”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:

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.

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.

In early March 2009, Nicolas Primat died in Toulouse aged 42.

Read an appreciation of his life and art practice on The Arts Catalyst website.

My deepest sympathy to his family and friends.

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.

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.

Photo credit, Elina Chauveaux
Non human animal, Deliah.
Cornerhouse, Manchester, 23rd - 24th January, 2009.

Gradually falling asleep with a pig is coming into being here at Cornerhouse. Tomorrow, the pig, Deliah, will arrive at Cornerhouse. Today, the finishing of the installation is being made in the gallery.

A transitory dwelling structure has been designed and made for both of us, primarily with piggy requirements in mind. Whilst observing the many rules, regulations and guidelines that regulate the movement, care and public interaction with livestock, it is also deliberately quoting the modernist white cube gallery vocabulary in obvious ways, white and minimal. It’s occupants - human and non human animal will be contained by it’s boundaries which will also frame, literally and metaphorically how we come into relation with eachother and how that might be informed and read by the position of the viewer.

I’m in some trepidation about it all, as the questions I have that I am curious and motivated by are also the ones that trouble me about this work. Fundamentally the use of a non consensual, non human animal in a work, another kind of ‘consumption’ perhaps - albeit one that attempts to undo and reveal it’s own mechanisms, dynamics and politics. My ambivalence is one that is active and dynamic, not a sitting on the fence but a purposeful and experientical engagement with an investigation. Is this the right forum for an inquiry - I do not know. I am hoping that the viewer will bring their own responsibility - i.e. capacity to respond, into their thinking, being and process around the work. I am also curious about the precise and careful context the other works bring to eachother and the audiences very different possibilities of coming into being with the works, for example Beatriz de Costa’s Pigeon Blog which is adjacent to falling asleep with a pig.