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One of the rules of this blog is never to make announcements of events. Every rule comes with its exceptions... The November programme of the VASTAL workshops and lectures is out! The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. is Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society's temporary research and education institute on Art and Life Sciences. It's free, open to the public and i hope you'll allow me to remind you how much we enjoy them: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop Wednesday 11 November Body Art Lecture with performance artists: Kira O'Reilly, WARBEAR, Jeanette Groenendaal and Boryana Rossa. Thursday 12 November and Saturday 14 November Body Art Lab which, i'm told, will involve blood and sex performances in the Glove Box. "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. " The Vivoarts Performance in the Glove Box, is a Mason Juday and Adam Zaretsky Production and will feature Boryana Rossa, Oleg Mavromatti, Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal and WarBear. Tuesday 17 November Animal Personality Art and Science Lecture and Lab with Dr. Kees van Oers or one of his colleagues and Koen Van Mechelen. Dr. Kees van Oers studies the genetic background, physiology and fitness consequences of variation in avian personality. In 2005 he obtained a personal VENI-grant to study the evolutionary genetics of personality using a linkage study in a natural population. This work is currently extended in collaboration with the Animal Breeding and Genomics Center in an NGI-grant on songbird genomics. Koen Vanmechelen is a Belgian conceptual artist whose work engages with issues of genetic manipulation, cloning, globalisation and multiculturalness. The artist is currently working on The Cosmopolitan Chicken project, an experiment to develop a super-hybrid chicken.
Koen Vanmechelen's The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project chickens will be installed from Nov 5 to Dec 6 at the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ in Amsterdam. Vanmechelen is also having his first solo exhibition in a U.S. gallery at Conner Contemporary Art in Washington. Featuring live chickens, the exhibition also includes taxidermy and blown-glass sculptures, video, and photography, as well as drawings and paintings in tempera made from eggs laid by chickens bred by the artist. |
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Tissue Culture Lab at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics (part 1) As promised yesterday here's a report on the Tissue Culture lab that took place on September 15 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., the temporary research and education institute set up by Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society in Amsterdam.
The Tissue Culture Lab was headed by Oron Catts of the SymbioticA and Tissue Culture & Art Project fame. In this hands-on wet lab for public practical and experiential tissue culture technique, we isolated primary tissues (mostly bone marrow, muscle and HeLa cells) in a custom-made sterile hood and then incubated them separately from their original corporeal context. but more interestingly we got to face and discuss some of the ethical issues that accompany tissue culture and the process of working with life in general.
Ours was a very basic and rough approach to tissue culture. We performed some very mundane tasks: we learnt the art of "pipetting", we mixed antibiotics, trypsin and other ingredients to create a solution that would provide cells with a body similar to the one they come from. We got to don huge green gloves and manipulate knives and tweezers. The aim of the wet lab was not to have us run our own lab. The objective of the workshop was to present the general public with the technology and the dilemmas that accompanies it. A hands-on approach takes the technology beyond a strictly scientific approach and informs the debate on the ethical, cultural and social implication of tissue culture. What does it mean to work with living, semi-living or formely living beings? What does it mean to grow disembodied cells from a former organism? What's the meaning of tissue culture for artistic purposes versus health application? Or the development of a new weapon?
Amusingly, the whole operation took place under a reproduction of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson which graces the walls of Waag's Theatrum Anatomicum room. First we worked with a recently slaughtered goat then with the HeLa cells that Adam went to fetch in Leyden and brought back in a box filled with ice. As mentioned in my previous post, Henrietta Lacks' doctor removed cells from her cervix and provided Johns Hopkins University with a sample of these cancer cells. It happened in 1951 and the patient was never asked if she'd agree to that. The HeLa cell cultures survived and multiplied so well in culture, that they were soon being shipped to research labs around the world. In 1975, the family of Henrietta Lacks learned that her cells still lived, spread all over the world. The cells are controversial. Some people gained recognition for the papers they wrote and the research they made using the cells of this young black woman, other made money with her cells, they became mere commodities but her family was never consulted and they didn't received a cent. Because we were working with the cells taken from a woman who died of cervical cancer, some participants to the lab asked whether they were safe to use. Apparently they are ok. These cells have been used throughout the world for decades without anyone being infected by them.
The only known case of a continual line of cancer cells that had outlived its original host by year is the one affecting the Devil of Tasmania. The malignant cells are transmitted from one animal to another through bites, while feeding or mating. The disease apparently began with a single sick devil, probably in the mid-1990s, that directly spread the cancer cells by biting rivals in the face and around the mouth, which is natural devil behavior. Bits of tumor break off one devil and stick in the wounds of another.
