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.

and 99% cocao solid experiment with Mel Grant.

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

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

On Saturday, before I went into the lab to do tissue culture (see previous entry) I did some DIY biotech at home, using technology somewhat older than tissue culturing I baked bread using a commercially available bakers yeast. Yeast is one of the most common and undesirable contaminants in tissue culture, guaranteed to compete with the cells for the goodies in tissue culture medium it will lay havoc with the delicate cell culture ecology and destroy it. So it’s status is radically redefined between the spaces of my home kitchen and the university research lab, from essential organic componant to contaminant.

I was careful to not carry any into the tissue culture room with me on my hands or clothing however it made me very conscious of the presence of everyday airborne yeasts and as Janet later pointed out, the yeast incubator that is adjacent to her lab. There’s also a fruit fly lab next door where vast amounts of yeasty materials are cultured to as fly food. The tissue culture hood and the extended tissue culture room itself is an architecture of filtered air flows designed to keep airborne contaminants out.

I would like to culture the bread yeast and take a look at it and in doing so to explore the possibilities of third spaces, neither the domestic nor the research laboratory, where I can explore yeasts and cells cultures, for a moment suspending both of their defined framings. And perhaps to capture and cultivate some airborne yeasts. I’d like to tackle sourdough bread baking and the idea of making my own starter from yeasts in my environment appeals to the idea of local ecologies and the permeabilities we enact with organisms through our domestic practices. Perhaps I can make a wild sourdough starter from wild (?) laboratory yeasts. Janet has added beer making and compost making to the list of exhanges between domestic biotech and The Lab. She uses bokashi to break down in her kitchen to break down waste into garden nutriants.

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

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.

Claudia’s trachea, porcine trypsin, pig tales, PIG 05049, bacon sandwiches, stand ins, stand outs, flesh of my flesh, green gills, cholorphil, chora ( “imprint-bearer”), making a pigs ear of it, making an eerie pig of it,  a silk purse out of a sows ear, tea time, teary time, torn thyme, flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor, as slow as possible,

See here for a really interesting interview with Adam Zaretsky - on the very excellent blog We Make Money Not Art