fingering (see More Lessons from a Starfish, Eva Hayward), meshings of and matrix and other textile metaphors that allow all those tight grips of knots and twists and loose undecided threads. Inspired by Silke Panse speaking on Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness in regard to Anna Lucas’ blind drawings made from scenes of the film and conversations with Complexity scientist Sylvia Nagl.

 3-D scans of  cell cultures on scaffolds

Moss walks and moss architecture and tardigrades, inspired by talks with Andy Gracie

Drawn glass spindles, further tissue culturing onto glass and hair, (flaming glass pipettes into needles, lernt from Janet Smith yesterday)

Further glass spider web frames, as suggested and prototyped by Mel Grant using lab glass wear and flame.

Moving cells with mouth and glass, air bubbles and media, old school methods of cell sculpting, from more conversations with Janet Smith and her nuanced TC crafting

Running home made bioreactors and other tissue engineering gizmos off bicycles, inspired by TC&A and the Claudia’s Trachea team.

Lois Fuller and are friends electric, back to hypnotism and dancing. From converstations with Catherine Hindson. And Fuller being bezzie mates with the Curies.

Roses and blood, ecologies, bodies and can I feed a rose with my blood? Plant and human hormones, blood drips into rose growing media Molecular and gross growths.

Melting actions in the lab; frozen consumables from other bodies that dissaggregate, feed, protect, cultivate cells,  triggered by conversations with female scientists (about how to thaw things in the lab with ones body heat and clothing; secreted in a cleavage, the top edge between knicker and skin, inside a latex glove), Cynthia Versparget’s incubra and melting actions in Hannah Pollards work.

Measured counting actions of heart explant contractions, purkinje syncopations.

Slowly falling down stairs for days, capturing descents and stumbles and rests, perhaps with cameras as Manuel Vason suggested, perhaps layering images for playback, or maybe something more lo-fi but thinking about GinaCzarnecki’s extraordinary video works.

 I’m currently reworking  Untitled (syncope) for this showcase

 here is the text from the Bristish Council

The British Council and El Teatro de la Laboral present S.P.A.C.E. UK, a showcase programmed to explore the possibilities of performance spaces. S.P.A.C.E. UK takes full advantage of the multiple spaces which make La Laboral a unique place to programme site specific projects and generate work linked to the building and its history.

The idea behind the showcase is to create links and promote networks amongst artists from different disciplines and countries. S.P.A.C.E. UK  is a showcase of the latest generation of contemporary British artists working in the area of performance. These are artists whose work is meant to be seen in a variety of spaces and not just on a conventional stage.

The pieces on show to audiences and programmers over two intense days at Teatro La Laboral cover a range of forms of expression. Live art, action art, intervention and manoeuvres will be presented by artists of the calibre of Kira O’Reilly, Rajni Shah, Peter Reder and Marc Rees, amongst others.

In addition, S.P.A.C.E. UK will be a place for professionals to meet and debate the uses of public spaces for the performing arts, as well as serving as a catalyst and meeting point for local artists.

You can find more information in this document and the detailed programme

www.teatrodelalaboral.com

Building bacterial in Second Life.

Read the entire post here.

Short video clip here.

Finally, after some considerable time not posting (the longer I leave it the harder it gets), here’s some news.

Biocrafts and Edge Practices is the working title for a phase of work I’ll be embarking on with Janet Smith at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham. It continues the interest in tissue culturing onto spider silk identified when I was artist in resident at the school last year. We’ve been awarded an Arts Award by Wellcome Trust.

It will have it’s own blog and site but in the meantime in order to give an overview of the project,  here’s some excerpts from the application:

Artist Kira O’Reilly and scientist Dr Janet Smith will collaborate on interdisciplinary laboratory based activities of tissue culturing cells onto spider silk. These investigations of biomaterials and biocraft will generate a series of exchanges, materials and writings to form a book publication.

The book will be an art object. The design of the spider’s web will inform its structure, materials and the complexities of its writings. It will reflect the crossing of boundaries between biosciences, arts, craft and technology. The book itself will be a ‘wandering’ book, moving across categories of knowledge in academic libraries, art bookshop and art/science spaces.

Aim
To conduct an extended period of collaborative and interdisciplinary research in which they will grow muscle, nerve and bone stem cells onto spider silk and into 3-dimensionl structures; the conversations from which will generate dialogues and writings that then feed back into the laboratory activities. The writings will form a book that will allow for many modes of writings to articulate the full spectrum of activities.

Objectives

• Developing a biocraft. To develop convincing methods of growing cells onto spider silk; establish muscle, bone and nerve muscle cell co-cultures and provoke an exchange of ideas. To extensively document the work in progress using video, photography and writing. Cell lines and primary cells will be used but no animal will be directly sacrificed for the research.

• Bioarchitectures. To create three dimensional structures with these biomaterials in combination with found and manufactured spider-silks. To use the events and experiences in the laboratory as provocations for dialogues, writings and on-line blog that reflect on and further propel the laboratory activities.

