Click here to download the new PIG edition of Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.It includes a feature on my work inthewrongplaceness.The cover is an image by Astrid Kogler, from the series, The Pig Trilogy,  2007 © Astrid Kogler.Antennae is in it’s 3rd year of production, it is free, no advertising, non-profit and non funded, so please consider making a donation.

all photography by Axel Heise

sk-interfaces, Exploding Borders in Art, Technology ad Society,

curated by Jens Hauser.

Casino Luxembourg.

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:

These are recordings of small actions of trying to capture spider webs between my fingers to create connections between my skin, it’s topography and the silken structures. I was also thinking about gaps, bridges, spannings, attachments. Alot of nothing and alot of something.

I took the photos of my left hand with my right hand with my trusty point and shoot Canon A480 & I haven’t done anything except crop them. 

Another person taking the photos with an SLR - and some delicate photoshoping would improve the precision of viewing the filigree threads attachments to the skin terrains.

However I’m pleased with them as small performative enquiries that allow me to move between scale, different focus, orientations and notions of body. These actions very particularly work with touch and the felt as well as sight. There is a way of trying to see spider webs when hunting for them, a slight defocusing of the eyes onto a nearer plane in the search for the giveaway glints and catches of light that betray the almost but not quite invisible presence of fresh gossamer.

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.

These two images were taken of 5 mm glass cover slips dropped carefully onto webs inside a rotten tree trunk. The idea of installing cover slips into web structures was inspired by versions that Mel Grant initiated and made last year. Mel suggested trying this method to see if the spider would create further silken threads on or around the cover slips. More than anything I found the combination of glass and silk thread elements and structures fascinating.

 The upper image is a large web made in Cultivamos Cultura in August this year.

The lower image is a large piece of Venetian lace from the 17th century from the Whitworth Art Gallery’s textile collection.

The lace piece had several rips and repairs in it’s ground, one repair which can be seen here in the bottom left. These damaged ares and repairs across the collection appear like wounds, scarbs and scars,  the altered darned textures of the lace stand out like the altered architecture of wound tissue in skin. I wondered about returning to the collection and making an investigation of these wounds and scars in the textiles.

Of course the etymology of textile and tissue is the latin L. textura “web, texture, structure,” from stem of textere “to weave,” from PIE base *tek- “to make”, tek being the route of techné - technique, technology.

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.