During the workshop we also learned that very few cells seem to be able to grow very well without the blood plasma of a calf. The Tissue Culture and Art Project's famous Victimless Leather jacket was fed with that blood. The irony is thus that the project was not victimless at all. The same goes for the barely edible frog steaks that required the serum from two calves in order to grow. Technology is getting better at hiding cruelty. Catts gave the example of a trip that he and Ionat Zurr made to Spain where they observed that opposition to bullfighting had intensified, but Spanish people are eating more and more at McDonald's. Taxonomical crisis. What we see now in labs is life but not life we were used to. Linné's system is still used but it had to be modified. If life isn't the same anymore, neither is the notion of death. TC&AP performs killing rituals after they've exhibited a piece in a show. They would grow a living or rather 'semi-living' piece using parts of a dead animals, then they grow it, giving the public the feeling that the new entity is living. As a result, some people complain about the 'slaughter' of an entity that used to belong to a dead body. Wonder if anyone is still following me here? There are various ways to incubate the cells. You can either use an incubator:
Or your own body. No one was up for the fleshy option. Except Adam who got Oron Catts to tape the flask containing the cells on his thorax:
One might believe at first sight that making things out of living stuff would be more environmentally-friendly but it's not. Mostly because of the colossal amount of waste required by scientific practice. Take glass pipettes for example: they have to be washed several times, sterilized and individually packaged in plastic before they can be used again. Plastic used to replace glass is always wasteful because it has to be wrapped in plastic too and can only be used once before it is binned. Each day bags and bags of laboratory waste have to be incinerated. At the end of the workshop, Adam generously invited us to join a barbecue were we would eat the remains of the goat we had scavenged in search for living cells. I wonder if anyone had the appetite for it.
Next sessions of VASTAL labs and talks: November. We'll keep you posted on that one too! Previously: Image of the day, September programme of the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics and Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. |
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A couple of week ago, i was back at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd., Adam Zaretsky and Waag Society's temporary research and education institute in Amsterdam.
On the menu that day was a Tissue Culture Lab headed by tissue engineering artist Oron Catts. Catts is the co-founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA, the Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, UWA. He is also the founder, together with Ionat Zurr, of the Tissue Culture & Art Project. Wikipedia defines tissue culture as follows: the growth of tissues and/or cells separate from the organism. This is typically facilitated via use of a liquid, semi-solid, or solid growth medium, such as broth or agar. Tissue culture commonly refers to the culture of animal cells and tissues, while the more specific term plant tissue culture is used for plants. I'll come back to the hands-on wet lab in an upcoming post. For now, here are some notes i wrote down during a talk that Oron Catts gave to kick off the workshop. His presentation, which put our workshop into a historical narrative, was titled An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine - A biased history. As HG Wells wrote back in 1895, life is becoming something for us to engineer: 'We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered.' HG Wells, 1895
In 1885, Wilhelm Roux removed a portion of the medullary plate of an embryonic chicken and maintained it in a warm saline solution for several days, establishing the principle of tissue culture. The first successful human transplant was a corneal transplant performed in 1905 by Eduard Zirm in Olomouc, Czech Republic. In 1907 zoologist Ross Harrison successfully perform the first partial life entity. He demonstrated the growth of frog nerve cell processes in a medium of clotted lymph. In 1913, surgeon, biologist and eugenicist Alexis Carrel grows cells in culture for long periods -fed regularly under aseptic conditions. In 1912, Carrel took tissue from the heart of a chicken embryo to demonstrate that warm-blooded cells could be kept alive in the lab. This tissue was kept alive for thirty-four years -- outliving Carrel himself -- before it was deliberately terminated. His experiments horrified his contemporaries. It has sometimes been said that his lab in Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research inspired Hollywood's Frankenstein. Interestingly, this practice of fragmenting the body and keeping the cells alive was called "Artificial Life" at the time. In 1913, Ross Harrison noted the epistemological contradictions regarding tissue culture: Eduard Uhlenhuth wrote in 1916 "Through the discovery of tissue culture we have so to speak created a new type of body on which to grow the cell."
The first premature baby wards in the US were part of a freak show called "Oddities of Life." From the 1910 till the 1930, tissue culture starts to be regarded as science by scientists. They start to see an utilitarian end to it, it's not just a curiosity anymore. 1948 saw the first animal cell line established (mouse). Those cells tcan be considered the oldest living parts of a mouse.
