Images from The Chicken with Human Teeth Experiment, Olivier Fortin. Photos: Olivier Fortin

The class ended on April 7th and I have just gotten around to posting images from the final class. Thanks to Antonia for taking them.

Papers were presented for the first half of the class by Vanessa Rigaux ( Bioart and its Double), Olivier Fortin ( The Chicken with Human Teeth Project), Richard Baldwin (Propensity Towards Madness) , a performance lecture by Britt Wray and video and sound based projects by Antonia Hernandez and Claire Kenway (Poissant Passion). Then, performance works and installations by Alison Loader, Kendra Besanger and Kelly Andres were shown in the Greenhouse located on the top of the Hall Building at Concordia University. Here is some documentation from the projects.

This weekend Kelly Andres, Alison Loader, Antonia Hernandez, Vanessa Rigaux, and Claire Kenway will be presenting on their work at the Hi Tech, Lo Tech, No Tech RAIQ conference. Please come by. I will be chairing the panel presentation, so if you want to hear more about these fantastic projects- this is your opportunity!

Tagny eating a plate of agar and basil, part of Kelly Andres bio cuisine. Photo: Vanessa Hernandez

Wheatgrass drink, part of Kelly Andres bio cuisine. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Agar fish delicacy; a dish by Alison Loader. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Agar dishes, Kelly Andres. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Alison Loader also showed her Kinder/Garden Project in Kelly’s Greenhouse studio

Alison Loader's mould and casts for the Kinder/Garden project. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Alison Loader from Kinder/Garden. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Alison grew squash into the form of a fetus. Read this fantastic blog for details and documentation of the full process on the Kinder/Garden blog.The final form of the squash is remarkable. This project makes striking connections between contemporary modes of bioengineering and reproduction through digital and biological media. Alison will be speaking more of this at the conference this weekend.

We were under constant surveillance while wandering through the greenhouse. (Part of the installation by Alison Loader in collaboration with Kelly Andres).To see Alison Loader’s video, “Hear the Wind”- with sound by Owen Chapman (Opositive) created with previously recorded surveillance footage and the Fluxmedia inverted microscope visit here.

Kendra Besanger's performance installation. Photo Antonia Hernandez

Just down the hall from the Kelly’s greenhouse space, Kendra Besanger invited us to join her in a buffet of composted food.

Kendra Besanger performance installation. Photo: Antonia Hernandez

Antonia Hernandez presented a video of molds she has grown in her fridge at home as part of the project “Home is where the heart is”. Here is a sample photography taken by Antonia Hernandez. Antonia also did some still animation with her samples with the Fluxmedia microscope. (She will be screening it at the upcoming conference).

Photo: Tagny Duff, A specimen prepared by Brandon Ballengée

Brandon led the class through an exercise to identify the Gosner Staging of frog specimens. Many of the specimens had deformities at various stages of development.

Photo: Tagny Duff , In photo: Vanessa Rigaux

Photo: Tagny Duff In photo: Kendra Besanger, Claire Kenway, Alison Loader, Antonia Hernandez

Then Brandon introduced us to his stained tadpole/frog specimens.

Photo: Tagny Duff

Photo: Tagny Duff, Brandon Ballengée prepares a specimen for Vanessa

Then we looked at stained deformed frog specimens that Brandon had spend months to prepare.

Photo: Tagny Duff, Specimens stained and prepared by Brandon Ballengée

Photo: Tagny Duff, Frog specimens stained by Brandon Ballengée

Then the class looked at the stained specimens under the inverted microscope and (as a group) took still images on the HD camera to compile an animation video. (Thanks to Alison for compiling the images and rendering the video in Final Cut. Videos and images will be posted shortly!).

Photo: Tagny Duff, Brandon Ballengée, Claire Kenway, Alison Loader and Vanessa Rigaux in Fluxmedia lab

For Manuel de Landa, species can be seen as the historical outcome of a sorting process. That sorting process is the result of accumulation of genetic materials under the influence of selection pressures, and a process of consolidation of the previous stage, through reproductive isolation.

That reproductive isolation can have internal or external causes. External causes are, for example, geographical conditions. Internal causes can be product of interactions or patterns of reproduction among the members of a community. But even product of internal or external causes, that reproductive isolation has no impenetrable barriers. Some organisms can exchange genetic in different ways, so the evolutionary process is more similar to a bush or rhizome than a hierarchical tree. De Landa quotes Jeon and Danielli, saying that, depending of the time-scale, the whole of the gene pool of the biosphere is available to all organisms.(…) Organisms and genomes may thus be regarded as compartments of the biosphere.

