I find myself in the privileged position of being able to list four new publications that have recently included my work. My great thanks to all involved.

Art + Science Now by Stephen Wilson and published by Thames and Hudson, features an image of my work Wet Cup (2000) photographed by Manuel Vason in the Human Biology Chapter.

Art + Science Now is a groundbreaking overview of the art being made at the cutting edge of scientific research. The first illustrated book in its field, it shows how some of the worlds most dynamic art is being produced not in museums, galleries and studios but in the laboratory, where artists probe cultural, philosophical and social questions connected with scientific and technological advances. Featuring the work of around 250 artists from the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the USA, Japan and elsewhere, it presents a broad range of projects, from body art to bioengineering of plants and insects, from music, dance and computer-controlled video performances to large-scale visual and sound installations. This comprehensive guide to contemporary art inspired or driven by scientific innovation points to intriguing new directions for the visual arts and traces a key strand in 21st-century aesthetics.

Here is a link to slide shows of the artists from Art + Science Now.

Marina Abramovic + The Future of Performance Art, edited by Paula Orrell and published by Prestel, includes photographs by Marco Anelli of  Stair Falling (2009), made for Marina Abramovic Presents . . . , Whitworth Gallery, Manchester International Festival, 2009.

Abramovic’s remarkable career as one of her generations most challenging performance artists has paved the way for younger artists who are interested in this complex and often radical art form. Lately Abramovic has turned her attention to exploring ways to encapsulate the art from after the performance is physically completed. This project explores the diversity of contemporary performance from exciting new artists from around the world. Their use of story telling, virtual worlds, audience participation, sound and body are documented in this illustrated volume. An interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist with Abramovic outlines the challenges and goals of her new project while essays by leading curators in the filed of performance art explore methods for preserving this unique art form.

The Many Headed Monster, by Joshua Sofaer and published by Live Art Development Agency.

The Many Headed Monster is an original and inventive resource for anyone interested in contemporary performance practices and their relationships with audiences. Across a range of artistic disciplines, artists are dealing with audiences in innovative and creative ways, placing the audience at the heart of their work. Contemporary culture is marked by the emancipation of the spectator and the transformation of the audience from passive recipient to active participant. The Many Headed Monster is a critical and practical resource investigating what is at stake for audiences today when they attend a live event.

The Many Headed Monster is a boxed set containing a lecture complete with presentation instructions, extended notes and author’s commentaries, a dvd of 22 performance works by leading UK and international artists, and 50 full colour image cards.

Ephemera:  Between Archival Objects and Events, by Paul Clarke and Julian Warren,  Journal of the Society of Archivists, Volume 30, Issue 1 April 2009

Abstract:

This article re-stages on the page a dialogue between Arnolfini’s archivist and the research fellow on ‘Performing the Archive: The Future of the Past’, which took place at the interdisciplinary conference Archive Fever/Archive Fervour (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, July 2008). This conference promoted opportunities for archivists and academics ‘to discuss the ways in which both fields intersect and to explore the ways in which mutual co-operation can benefit their future development’. Their dialogue started from two provocations put to one another:

‘How do performances remain? How do they produce traces, or document themselves?’
‘How do documents perform and are archives performative; what do they do?’

Their responses interrogate the discreteness of the archive, the documents contained within, and the performance events that are its objects; questioning the distinction between acts of performance, documenting, archiving and using archives. In the context of this dialogue, ‘ephemera’ refers both to passing moments—the temporality of event-based art—and its residues. In the case of performance, the artwork cannot be collected as an original object, only traces, such as memory and ephemera, remain. The article presents a conversation between theoretical positions and practical propositions, made with materials selected from the holdings of both the Live Art and Arnolfini archives.

Patrick Duggan has very kindly sent me a copy of this article and interview with me which I have made available here: dugganthe-touch-and-the-cut.pdf

It was published in 2009 in Studies in Theatre and Performance, Volume 29, No 3 by Intellect.

The Adam Zaretsky conceived and realised Vivo Arts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. Stills taken during the series of actions made in the V.A.S.T.A.L. Glovebox, at Waag and  Stedelijk museum Bouwkeet on tour 2009

THE GLOVEBOX - BODY ART LAB from giuliana videopirate on Vimeo.

The VASTAL Virginarium is a six person Glove Box artistically designed by Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday for Bioart Laboratories and public performances, which revolve around cultural interpretive issues of purity, sterility and cleanliness. Much like a sterile hood used in biology for pure culture technique, this glove box has Positive air pressure.

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The VASTAL Virginarium Is a Collaborative Cultural Containment Stage For:
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Sterile Field Inter-Public Body Art Performances

Various performance artists will be ritually cleansed and enter the Glove Box one or two at a time. Various performance artists take turns in the box interacting with the public or other actors reaching into them with the gloves. This is experimental Body Art with a Biological theme that references experiments, lab animals, the pure and the impure as well as the distance (or presumed distance) that objectivity implies. A glove box is a techno-purified place, but as an artistic/creative aseptic arena, the VASTAL Virginarium is purely for cultural production. It represents a return to ourselves as animals, experiments, faulty and in disarray but also as changeable and in process.
There is ultimately no absolute chastity or true cleanliness, passage is from one form to another into another again. But, through emulation of purification and altered versions of artistic isolation we will try to help garnish public acceptance of the imperfectability of living in this uterine world.