The cells were propagated by George Otto Gey without Lacks' knowledge or permission and later commercialized. There was no requirement to inform a patient, or their relatives, because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis or therapy was the property of the physician and/or medical institution. This issue and Ms. Lacks' situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California in 1990 but the court ruled that a person's discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized. HeLa cells are termed "immortal" because they can divide an unlimited number of times in a laboratory cell culture plate. It has been estimated that the total number of HeLa cells that have been propagated in cell culture far exceeds the total number of cells that were actually in Henrietta Lacks' body. The cells traveled around the globe- even into space, on a satellite to determine whether human tissues could survive zero gravity- and have been used for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits". HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape glue, cosmetics, and many other products (source.) Cell lines are usually dehumanized but the story goes that one night, a surgeon working with HeLa cells realized that he was working with a person's cell while he was having dinner with a relative of Henrietta. Neither Henrietta nor her family had given permission for the cell line. They wanted her contribution to science to be respected and her cells to be sort of 'rehumanised.'
1954, the field of tissue culture becomes more standardized. "I have sought to strip from the study of this subject its former atmosphere of mystery and complications. The grey walls, black gowns, masks and hoods; the shining twisted glass and pulsating coloured fluids; the gleaming stainless steel, hidden steam jets, enclosed microscopes and huge witches' cauldrons of the 'great' laboratories of 'tissue culture' have led far too many persons to consider cell culture too abstruse, recondite and sacrosanct a field to be invaded by mere hoi polio." P.R White, The cultivation of animal and plant cells, New York, Ronalds Press 1954. Joseph Murray performed the first successful transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, in 1954.
1978, Louise Brown, the world's first baby to be conceived by in vitro fertilisation. Publication of Langer, R & Vacanti JP, Tissue engineering. Science 260, 920-6; 1993.
We are becoming salamanders: our bodies can repair themselves and regrow lost parts using their own resources. In the '80s, repairing the body was more mechanical, people would picture prosthetic limbs, heart pumps and mechanical organs. 10 years later, the image is the one of a body that relies on cells that have been engineered into 3D objects. Previously: Image of the day, September programme of the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics and Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. |
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I discovered this one yesterday during a talk that Oron Catts from Symbiotica was giving at the VASTAL (the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd) at the Waag Society in Amsterdam right before the tissue culture workshop he was heading together with Adam Zaretsky. The talk was entitled "An alternative timeline for regenerative medicine - A biased history." I'll come back to it later on this week. Here's the image:
It's a show of baby incubators at a freak show! Dr. Martin Couney, a pioneer in the care of prematurely born infants, showed baby incubators at fairs and freak shows in Europe and the U.S. His Infant Incubators was the most successful attraction at Coney Island, surpassing the appeal of bearded ladies, Siamese twins and sword swallowers. The admission fees subsidized the development and application of medical technology. The premature infants on display were being treated with equipment and techniques more sophisticated than those available at most hospitals; the survival rate of over 80% was unsurpassed at any medical facility in the world. Interest for the incubator 'oddity' dwindled when the New York State Hospital finally opened its incubator ward, and hospitals across the country followed suit.
Images from neonatology. Oups! Forgot to mention that there's only a few days left to apply for Symbiotica's residency program. Tomorrow, Saturday 19, don't miss the Sequence DNA by Chance Lab at Waag (i wrote down some info over here.) |
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I never do event announcements on this blog. I guess that would make some people happy but i can't find the time to blog about every single event i'd like to share with you. I'm not even sure my blog is the best place for that so i'd rather make exceptions to my "no call no announcement" rule once in a blue moon. Here's this semester's exception.
You might remember that back in May i was throwing seedballs all over Amsterdam along with Adam Zaretsky, the Waag society and other eco-enthusiast. The VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. comes back to town in September and this time the focus will be biology and bacterial transformation. VASTAL is a temporary research and education institute that Zaretsky has created in Amsterdam following an invitation by the Waag Society. The lectures and workshops aim to show the public what it means to work both artistically and scientifically with living organisms and materials. VASTAL also aims to make this form of art-science accessible for a broader audience and invite them to discuss the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake.