The way in that evolution occurs is through different abstract machines related to the way in which energy is organized for the replication of genetic material. De Landa talks about three kinds of abstract machines: one generating hierarchies, other meshwork and the third is a kind of sorting device, or probe head, that searches in pre-structured organizations of energy. This third kind of ‘abstract machine’ even being the only that is not present in the geological world, can be found in other nonbiological realms, as human culture.

Darwin’s assertion about the evolution as a process of descent with modification, was modified by scientists such as Dawkins, saying that any variable replicator coupled to any sorting device would generate a capacity for evolution. In this definition is it possible to incorporate software routines or language as well as genetic replicators and ecological pressures. As Gilles Deleuze affirms, artificial is fully into nature.

For Manuel de Landa, life is formed by the flow of genetic material or replicators and the flow of biomass. That biomass can be organized in different systems and is the probe head, the third abstract machine, the device who looks for different scenarios, or adaptative-landscapes, different possibilities, or affordances.

Following de Landa, we are historical contingencies of the biosphere, with all the replicators available for evolution, influencing and being influenced by the energetic environment. What amount of possibilities!

My reflection is an “essai” in the style of Montaigne – a digression on what is serious and philosophical articulated through the medium of personal response.

The rules of natural history break down the relationships between creatures in nature according to series and structure. In a serial relationship, “a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.: all of these forms conform in varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series.” (234) As it relates to structure, “I say a is to b or b is to c is to d.” (234) This Darwinist tendency to glance through a lens of perpetual mimesis represents a structuralist framework through which once can choose to view the natural acts of becoming. In Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible, Deleuze and Guattari challenge these natural acts with acts of the supernatural, the unnatural: magical acts of becoming that contradict the very structure of mimesis. Natural history is about reproduction, evolution, the forming of patterns and continuations; becoming is about transformation, transmutation, symbolism, and magic.

Structuralism does not account for the state of becoming, as becoming is “a phenomena of degradation representing a deviation from the true order.” (237) Where myth and magic merge with secret and sorcery, there is becoming.

Becoming is not a correlation, an imitation, a line that connects point A to point B. Becoming is not a fantasy but a reality lacking in subjectivity. Becoming-animal represents the discovery of undiscovered sides of the self. “The becoming-animal of the human is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not.” (238)

I found it useful to view this chapter of A Thousand Plateaus through creative terms rather than literary ones: using poetry and music as a platform unravelling some of the intricacies of becoming discussed in this article; its metaphysical nature, its transient nature, its invisible yet ever-present possibilities.

Becoming is…

The line
In between.
That place in the middle.
That point of neither beginning nor end.

Becoming is…

The line that “unites the wasp and the orchid [that] precludes a shared deterritorialization of the wasp: in that it becomes a liberated piece of the orchid’s reproductive system, but also of the orchid, in that it becomes the object of an orgasm in the wasp, also liberated from its own reproduction.” (293)

Child = becoming-young of every age.
Girl = becoming-woman of each sex
Love = Extracting sex from the particles?
Speeds, slownesses, flows, and dynamics make up sexuality, after all.

Rawr (!)

Becoming is a multiplicity.
Taking on the attributes of another being
Yet it (re)produces nothing other than [the] self.

It is not about progress.
It is not in your head; it is real!
Shaped like a rhizome, it slithers
Like an epidemic,
Contagious in its hallucinogenic molecular manifestations.

There is becoming in all of us.
It is perpetual // ongoing // everlasting
There is no point of departure here, nor is there an end in sight.

Becoming happens all the time in fictitious literature:
Haruki Murakami wrote a Trilogy of the Rat.
Willard made Socrates his hero.
Kafka wrote about mouse societies.
And then there was Moby Dick…

When it comes to becoming-animal, it’s all about that exceptional individual within the pack (243). It’s about a budding relationship that fuels “a kind of alliance of love, then hate.” (243) These animals are the sorcerers of the pack, the anomalous entities who haunt the periphery. It is only through their special kind of magic that this becoming-animal is even possible, a symbiosis of man and his other [secret] self. Deleuze and Guattari say: “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities… A fiber [that] stretches from human to animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible.” (249)

Animals undergo their metamorphoses by contagion rather than by filiation. Nature versus nature: “werewolves become vampires when they die.” (249)

Animals undergo a molecular transformation, their molecules rearranged into particles rearranged to become imperceptible, having become as such as the result of supernatural forces.

Human—> Animal—> Molecules——> Particles – – – – – → Imperceptible———> Supernatural

Becoming is no fantasy;
It is real.
It may not be permanent,
It may not be tangible
But it is.

