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 ”This writing is all just fake (copied from other writing) so you should go away and not read any of it.”

Kathy Acker, “Translations of the Diaries of Laure The Schoolgirl”, p. 104, Hannibal Lecter My Father, Semiotext(e).

A series of private ‘actions’ of the copying by hand onto laboratory filter paper a science research paper published in 1994 called ‘The Effects of Fibroblast Growth Factors in Long-Term Primary Culture of Dystrophic (MDX) Mouse Muscle Myoblasts’, written by Janet Smith and Paul N. Schofield.Although it’s not strictly a transcription,it is meant to play on the trans or crossing from one mode of knowledge to another, or one disciplinary area into another. In my case, as a non scientist engaged in artist practice in a highly sophisticated bioscientific context, my taking a form of that knowledge through a personal, explicitly performative and embodied process perhaps produces and maybe acknowledges some of the knowledges that get omitted from the conventions of the science paper. My digestion of knowledge by the writing. The simultaneous flickerings of readings and writing involved in transcribings.Or at least that’s the theory. The actual writing out of, the practice and process will yield some unknowables.

The use of transcription is also a punning of the biological process of the same name in which an RNA copy is synthesised from DNA, leading to gene expression. Highly relevant when discussing a genetic disease like Muscular Dystrophy. The play of words within genetics that relate to linguistics, speech acts and acts of writing makes me curious. This was initially sparked by Janet’s lab meeting white board drawings, in which she drew a cells interaction and intractions across it’s membrane borders, demonstrating it’s relations with it’s immediate environment and how that plays out within and without. She also demonstrated the transcription processes. Witnessing these action drawing, spatial and temporal, revealed many of the subtleties of her highly nuanced area of expertise.My copying actions are inspired by a few sources; one is Monica Ross’s 2001 performance of the coping of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) by Walter Benjamin. See http://www.justfornow.net/Another is the glorious post punk US avant guarde writer Kathy Acker who melded many source texts together in a kind of cut up practice. An early method given to her by her creative writing teacher David Antin was ‘don’t be afraid to copy it out,’ to find it in a book and work with that. ‘See Death (and Life) of the Author, Peter Wollen on Kathy Acker, London review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n03/peter-wollen/death-and-life-of-the-authorMatthew Goulish, US performance maker and writer who writes‘My writing involves rearranging, altering, adding to, subtracting from, the words of those who came before. I did not invest this method. I copied the idea of copying.’10.2 In Memoriam to Kathy Acker, Writing live writing deathp 117, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance.Routledge. London and New York, 2000.Another would be the generative writing/drawing practices of Jordan McKenzie, who as used many approaches to writing to reveal, disclose and translate texts into drawing practices. For example Palimpsests see http://www.jordanmckenzie.co.uk/palimpsest.htmBarthes, Joseph Kosuth, Fluxus and many more.Slips of tongues and absent mindednesses.My approach is crude but I think its downstream issues might generate something interesting. Including the mistakes (mutations) and absent-minded flaws the transcriptions will produce. The idea of moving something through my very own physicality, digesting so to speak is perhaps another way of tying understand and come into an explicit relationship with.

The 8th Theses

When telling Jennifer Willet about the proposed action to write out research papers including Janet’s 1994 paper, she reminded me of Benjamin’s One-Way Street, The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen ThesesVIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.retrieved on 14th Oct 2009 from here.

Also referencing Monica Ross referencing Benjamin. Just for Now.

But actually my version is less a seeking for inspiration and more a wish to move though the body, my body, ’scientific discourse’ and to find ways to write back into it and around and in it’s margins. Jennifer and I discussed paper, what to write on - and where? My sketch book, a Muji notebook, brown wrapping, paper, acid free print makers paper? Each material surface creates a set of knots to the text and the actions, as doe the where? 

* And there is a footnote about getting taxis and suicide and tissue culture.

fertilised egg shell shattered and spilt the 3 day old embryo.

opened up egg showing a 5 day embryo in the top left hand corner

 DISSECTIONS:

Shots taken through the black dark room curtain that cloisters the window of the door of the ‘room of appearances’ or the tissue culture room that is part of Janet Smith’s lab and where I work.This room has been very carefully conceived and considered by Janet, it’s feel and tone altogether different from the other tissue culture labs I’ve been in.

St Veronica wiped the bloodied face of Christ on calvery, her veil took up his imprint and some centuries down the line, she became the patron saint of photography. The blackness of the darkroom curtain of course absorbs all light, all appearances, it cannot reflect back but is the negative and this case the occulting figure in the camera obscura (dark room), the obscurer. The play between light and dark, development and appearance often seems analogous to the appearance and development of the cultures that are cultivuated within - and to the technologies of appearance that are used to display and interpret cellular and molecular information. From microscopy, to histology staining, to western blots. Exploitations of lucida be it optical, objective, fluorescence, antibodies, bioluminescence. 

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.

I will make a new version of inthewrongplaceness for the opening of sk-interfaces  at Casino Luxembourg, the action will be photographed and the documents will be exhibited in the space for the remainder of the exhibition.

26 September 2009 - 10 January 2010
(opening Friday 25 September 2009)
SK–INTERFACES

Art Orienté objet, Maurice Benayoun, Zane Berzina, Critical Art Ensemble, Wim Delvoye, Olivier Goulet, Eduardo Kac, Antal Lakner, Yann Marussich, Kira O’Reilly, Zbigniew Oksiuta, ORLAN, Philippe Rahm,  Julia Reodica, Donald Rodney, Stelarc, Jun Takita, The Office of Experiments, The Tissue Culture & Art Project, Sissel Tolaas, Paul Vanouse

Skin is our natural interface to the world – but it is progressively being replaced by technological extensions, some of which can have liberating, other rather new restrictive, effects. The trans-disciplinary exhibition SK–INTERFACES presents about 20 international artists who question the ways in which today’s techno-sciences alter our relation to the world: digital technologies, architecture, tissue cultures, transgenesis, self-experiments or telepresence – the artists appropriate these methods and explore the permeability between disciplines and between art and science. Their interfaces connect us with different species, destabilise our definition of being human today and reflect on the question of satellite bodies.

The exhibition SK–INTERFACES at Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, curated by Jens Hauser, is the extended continuation of a project organised for the European Capital of Culture 2008 at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool.

A number of performances will accompany the exhibition.
Curator: Jens Hauser
in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) Liverpool

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.

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.

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.

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.