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.

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’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

Here is a beautiful little video of blood cells forming. It’s part of a general circulation of ideas that are being provoked here in the residency at the School of Biosciences. I came across whilst reading an article in The Scientist about how physical, mechanical forces contribute to blood cell formation. The beat of the heart helps form blood stem cells. This relationship between physical force and cell development is something Janet has also spoken about regarding muscle cell forming. Janet suggested we look at patch clamping which I’d never heard of before but effectively it allows an electrical current to be measured. Here and here are other links to articles about it.

This is also the case with muscle cell formation. I was reminded of a conversation with Adam Zaretsky whilst in Mexico during which he suggested putting muscle cell culture under physical stresses, or in his words, get them to do yoga - knowing that I am a regular yoga practitioner. So I’m reviving that idea in conversations with Janet. It reminds me of other kinds of stress forces artists and scientists have worked with, including Adam who trialed the Humperdink Effect caused by playing Engelbert Humperdink to bacteria for two days.

The patch clamp thinking also came whilst talking about working with muscle and gold. I’m interested to work with gold and cell culture and have been for a while. Mel Grant and I hope to place gold particles into fat cells and I wondered about culturing muscle onto gold. Mel sent me this paper on embedding particles within cells without disrupting their membranes. And colloidal gold.

The culturing onto gold has been stirring for a while, I had a discussion with Cait, a PhD candidate in chemical engineering who is culturing e-coli onto gold, also I took a look at Paul Thomas’ Midas Project in which he cultures skin cells onto gold. Here is a paper on culturing skeletal muscle cells onto a gold surface. The paper identifies the applications for tissue engineering and architectures between the conductive organic and non organic materials.

The gold fat cell project makes a play between metaphors and materials, preciousness and scale. One possible cell type to use is the cell line: 3T3 L1, derived from 3T3, fibroblasts, or connective tissue. It’s an adipose like cell line, or a fat like cell, a model as it were. Fat cells can also be developed from muscle stem cell, there is a molecular switch that can cause the developmental cascade of a myoblast (muscle stem cell) on a muscle cell formation pathway (myogenic)  to switch to a fat cell pathway (adipogenic).

Here’s a reverse view and anti fat application>

Note to self: look up MyoD (muscle regulatory factor - MRF) and PPA gamma - important in the expression of genes for muscle formation.

What often happens when I’m in the School of Biosciences is that I get lots of tiny bits of wonderful information, quick and concise lectures on molecular biology, genetics, developmental biology, anatomy biochemistry etc. that I partially understand but have no real context for. The good thing about that is it allows me to dance with allot of ideas, the obvious shortcoming is that I have no mastery of any of these knowledges. I grab bits of information from conversations and papers, and from practical work in the lab, which I never do enough of but I potter along with nonetheless. The discussions get cut up with references to books in particular, films and art works. For example Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, his idiosyncratic scientist De Selby who’s experiments occupy a subtext of pages of footnotes,  Alfred Jarry and paterphysics, Angela Carter, Laurence Sterne, Marina Warner, Alice Oswald, Judith Butler, Joan Roughgarden, Walter Benjamin and the list goes on.

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.

There’s an interesting article in this weeks New Scientist on DIY biotech, Genetic Manipulation Now Becoming A Hobby, see here

It mentions DIYbio who support amateur and DIY biotech culture online and off. They pool some great info like how to make your own lo-fi, domestic gel electrophoresis box, more info on that here.

Artists including Oron Catt from Tissue Culture & Art Project, Phil Ross, Paul Vanouse, Critical Art Ensemble, Natalie Jeremijenko,  and Heath Bunting have negotiated complex and intriguing navigations of research and development of biological media and art across the borders of the research institution/non-institutional spheres, or have postioned their making outside of the often inaccessable traditional science space. This has included running workshops that give the principles of how to build your own sterile hood for tissue culture work - and the Locus Plus published Creative Biotechnology: A User’s Manual.

Speaking of which, the science researcher I currently work with, Janet Smith, mentioned a DIY incubator for tissue culture work, We’re going to get some plans together to post here.

INTERACTIVOS 09: Garage Science Workshop-Seminar

nteractivos?’09: Garage Science takes place from January 28  through February 14, 2009

With the participation of Critical Art Ensemble, Julian Bleecker and Natalie Jeremijenko

and with the advice of Antonio Lafuente

An International Workshop-Seminar that includes an intensive project development workshop (January 28 through February 14, 2009) and a seminar with lectures and public theoretical works presentations (January 28 and 29, 2009).

Garage Science

The socialization of technology and the accessibility of information available on the Web make it increasingly easy for anyone to have the possibility of building a home laboratory. Garage science is nothing new but home laboratories are connected now more than ever before. There are home laboratories of all kinds: technology factories, chemistry or biology labs, artists’ studios, places to rehearse, etc.