• The Book. To expand the laboratory activities into dialogue that discusses the wider implications and meanings of science and art practice. It will interweave ideas and practices from endurance sport, gardening, textiles, craft and architecture with those of biotechnology, techné and feminism. To create a holistic, limited edition artists book that uses the spider web architecture as its structuring device.

• Location. To categorise and locate the publication in academic libraries and art book shops as a provocative agent that will cross disciplinary fields, accumulating the attendant readerships.

• Audiences. The book will cross category boundaries within different science, arts and humanities disciplines to attract an eclectic range of academic and non-academic audiences

sk-interfaces exhibition >>
Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society FACT, 1.2.-30.3.2008, exhibition curated by Jens Hauser
http://www.fact.co.uk/news/?id=128

sk-interfaces book >>
Liverpool University Press
164 pages, 70 color illustrations
http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3823
______________________________________________________________
EXHIBITION
sk-interfaces is a multi-disciplinary exhibition of contemporary art works which reflect the progressive feeling of uncertainty and ‘inbetween-ness’ which we encounter in the age of technological extensions. Much like a generalized rite of passage, the 17 international artists translate this emotionally uncomfortable ‘betwixt and between’ period. They make use of today’s sensation of being ‘neither here nor there’ to engage us into moments of enhanced self-reflexivity. Skin represents a place where art, science, biopolitics, philosophy and social culture inter-face. Materially and metaphorically, artists replace borders that tend to separate by membranes that need to be negotiated; between spaces, species, gender, senses, disciplines and genres.
sk-interfaces launches FACT’s Human Futures programme in Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture.
Works by:
Tissue Culture and Art Project – Victimless Leather Orlan – Harlequin Coat Wim Delvoye – Sybille II Stelarc – Extra Ear: Ear on Arm Art Orienté objet – Artists’ Skin Culture, Roadkill Coat, Trans-species Aura Photography Critical Art Ensemble – Immolation Eduardo Kac – Telepresence Garment Zbigniew Oksiuta – Biological Habitat, Spatium Gelatum, Cosmic Garden Jun Takita  – Light only Light Julia Reodica – hymNext Hymen Project Maurice Benayoun with Jean-Baptiste Barrière – World Skin The Office of Experiments – Truth Serum Zane Berzina – Touch Me Wall Jill Scott –  e-skin: Somatic Interaction Olivier Goulet – SkinFlags,  SkinBag Corps.EXT Yann Marussich – Bleu Remix Kira O’Reilly – Inthewrongplaceness (at the Bluecoat)
FACT - Foundation for Art and Creative Technology
88 Wood Street, Liverpool L1 4DQ, UK
www.fact.co.uk

BOOK
sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society. Edited by Jens Hauser. An art and text book published by Liverpool University Press.  Contributions from 25 major international artists, scholars and critics, thermochromic cover design by Zane Berzina.
Press Inquiries:
Simon Bell
Tel. (44) 151 794 2234
Email: sbell@liv.ac.uk

Yesterday I visited moving image artist Anna Lucas who recently began a drawing residency at Somerville College, University of Oxford. The pilot residency is connected to the University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. One of Anna’s activities whilst there is repeated drawings of Werner Herzog’s 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness, including the entire film, and individual scenes. She is located in the the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics where she uses the lecture theater to perform the watchings and drawings. We stood outside the building last night, discussing the structural and semantic implications of the arrangements and triangulations of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and pondered what the physiology, anatomy and genetics of a film might be.

I looked at some of the drawings made so far, traces of events, eventful traces, recapitulations of time, drawing time quite literally near and far into and out of the meta time established by the frame works of Herzog’s documentary and the complex unfoldings of events in the bioscience world that envelopes her activities.

We talked alot about time, or perhaps I ranted about time and cascades of events - borrowing heavily from the molecular biological phrasings I hear tendrils of around me. Cascades suggestings structures and narrative - sequential. Anna is performing some kind of crumpling perhaps, of gestrure, refigurations, through hand and eye in a large dark room structured towards other hierachies and diseminations of knowings and knowledges.

I mentioned the flattened space I once heard Parveen Adams refer to in a talk on Cronenburg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash. She borrowed flat space (I hope I’ve recalled that wording correctly) from architectural theory and posited it as a refusal of the scopic peeping Tom mechanism that pervades cinema. I don’t know that necessarily relates to Herzog but it does relate to the relational structures Anna is navigating as she moves between looking and action, between scopic space and flattened drawing ground, blinding herself to what marks she is making.

Perhaps the webs can be viewed as drawings. There is some more investigation to be done there. I collect them onto coverslips by scooping the slip several times throught one web to maximise the number of catches of silk onto such a small surface so the web design becomes more complex and less logical.

We talked as well about the usefulness of allowing one activity to co-exist along side other non related activites, and the delft hookings and crossings of associate and implied meanings that can then evolve. Reminds me of the literal hookings of a crochet hook or the radial junctions of web that create the tensile structures. The women I learnt lacemaking from in Australia had a bodily working knowledge of engineering, their fingers testing and seemingly intuiting the torchons of their stitching and cross stitchings in making bobbin lace.