Sadly i can only attend the September 15 sessions but i hope you'll overcrowd the school. Here's some details that Adam Zaretsky kindly forwarded to me: Friday 11 September - Alt-Biology: Solar Transgenics, Synthetic Biology, Nanotech Biomimicry, Post-Natural History and Green Biofuel Huub de Groot is a Professor of Biophysical Organic Chemistry at Gorlaeus Laboratories, Leiden University. His research on producing Solar Biofuels from Microorganisms has consistently been focused on appropriate and sustainable hi-tech replacement of fossil fuels. By engineering green bacteria whom can collect sunlight with high efficiency conversion to chemical energy, we may have a source of cheap, clean and ubiquitous energy. While working with plants and algae Huub is also interested in engineering carbon nanotube latticeworks of super bio-solar battery structures which mimic the very efficient light harvesting 'antennas in disarray' found in green bacteria. As a possible infection/effect of Huub's continued collaborations with Rob Zwijnenberg (art-philosopher) of The Arts and Genomic Centre and the artists in residence, which his lab welcomes, Huub has proposed a Genetically Modified Solar Transgenic Art-Sci fish project intended for collaboration and future research.
Richard Pell, a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon is one of the founding members of the Center for PostNatural History. Rich will speak about the Center's investigations into the geographic placement of transgenic plants and animals and the cultural and ecological effect on their cartographic areas through such museum displays as Transgenic Organisms of New York State and Strategies in Genetic Copy Prevention. Rich will also speak about Synthetic Biology and his role as a iGEM Judge. Tuesday 15 September - Tissue Culture Lab What does it mean to grow disembodied cells from a former organism? Why do people want to keep samples and parts of beings well fed and free from contamination? How is a cell line kept alive and healthy after isolation from the living or the dead? This is a hands-on wet lab for public practical and experiential tissue culture technique. We will isolate primary tissues (bone marrow, scar tissue, muscle and, possibly, embryonic stems cells) in a sterile hood and then incubate them separately from their original corporeal context. The emphasis is on zombie fetish rites versus the general living rights of the undead vampiric matrix. Growing Politics: Tissue Culture and Art meets Urbanibalism Oron Catts is co-founder and director of SymbioticA will speak about the politics of tissue cultured artworks also known as semi-living extended body artworks. With such challenging projects as Victimless Leather, Semi-Living Worry Dolls and Disembodied Cuisine, Oron continues to challenge conventional readings of tissue culture as well as the general culture of eating, using and explaining life politics. Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher at Queen Mary University of London. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and edited the collections Media Activism (2002) and C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). He writes frequently at the cross of French philosophy, media culture and Italian post-operaismo. His current project is a book about the history of the notion of surplus from biology to knowledge economy and the environmental discourse. In Amsterdam, together with Katrien Jacobs and the Institute of Network Cultures, he organized the Art and Politics of Netporn conference (2005) and the C'Lick Me festival (2007). Matteo will be presenting "Parasitic life, fermenting yeasts and cybernetic DNA: The art of living matter versus biodigitalism." Before the discovery of DNA, chromosomes were considered containers for an obscure fermentation activity. Today biotech hobbyists have reduced 'life' to a predictable copy-and-paste of numeric codes. How does the so-called bioart cover the parasitic and decaying process at the basis of life and the negative entropy of the cell that was discussed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1944 together with his prophetic hypothesis of a genetic code? Matteo Pasquinelli shows how there is more know-how in the most ancient practice of fermenting ambrosia than in contemporary bioart. Saturday 19 September - (De)Mystified DNA: Sequencing Lab Join us for the random creation of a sequence of DNA. This lab is about understanding the Genetic code and the online freeware available to 'read' DNA. Our sequence is arrived at through chance. We will then creatively explore software options like BLAST for finding where the random sequence is already embedded in the genomes of sequenced nature. We will also explore the online tools of plasmid design including DNA text to flesh online ordering and the anatomy of a DNA sequencing machine. As a group we will arrive at a symbolic reading of our chance strand of potential life alteration. Discussion in risk assessment in both chance based and knowledge based systems of hereditary difference production. (This is not a Wet Lab) Registration is possible via info at vastal dot eu. There are limited number of places available, so be in time! All courses and lectures will be in English. Previously: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop. |
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More notes from the second edition of Biorama, a symposium and workshop that invited artists and experts to share their views, works and discoveries about the biology of the underground. Andy Gracie kicked off the artists presentations with a compelling introduction to the mythological theories about the structure of the Earth and the civilization, often called the Agharta, that live inside it. Let's get this straight first: the Earth is hollow and other societies live in there. Andy brought us to the cave in order to be closer to them. Modern science doesn't pay much attention to the theory of the Hollow Earth, or Agharta, but this has not always been the case: Astronomer Edmund Halley (he of the comet) was fascinated by the earth's magnetic field. He noticed the direction of the field varied slightly over time and his theory was that there existed not one, but several, magnetic fields. In 1692, he put forth the idea of a hollow Earth with inner concentric spheres nested into each other and rotating at different speeds. According to Halley, the spheres were separated by different atmospheres separated these spheres, and each had its own magnetic poles. These inner regions were luminous and probably hosted other civilizations. He speculated that escaping gas caused the Aurora Borealis. Mathematician and physicist Leonhard Paul Euler believed that there were two entrances to the Hollow Earth. One was in the North Pole, the other in the South Pole.