Latitude = sum total of intensive affects capable of at a given power or degree of potential
Longitude = sum total of material elements belonging under given relations of movement and rest, speed, and slowness. (260)

The Plane of Consistency merges with the Plane of Transcendence. The plane of consistency, composition, content, cuts across all dimensions of any creature, object, or entity. It acts as an intersection, a merging of pathways for every concrete form. Becoming-animal is a multiplicity of transformations and re-awakenings; packs of animals morph into one another. It is along the Plane of Consistency that these haeccities become. The Plane of Transcendence is that invisible point, those invisible lines which cut diagonally across the Plane of Consistency.

When viewed in musical terms these two planes—despite a multiplicity of abstractions—are suddenly viewable from more concrete terms. Music is all composed from a horizontal line—a bass line—which acts as the ‘base’ upon which all other elements are composed. This is the Plane of Consistency: the tempo, the duration, the refrain or melody. From this ‘base’ line, musicians draw their own random abstract diagonal lines to free themselves. This results in an unleashing of permutations that are invisible, imperceptible, yet ever-present: harmonics, ghost notes, polyphonies and textural deviations; notes that do not, in fact, actually exist but are the result of hybridities that emerge from those notes along the base line, forming naturally along the Plane of Transcendence.

Ultimately, becoming is “a state of relations among particles, molecules, and rhythms of motion and stillness, speed and slowness.” (275) As latitude merges with longitude, the grand total—the molecular “has the capacity to make the elementary communicate with the cosmic…” (309) Through this continuous loop of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, through the assimilation of the major with the minor and vice versa, this becoming takes place between people and animals, werewolves and vampires, the natural and the supernatural.

John Cage was the first to deploy the sound plane in a way that “affirms a process against all structure and genesis, floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement.” (267)

This kind of subversion, submission, and immersion is in essence what becoming is all about.

References:

http://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/introser/montaigne.htm

Embryo (image taken from www.wellsphere.com)

Life sciences have been categorized in recent history by a tendency towards biological determinism, by which the expression of the particular genes of an organism’s is said to dictate much of its development and existence. If the above claim sounds matter-of-factly accurate – and I think it would to most people – it is probably because statements of this sort have long been “proven” to be “true” by apparently rigorous applications of the scientific method. What is often obscured by this “habit” of presenting results simply as being the automatic products of verification through experimentation is that it maintains illusions of purpose and control in science. Moreover, it also hides many of the behind-the-scenes processes involved in knowledge production, which often includes a considerable amount of guesswork, luck, and all-around messiness.

Evelyn Keller’s book Making Sense of Life: Explaining biological development with Models, metaphors and machines can be seen as an effort to challenge the discourses of determinism and certainty built around these disciplines. In the chapter entitled Genes, Gene Action, and Genetic Programming, Keller sets out to uncover sources of ambiguity in the language used to make sense of early ‘genetics’. She starts it off with a quote from Hungarian chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi as way to introduce one of her central arguments: “Languages are the product of man’s groping for words in the process of making new conceptual decisions, to be conveyed by words” (in Keller, 123).

What is implied here is that there is a need to invent or adapt language to deal with new experiences always comes either before or at the same time as the new experience is encountered. Applied in contrast to a history of developmental biology, this highlights the fact that seemingly objective scientific truths exist as linguistic constructs first, and are often fleshed out and verified in evidence only later. Within this framework, the ambiguity present in the words that are groped for in order to explain science can often lead to incomplete, inaccurate, or (worst?) overly-applicable conceptual models and metaphors.

Keller presents examples of such cases of over-applicability in the following chapter entitled Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor, where she traces the evolution of uses of the cybernetic metaphors of ‘feedback’ and ‘control’ in different models designed to explain embryonic development. Here, Keller frames her discussion in terms of the flexibility of abstract concepts and models, particularly Delbruck’s mathematical model, which was simultaneously applied to support competing sides of the embryonic development debate (159-167). By doing so, she also calls into question the conservative tendency of the scientific world – and perhaps of society at large – to accept new information if it best fits existing one. Later in the article, Keller attributes this tendency to the guiding principle of parsimony in science, which she describes as “a prescription for conserving as much of the pre-existing formulations as new findings [can] permit” (171).

In other words, it was – and still is – considered normal for scientists to rely on accepted models to gain acceptance for their own discoveries, arguments, or models. What this entails however is that acceptance (or legitimacy) may not be solely about the accuracy of new information but also about ‘how it was framed’ or ‘how well it fit’. In the end, what can often get lost in this process are the unresolved ambiguities that Keller demonstrated were present in the earlier models and concepts, or worst, the fact that newfound evidence may have long proven them to be incomplete or inaccurate.