These home laboratories have a worldwide scope via the Web, which serves as a space for the dissemination of projects and the exchange of knowledge and techniques. These online communities are accompanied by a proliferation of onsite events, such as dorkbots, barcamps and hackmeetings, where people who only knew each other via the Web can meet face to face and share their achievements and experiences.

The communities formed this way provide citizens with the capacity to develop scientific-technical knowledge comparable to what is produced in the major laboratories. “Citizen science” can serve to explore questions such as: How are the foods we eat made? What possibilities exist in biogenetic research? What is the code that makes the machines we use work? How are those machines manufactured? Based on this knowledge, experimental and critical formulations and objects can be produced proposing new paths and goals in these fields.

Interactivos?’09 aims to explore these practices, where art, science and technology meet. We invite the participants to turn medialab into a garage laboratory where low-cost, accessible materials are used to develop objects and installations that combine software, hardware and biology. There’s license to fail!

Garage Science, by Critical Art Ensemble

Garage science is a term filled to the brim with utopian possibilities; however, unlike similar utopian rhetorical flourishes the form of production it describes can actually have a revolutionary impact on the material landscape of everyday life. At it’s most grandiose, garage science is associated with visionary eccentrics and next-level hackers that have changed the world. The light bulb, radioactivity, antibiotics, the synthesizer, the personal computer, etc. all began to some degree as home projects. Such revolutionary outcomes may not be probable, but they certainly are possible.

But even from a more quotidian perspective, there is every reason to pursue garage science. Before the Reagan Revolution began undermining it, public science was actually encouraged in the US—even by the government (although sometimes for cynical reasons). Numerous journals, magazines, and science supply houses catered to the sizable amateur public anxious to engage new scientific knowledge systems, materials, and processes. The effect was the creation of a citizenry knowledgeable enough about scientific developments—and more importantly, their application in the public sphere—that they were quite capable of intelligently participating in the politics of science.

Needless to say, when the neoliberals took power, they quickly realized this democratic form of politics had to be stopped, and the easiest way to kill it was to halt all forms of amateur science. They believed that knowledge development and management should be handled by small groups of “experts” who shared the ideological values of neoliberalism so that knowledge and its application could be controlled solely from the top down. After thirty years, neoliberal dismantling of the public education system and elimination of amateur science has reached such a point that the public now finds itself dependent on the ‘experts.’ Moreover, it finds plausible the idea that anyone doing science outside the institutions of the experts must be doing it for some nefarious reason.

For Critical Art Ensemble, part of our struggle has been to establish science as a popular site for cultural intervention, and to thereby contribute to a pedagogy that empowers people to challenge the experts, to become active participants in the politics of knowledge of the scientific and techno-spheres, and to expand the possibilities for cultural production into scientific disciplines.

 In the lab I am surrounded by people spending allot of time in (wild, wild) Western Blot production, making smudgy representations that indicate the presence or absence of specific proteins with the help of antibody markers. Moving tiny amounts of colourless liquid around in the search of the miniscule sub cellular agents that are the nuts of bolts of molecular biology reuires serious attention to methods of detection and revelation.

See here for a great page on the ‘what is’ - skip the audio though, it’s wonderfully unhelpful.

http://www.molecularstation.com/protein/western-blot/

The horseradish bit comes at the very end of the process, there’s an enzyme in the horseradish root called Horseradish peroxidase that allows for Enhanced Chemiluminescence - it generates light. It binds with the anitbody that binds to the protein you want to detect, the light is a signal - which can be developed - like a chemical photo - establishing a visual trace which can be read - to the consternation or delight of the scientist out there blotting in the lawless land of the west. I cannot help wondering if it’s the same tricky enzyme that blows the top of my head off when I eat the stuff neat with blood sausage - I just love it and have been moved to tears by it’s intensity, especially with blood sausage. I wish it was possible to buy the root in shops here in the UK rather than heavily diluted sauces, but I’m told it grows wild everywhere - I’ve yet to master recognising and harvesting it.  Actually a quick Wikipedia glance tells me that the crown blowing/sinus exlopsion substance is of course not the same enzyme, the herbivore defence effect is from Allyl isothiocyanate CHCH₂NCS + KCl. Not to be deterred I see no harm in a bit of horseradish consumption before during and after a Western Blot protocol. It can’t hurt .(“I might as well spit in it,” I overhead one chap say when his blots refused to display the protein he was on the hunt for, and  it sure has a definite a lo-fi appeal  as a method for creating a visceral enzymatic intervention.)

Nowadays most of the stuff needed is bought commercially, in kits, or otherwise, commercially synthesised and acquired. However there was a time when alot more of these materials, antibodies for instance, would be developed in the lab, on one hand making things alot more time consuming, however it also meant that these practices and enquiries exisited outsde of commercial economies and their drivers. As Prof. Alaistair Strain put it, we “used to share stuff we made, not buy it”.