Kira O’Reilly (inthewrongplacesness, 2006), 2008

Graphite & watercolor on paper, 24 x 18 inches

Carrie Young writes:

In 2006 I did a performance piece with three other women. We danced around on stage wearing dirndls, doing the Chicken Dance, then peed on stage. The only way I got the courage to perform was by doing the whole thing wearing an animal mask. I was traumatized by the experience, not least because I was the only one of the four dancers who DIDN’T get performance anxiety (i.e. I was the only one who was able to pee; the other women just squatted in vain).

 The series of drawings “(My) Performance Anxiety” is about my conflicted relationship to performance art: on the one hand, it terrifies me (both as performer and as spectator), and on the other, I have an incredible amount of respect for and am inspired by women performance artists. In the drawings I project my shame and anxiety about performance art on to the images of famous feminist performance artists by placing animal masks on their faces. The simple, gestural drawings are a way of expressing or working through both my reverence for the artists I depict, and my feelings of personal inadequacy for not being brave enough to perform without wearing a mask. The colorful, playful mask neutralizes or makes comical work that, in its original context, was revolutionary, confrontational, and irreverent, thereby underscoring the importance of the women’s bare faces encountering and interacting with the audience.

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.

See here for a really interesting interview with Adam Zaretsky - on the very excellent blog We Make Money Not Art

On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in Cambridge. His influential and controversial address on the subject of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ condemned the widening gap of knowledge and understanding between ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘natural scientists’.

Fifty years on, The London Consortium is bringing together the Science Museum, Tate Modern, the Wellcome Trust and Birkbeck, University of London, in a three-day conference. The conference will consider whether Snow’s critique has been addressed by the increase in multi-disciplinary work and research and the emergence of new cultural forms. Have the distinctions between and within the two cultures become further entrenched? How have the terms of the debate changed?

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.