After having concentrated mainly on the science behind the models and on their different applications, Keller ends this second chapter by bringing the focus back on language once again. She writes that “much as with genetic structures, language builds into new formulations a tacit memory of older concepts, shaping the course of research in accordance with its prior history, even while it also, and at the same time, provides the means by which new concepts are formulated and new perceptions achieved” (172).

It is important to mention however, that despite appearances of it – and my own initial interpretations – the two articles were likely not meant as a case for linguistic determinism, by which choices in language (and models and metaphors) would directly dictate other language, research, and results. Surely, Keller’s intentions were not to swing the pendulum from one extreme all the way to the other. In fact, she is careful to counter her strong claims for the determining effects of language with examples of how ambiguity in meaning of concepts and the flexibility in application of models actually proved to be “productive” in many ways. Most notably, they are said to have filled explanatory gaps long enough to allow to shift the focus onto finding solutions to other problems (129) as well as to have infused some force into research (132), leading to important discoveries such as DNA. Keller’s use of the word “force” is an important one here because it positions language as one of the many influencing factors playing a role in the production of meaning.

It seems like what Keller is getting at, without specifically mentioning it or naming it as such in these two chapters is a type of interactionist approach to the production of scientific knowledge. In fact, in a general sense, the chapters (and the book from which they were taken) argue for the importance of recognizing the tight connections between the use of language in the social domain and how it produces biological understandings. Her final line best exemplifies this position: “words – together with the linguistic forms by which they are given meaning – are, in this sense, just like genes and the regulatory networks in which they are employed, the primary vehicle for their own evolution” (172).

Works cited:

Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Genes, Gene action, and genetic programming” and “Taming the cybernetic metaphor”. Making Sense of Life. Explaining Biological Development with models, metaphors and machines. Harvard University Press. 2002, pp123-172.

Excerpt from image under Creative Commons Attribution license. Photographer: juvetson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson). Accessed 9 March 10.

What is life? According to Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, it is bacteria (111), the first life on the planet, the developers of the metabolic processes that all life depends on to this day. Life is bacterial, or complex forms that evolved from it.

Bacteria altered the Earth, drastically. Our early environment held miniscule amounts of oxygen, before the blue-green bacteria evolved aerobic metabolic processes that caused the release of this toxin – And it was a toxin; many forms of bacteria were destroyed during the millennia of oxidation that followed. The amount of environmental damage produced by these bacteria was far beyond all the damage committed by humans in the last couple centuries – and yet life adapted, and what had once been a poison became a resource. This encourages hope that as a species we might find ways of turning our pollutants into resources . . . or, at least, that other species may do so in the future after our own demise.

So much of our existence is dependent on the actions of organisms that measurable in nanometers – is it any wonder, then, that people might we interested in exploring this realm themselves? Nanotechnology is a term used to refer to a wide variety of only somewhat-related activities: the development of nanometer-thick coatings and materials, progressively smaller mechanical devices, quantum computing, genetic engineering of viruses and bacteria (“synthetic biology”), even the dream of self-replicating molecular machines to complete any task imaginable. While many of these technologies are likely far-future concerns – if they ever can be developed – a study of the metaphors implicit in discussions on these subjects can be very valuable when considering the ways that we think about bacteria, but also life, our own bodies, and the environments and societies that surround us.

These metaphors consist of:

• The computation model of genetics; genetics as information, to be programmed in to a biological machine.
• The designer / engineer model; molecules of all forms serving mechanical functions that are most efficiently harnessed when organized completely by human design.
• The different-scales model; biological processes as a set of complex chemical processes that are the most appropriate and efficient for the particular conditions in which, and the scale at which, biological processes interact.

If a nano-machine can be a machine, a computer-programmable device, and / or a set of biological processes, what does that say about bacteria? What does it say about our bodies, carrying with them (or as part of them?) more bacteria than we have cells? What does it say about the collection of cells that make up our bodies, and therefore about any environment or society in which we might exist? What does it say, if we are more than our bodies, about ourselves?

We can certainly say the following:

• Life is complex, both in its mechanisms and the ways that we might consider its processes. Anything that acts in similar complexity to a life form will need to be considered in an equally complex fashion.
• Scale matters; forces that affect us heavily have less comparative affect on smaller objects (the strong force affects atoms more obviously than does gravity, for example), and vice versa on larger ones.