In 1947 Admiral Byrd would have given the first scientific evidence of a Hollow Earth. A "lost" diary reports that the explorer went on a mission to fly over the North Pole. It was not his first trip there. Actually, Byrd was the first person to fly over the North Pole in 1926. This second time, however, he discovered the entrance at the north poles and flew through the hollow earth where he observed other civilizations and enormous herds of giant mammoths. Another expedition in 1956 would have located the second entrance in the South Pole. The U.S. government kept the discovery secret and didn't allow anyone to cross the pole anymore which, obviously increased rumors of a conspiracy. Back in 1942, the Nazi sent their own expedition to find these openings that, according to them, would have lead to the land of the original Aryans and make alliance with them. A photo from the NASA would be proof:
Satellite images do not display any existence of a hole in the Earth. What you get sometimes however is a black dot over the pole that only reveal an absence of information. On November 25, 1912, the United States granted the patent number 1096102 to Marshall B. Gardner for "The Hollow Earth Theory". Others "proofs" that this hollow Earth life exist have been put forward: certain birds migrate to the North, aurora borealis, anomalous compass readings in high latitudes, north and south, etc.
Andy invited us to participate to the symposium inside a cave so that we would be closer to the only creatures we know of that live below the earth's surface and are so completely independently from the sun that they die when exposed to light. These organisms are called troglobites. There are fish, shrimp, crayfish, bacteria, molluscs and insects. The most intriguing of the troglobitesis is perhaps the proteus anguinus, or the olm. In Slovenia, a tourism industry exists for those who want to cathc a glimpse of the cave-dwelling creature. The olms are blind, yet have barely visible, regressed eyes covered by skin. Their body is covered by a translucent skin with two pink gills at the back of the head. Unlike other amphibians that metamorphose into an adult form, the olm retains its larval features, a phenomenon known as neotony (via). Andy then explained us briefly Jakob von Uexküll's theory of 'umwelt', an organism's self-centered perception of the environment. Uexküll theorised that organisms can have different umwelten, even though they share the same environment. In order to be able to make sense of the world around, a creature would look in other organisms for a series of elements that carry some significance. For example the tick's umwelt is reduced to only three (biosemiotic) carriers of significance: The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals + The temperature of 37 degrees celsius (corresponding to the blood of all mammals) + The hairy typology of mammals. That's how they recognize if they are in front of a mammal they can parasite. Some parasites even hack the nervous systems of their host in order to control their behaviour and establish better conditions for their own survival. While looking for online information about the phenomenon, i stumbled upon this hair-raising video that explains how spores from a parasitic fungus come to infect the brain and changes in behaviour of a jungle ant.
This is going to put me off mushrooms for some time. But back to the Umwelt. Jakob von Uexküll's theory of the Umwelt made him a pioneer of semiotic biology, or biosemiotics, a field that addresses the complexities of biological processes by studying the production, action and interpretation of signs in the biological realm. Some researchers have put forward the question "Do Does a robot have an Umwelt?" There doesn't seem to be any agreement on the answer. Giambattista della Porta was an Italian polymath who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution. In 1560, Della Porta founded a scientific society called the Academia Secretorum Naturae, one of the first scientific societies in Europe and their aim was to study natural sciences. The Academia Secretorum Naturae was compelled to disband when its members were suspected of dealing with the Occult as, at the time, it was regarded as blasphemous to reveal the secrets of nature. Della Porta was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul V. Andy Gracie drew a parallel between the Academia Secretorum Naturae and bioartists today who start their research in a DIY fashion. People like Garnet Hertz and Anthony Hall are amateur scientists who like to learn for themselves and uncover nature. Is it art? Is it science? Does it really matter? Image on the homepage PBS. |