Design Credits:
Adam Zaretsky and Mason Juday

The artists brought together by Adam Zaretsky were:

Kira O’Reilly
WARBEAR
Jeanette Groenendaal
Zoot Derks
Boryana Rossa
Oleg Mavromatti
Sarah Hamilton
Jennifer Willet

See:
http://www.vastal.eu
http://waag.org/news/52789
http://vastal.waag.org/?page_id=357
http://waag.org/news/61188

all photography by Axel Heise

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

curated by Jens Hauser.

Casino Luxembourg.

The Ron Athey and Lee Adams curatorial vision that is Visions of Excess* was presented at the International Performance Art Festival, Warehouse 9, Copenhagen. Smaller in scale than usual it featured Lee Adams, Lazlo Pearlman, Mouse, Dominic Johnson and myself, and fitted perfectly into the beautifully orchestrated festival. The rest of the festival  included Del LaGrace Volcano, Nao Bustamante, Narcissister and Niko Raes.

See here for video stills from the entire festival including more from my own Bureau of Decayed Visions/collective DNA extraction.

Small amounts of  body tissue was collected from self electing members of the audience. Conversations made up a great part of it and somehow they informed the mix as well. My attire was both glamerous hostess and and show girl, black feathers and vast expanses of tulle. The organic materials were blended together and a lo-tech DNA protocol was performed using only ingrediants form the supermarket and the bar. The subsequent extraction contained in a plastic tube, was then held inside me by me as I inverted myself upside down and became a human repository, holder or perhaps incubator for this collective material coding. My work merged with Dominic Johnson’s performance Transmission, he came out of his installation covered in earth, blood and glitter and performed the placing of the test tube into my vagina as I disappeared under my tulle skirt.

all video stills by Nans Leiding.

A most heartfelt thanks to all at Warehouse 9 especially Miss Fish and Christian, Bernardo Verchelli.

And a special thank you to Dominic Johnson and our first artistic collaborative venture.

Thanks you as ever to Lee Adams and Ron Athey, it’s privilege to be included within the transformative dimensions you invoke

*communion with the ragged spirit of Georges Bataille, exploring the “scatological philosophers” key themes of death, eroticism and the forbidden. 

This is a small selection from the Webskin series. It is a development form the Finger webs which I did by myself when collecting webs and used my point and shoot camera.

For these Mel Grant and I visited a friend of Mels here in Birmingham, Laura Hunt who has a copious amount of spider webs in her garage.I wanted to see if I could improve on the Finger Webs series with the help of a better camera. I also wanted to try out placing webs between joints like my elbow.

All photographs taken by Melissa Grant.

IN a couple of emails I wrote

I rather like the girly delicacy of them - although I don’t want to make Cocteau Twins album covers - I don’t want to loose any bite!

I do like the suggestion of stocking tops, the hairs on my skin which mimic the hairs on the spiders and all of that stuff about hairy femininities, - you know how glossy and super airbrushed mainstream super femme body is, so I like the up too close and personal of the saggy skin of my body and the saggy skin of the webs on it.

Surfaces layers. it makes me think about an Oz based artist Paul Thomas talking about those covert spaces inbetween body and clothing. I like the idea of them being set against the profound beauty and implicit violence of the egg/embryo and the holding technologies of the cable ties. Like riffling though a private chest of drawers in someones bedroom and finding unexpected transmorgrifying indeterminant objects in the discreet domestic, maybe if Cronenburg met Angela Carter. We did the shoot at Mels’ friend Lauras’ who is a secondary school teacher. She is currently marking essays that touch on the gothic, so we were discussing Dracula and Angela Carter of whom she is a big fan (as am I). So it was rather lovely to have these literary conversations and references of the mutable and destabilised against the performing of those concepts.

I’m also reminded of the web being an extension of the spiders tactile zone, it’s delicate hairs sense the threads movements as they vibrate and move. The hairs on my arms function similarly but are amplified with the extreme delicacy of the webs and the cold that creates goose bumps and erect hair follicles. This working with layering and spanning on my own skin creates an extended meshing of these ideas of super fine touch and a distributed sense of self and selfing, both entirely responsive and entirely indivisible  from my environment. Felt textures and textual feelings  form a inter and intra mergings.

The punning on felt is another story. Mel, who is a great crafts person and makes alot of felt,  has suggested we try and create some felt with spider silk.

I posted these images onto Facebook where there is a very lovely circulation of thoughts, support and resonance between my work and that of UK based artist Liz Atkin, and US based academic, theorist and writer Eva Hayward and I.

Jennifer Willet and Kira O’Reilly (2009). Photographer: Bernd Bohm.

With special thanks to Adam Zaretsky who conceived and realised the glovebox and initiated the invitation and opportunity for us to use it.  Thanks also to WAAG Society who supported and facilitated the venure: http://www.waag.org/news/6019

My own very particular thanks to Jennifer who invited me to collaborate with her again on our second photographic series. She was also responsible for some of the fundraising that supported my visit to Amsterdam as was the case with our previous collaboration. Both situations emerged from a convergence of methods in our respective practices of similar visual and performative methodologies with respect to our presences and activities within the laboratory and the biosciences. But equally both methodologies have developed from somewhat different processes and discourses but with very similar sets of concerns. These lively convergences and divergences of thoughts, actions and language are largely what allow and create such a layered set of meanings in our brief encounters in the actual period of making. Several years of professional dialogue and friendship beginning whilst both artists in residence in SymbioticA and continuing despite very brief periods of actually seeing one another laid a foundation for these works. 

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 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