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

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.

Kira O’Reilly (inthewrongplacesness, 2006), 2008

Graphite & watercolor on paper, 24 x 18 inches

Carrie Young writes:

In 2006 I did a performance piece with three other women. We danced around on stage wearing dirndls, doing the Chicken Dance, then peed on stage. The only way I got the courage to perform was by doing the whole thing wearing an animal mask. I was traumatized by the experience, not least because I was the only one of the four dancers who DIDN’T get performance anxiety (i.e. I was the only one who was able to pee; the other women just squatted in vain).

 The series of drawings “(My) Performance Anxiety” is about my conflicted relationship to performance art: on the one hand, it terrifies me (both as performer and as spectator), and on the other, I have an incredible amount of respect for and am inspired by women performance artists. In the drawings I project my shame and anxiety about performance art on to the images of famous feminist performance artists by placing animal masks on their faces. The simple, gestural drawings are a way of expressing or working through both my reverence for the artists I depict, and my feelings of personal inadequacy for not being brave enough to perform without wearing a mask. The colorful, playful mask neutralizes or makes comical work that, in its original context, was revolutionary, confrontational, and irreverent, thereby underscoring the importance of the women’s bare faces encountering and interacting with the audience.

The new research at the school of Biosciences commenced this week with very gradual effort on my part to reacquaint myself with the lab. Janet (Dr. Smith, my collaborator) left me some cells to practice basic tissue culture on. They are are cell line called PD50A cells. They are muscle cells “mdx-derived skeletal muscle cell line labeled with a retrovirus conferring beta-galactosidase activity and G418 resistance (PD50A)” cited from here. Curiously, PD50A is also the number of a plasma TV model.

I’ve just taken a good long look at them and sub cultured them.

Looking at cells is part of my learning. Cell culture is similar to gardening in that it is proactive and responsive. Initiating situations and then responding to them as they develop - cultivation. I’m curious about the cells morphology and how this might suggest when to feed them (change their nutriant media) and when to sub culture them. Sub culturing is dividing a population of cells into smaller amounts.  Normally it is done when cells are confluent, or “carpeting” the bottom of the tissue culture flask.  My cells are slow growers, they’d made a 60% effort, so I split them anyway, into different population densities to see what they’ll do.

1:10, 3:10, 5:10

(Perhaps I should of gone for a Fibonacci sequence.)

This kind of information is possibly useful to me even at the crude level I am  working at, as I get to manouver around the lab, refresh my aseptic technique and to ponder. Also I hope I acquire some working and thinking knowlege towards what kinds of cell populations might like to grow on spider silk structures. What kind of environments and conditions might encourage such a situation?

Interestingly and wonderfully, a group in Hanouver have made studies towards using spider silk for nerve regeneration purposes. See the abstract here.

Looking down the microscope also reminds me that I want to use drawing as a method of thinking. Janet and I discussed constructing a camera lucida as a way to both study cells and to generate drawing practices. There is a particular kind of thinking that occurs withing the space of drawing when drawing is being made as an investigatory, research practice.