The Adam Zaretsky conceived and realised Vivo Arts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. Stills taken during the series of actions made in the V.A.S.T.A.L. Glovebox, at Waag and  Stedelijk museum Bouwkeet on tour 2009

THE GLOVEBOX - BODY ART LAB from giuliana videopirate on Vimeo.

The VASTAL Virginarium is a six person Glove Box artistically designed by Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday for Bioart Laboratories and public performances, which revolve around cultural interpretive issues of purity, sterility and cleanliness. Much like a sterile hood used in biology for pure culture technique, this glove box has Positive air pressure.

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The VASTAL Virginarium Is a Collaborative Cultural Containment Stage For:
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Sterile Field Inter-Public Body Art Performances

Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the Glove Box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a Biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. A glove box is a techno-purified place, but as an artistic/creative aseptic arena, the VASTAL Virginarium is purely for cultural production. It represents a return to ourselves as animals, experiments, faulty and in disarray but also as changeable and in process.
There is ultimately no absolute chastity or true cleanliness, passage is from one form to another into another again. But, through emulation of purification and altered versions of artistic isolation we will try to help garnish public acceptance of the imperfectability of living in this uterine world.

Design Credits:
Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday

The artists brought together by Adam Zaretsky were:

Kira O’Reilly
WARBEAR
Jeanette Groenendaal
Zoot Derks
Boryana Rossa
Oleg Mavromatti
Sarah Hamilton
Jennifer Willet

See:
http://www.vastal.eu
http://waag.org/news/52789
http://vastal.waag.org/?page_id=357
http://waag.org/news/61188

structure made from cable ties and garden spider (araneus diadematus) silk spinnings in a confined space.

These are recordings of small actions of trying to capture spider webs between my fingers to create connections between my skin, it’s topography and the silken structures. I was also thinking about gaps, bridges, spannings, attachments. Alot of nothing and alot of something.

I took the photos of my left hand with my right hand with my trusty point and shoot Canon A480 & I haven’t done anything except crop them. 

Another person taking the photos with an SLR - and some delicate photoshoping would improve the precision of viewing the filigree threads attachments to the skin terrains.

However I’m pleased with them as small performative enquiries that allow me to move between scale, different focus, orientations and notions of body. These actions very particularly work with touch and the felt as well as sight. There is a way of trying to see spider webs when hunting for them, a slight defocusing of the eyes onto a nearer plane in the search for the giveaway glints and catches of light that betray the almost but not quite invisible presence of fresh gossamer.

I’ve been collecting wild webs from in between rails and bringing them back to the lab in preperation for another cycle of tissue culture.

My methodology is crude to say the least, but it works. I’m using cable ties to make loops that I capture the frames with. I’ve also invited anyone else to collect webs and to send them to me, so if you’d like to contribute, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

On one of the webs I accidentally caught a spider which I was unsuccessful in releasing

 The next stage will be to sterilise them and then to decide how best to culture onto them and which cells. Most likely I’ll try to culture each cell line individually onto the silks and then some co-cultures.

Perhaps some in liquid media and some on agar.

We’re also going to make some biopsies from chick embryos and tissue culture with them, possibly onto the silks.

These two images were taken of 5 mm glass cover slips dropped carefully onto webs inside a rotten tree trunk. The idea of installing cover slips into web structures was inspired by versions that Mel Grant initiated and made last year. Mel suggested trying this method to see if the spider would create further silken threads on or around the cover slips. More than anything I found the combination of glass and silk thread elements and structures fascinating.

 The upper image is a large web made in Cultivamos Cultura in August this year.

The lower image is a large piece of Venetian lace from the 17th century from the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection.

The lace piece had several rips and repairs in it’s ground, one repair which can be seen here in the bottom left. These damaged ares and repairs across the collection appear like wounds, scarbs and scars,  the altered darned textures of the lace stand out like the altered architecture of wound tissue in skin. I wondered about returning to the collection and making an investigation of these wounds and scars in the textiles.

Of course the etymology of textile and tissue is the latin L. textura “web, texture, structure,” from stem of textere “to weave,” from PIE base *tek- “to make”, tek being the route of techné - technique, technology.

 webs from Canon Hill Park which I cross during my walk from where I currently live to the University of Birmingham .

Last week I made a short visit to Cultivamos Cultura  in the Alentejo region of Portugal. It’s a new initiative that has been  created by Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scientist Luis Graca towards fostering and developing shared knowledges in science, technology and contemporary art.

 My brief visit was to get a flavour of the place and it’s possibilities so that I can make a more protracted visit next year.

The main building has several outhouses attached to it which have laid disused for some time, so a glorious collection of spider webs have accumulated. I became fascinated by the webs and took many photos some of which you can see here.

Farm Fountain

US artists Ken Renaldo and Amy Young made the centres an inaugeral residency for two weeks and within that time created this wonderful sculpture and installation Farm Fountain, images of which you can see here.

It’s a circuit of different living systems around the stucture of a fountain. A solar powered pump  circulates water up from the pond and into the grid of plants. The water is used by the plants and also filtered through the terracotta beads in the plant containers desceneding through the plant grid and back into the fish pond.

On their Flickr site they write:

Farm Fountain was started in our studio 2 years ago as an indoor ecosystem and local food production artwork that we hope others will reproduce. Info and instructions for the home version are available online at farmfountain.com

When I visited Marta topped up the plants, as the weather was so terrifically hot the system requited some human help. There were some great red chillis growing and a fragrant and delicious chocolate mint.