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:

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

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.

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.

The SPILL Salons are informal events that are intended to allow people to engage with some of the strands of practice and thematics presented during the festival.

Salon 2
Monday 13th April
3 – 5 pm,
The Edge, Soho Square.

Feasts
Food and eating as cultural, political, economic and social practices; celebratory, sensory, perceptual, feasts and feasting will be explored as an entry point to digest SPILL’s multitude of courses. Archaeologist Martin Jones will discuss how humans first came to share food and the ways in which the human meal has developed since that time and how our culture of feasting has had far-reaching consequences for human social evolution. Australia artist Boo Chapple will talk about her art project Hand to Mouth and it examination of means of production, economies and waste, UK based artist John O’Shea will introduce Meat Licence, an artistic intervention into meat consumption, legislation and ethics of meat production.

Bioethicist Andy Miah references falling asleep with a pig in reference to his new publication Human Futures.

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,

 OPEN FORUM: ANIMALS IN ART

Wed 11 February 17:00

Accompanies Interspecies

As Animal Studies continues to grow as a focal point of academic enquiry, this forum looks to open up discussion around the question of animals in art and delve deeper into the underlying concept of our current exhibition Interspecies. There will be an open panel discussion and plenty of opportunity for you to debate, as we consider the representation or role of animals in contemporary visual art, performance and literature.

Chaired by curator Rob La Frenais, panel speakers will include Matthew Fuller (Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths), Robert McKay (School of English, University of Sheffield), Nicholas Ridout (Department of Drama, Queen Mary University London) and Steve Baker (Emeritus Professor of Art History, UCLan).

and me contributing to the panel discussion.

More information here: Forum text

image from video work by Ruth Maclennan featured in INTERSPECIES.