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

The Ron Athey and Lee Adams curatorial vision that is Visions of Excess* was presented at the International Performance Art Festival, Warehouse 9, Copenhagen. Smaller in scale than usual it featured Lee Adams, Lazlo Pearlman, Mouse, Dominic Johnson and myself, and fitted perfectly into the beautifully orchestrated festival. The rest of the festival  included Del LaGrace Volcano, Nao Bustamante, Narcissister and Niko Raes.

See here for video stills from the entire festival including more from my own Bureau of Decayed Visions/collective DNA extraction.

Small amounts of  body tissue was collected from self electing members of the audience. Conversations made up a great part of it and somehow they informed the mix as well. My attire was both glamerous hostess and and show girl, black feathers and vast expanses of tulle. The organic materials were blended together and a lo-tech DNA protocol was performed using only ingrediants form the supermarket and the bar. The subsequent extraction contained in a plastic tube, was then held inside me by me as I inverted myself upside down and became a human repository, holder or perhaps incubator for this collective material coding. My work merged with Dominic Johnson’s performance Transmission, he came out of his installation covered in earth, blood and glitter and performed the placing of the test tube into my vagina as I disappeared under my tulle skirt.

all video stills by Nans Leiding.

A most heartfelt thanks to all at Warehouse 9 especially Miss Fish and Christian, Bernardo Verchelli.

And a special thank you to Dominic Johnson and our first artistic collaborative venture.

Thanks you as ever to Lee Adams and Ron Athey, it’s privilege to be included within the transformative dimensions you invoke

*communion with the ragged spirit of Georges Bataille, exploring the “scatological philosophers” key themes of death, eroticism and the forbidden. 

Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly (2009). Photographer: Bernd Bohm.

With special thanks to Adam Zaretsky who conceived and realised the glovebox and initiated the invitation and opportunity for us to use it.  Thanks also to WAAG Society who supported and facilitated the venure: http://www.waag.org/news/6019

My own very particular thanks to Jennifer who invited me to collaborate with her again on our second photographic series. She was also responsible for some of the fundraising that supported my visit to Amsterdam as was the case with our previous collaboration. Both situations emerged from a convergence of methods in our respective practices of similar visual and performative methodologies with respect to our presences and activities within the laboratory and the biosciences. But equally both methodologies have developed from somewhat different processes and discourses but with very similar sets of concerns. These lively convergences and divergences of thoughts, actions and language are largely what allow and create such a layered set of meanings in our brief encounters in the actual period of making. Several years of professional dialogue and friendship beginning whilst both artists in residence in SymbioticA and continuing despite very brief periods of actually seeing one another laid a foundation for these works. 

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.