”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.

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.