As de Menezes stated (during an in-class lecture), art – like science – can be a form of thought experiment, an asking of, ‘what if?’. If so, is there much difference between the process of scientific discovery, artistic creation, and the slow evolutionary ‘discoveries’ of life? Maybe it’s just a matter of scale. Maybe the bacteria know something we don’t.

Hopefully we’ll learn it in time.

Class-Assigned Readings

Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan. “Masters of the biosphere”. What is Life? Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995. 87-111.

de Menezes, Marta. “Decon: Deconstruction, Decontamination, Decomposition”. Decon. Ectopia, 2009. 1-28.

Additional References

Atkinson, William Illsey. Nanocosm : Nanotechnology and the Big Changes Coming from the Inconceivably Small. New York : Amacom, 2003.

Drexler, K. Eric. Nanosystems : Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. NY : Wiley, 1992.

Elliot, William H. and Daphne C. Elliott. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 4th Edition. Oxford : Oxford U Press, 2009.

Feynman, Richard P. “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom : An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics”. <http://zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html>. Accessed 2 March 10.

Kunz, Robert G. and Louis Theodore. Nanotechnology : Environmental Implications and Solutions. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Interscience, 2005.

Regis, Ed. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition : Science Slightly Over the Edge. Reading, Mass : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1990.

UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service. Downsizing Development : An Introduction to Nano-scale Technologies and the Implications for the Global South. NGLS Development Dossier. New York and Geneva : United Nations, 2008.

Sok leads the lab and explains aspetic technique

Tools of the trade

Preparing the membrane substrate

Sketching with the pipette before drawing with bacteria

Drawing with ecoli in the agar petri dish

Puting the bacteria in the incubator (for 24 hours)

24 hours later:

Drawing #1, successful transformation! Photo: Richard Baldwin

Drawing #2 Photo: Richard Baldwin

Drawing #3 Photo: Richard Baldwin

The final results:

In photo: Rich Baldwin, Kendra Basenger, Claire Kenway, Tagny Duff, Jhave Johnson, Marta de Menezes, Alison loader, Genevieve Ruest

Nurse preparing a Polio Vaccine in Ethiopia (image taken from http://www.who.int/en/)

Attempting to conceptualize and understand the ways in which the immune system exists as a biological construct with strong social and political influences is not an easy task. First, we must attempt to conceptualize that the systems in our body are simultaneously biological entities and social constructs and, more importantly, that these two concepts intertwine and inform one another. Second, we must wrap our minds around the different ways in which our bodies are constructed, negotiated, and performed in highly politicized spaces. Third, we must come to terms with the fact that we have limited epistemological access to the “systems” that exist “within” our bodies. The epistemologies that we rely on have been informed and constructed by science and are tied into large, powerful, and incredibly specialized power structures – both institutional and philosophical. Lastly, in order to really understand the types of powers at bay in this complicated system, we have to attempt to grapple with thousands of years of philosophical and institutional constructions of the self. In the words of social anthropologist Emily Martin, we must understand “how our taken-for-grantedness about the body is generated” (xiii). We need to, at least in a basic way, understand how we got to where we are in order to conceptualize how we might possibly go somewhere else. The possibility of going somewhere else is embedded in Donna Haraway’s 1989 essay, The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self In Immune Systems Discourse.

Donna Haraway presents the immune system as “an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material ‘difference’ in late capitalism” (204). By this, she means that the immune system is a particular concept (rather than a material truth) and that it is located at a specific point of time in history. As a concept, it both describes and performs a process inside the individual body and within the body politic. In Haraway’s terms, it is “a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics” (204). Our conception of it has been constructed by a variety of discourses and imagery. Haraway refers to the depictions of the immune system in Peter Jaret’s 1986 National Geographic article,“The Wars Within,” as exemplary of the ways that militaristic metaphors have been inserted into our understanding of our body’s systems. Of HIV, Jaret says “Like Greeks hidden inside the Trojan horse, the AIDS virus enters the body concealed inside a helper T cell from an infected host. Almost always it arrives as a passenger in blood or semen” (723). The numerous battle and war metaphors combined with a plethora of highly fantasized photographs tempt us into an entirely foreign universe: a universe that “is” our body?

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo's (1727–1804) representation of the Trojan War. (image taken from Wikimedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) The application of ancient mythology onto modern scientific structures as an epistemological gateway presents an interesting paradox.

These types of constructs and conceptualizations are problematic for a variety of reasons. For example, we must question the social effects of normalizing the existence of military and war as ‘natural’ processes? However, Haraway wants to elucidate the fact that recognizing and understanding social/biological constructions opens up the opportunity for alternative conceptualizations and action.

Following a Foucauldian line, Haraway explains that the way in which we conceive of the immune system are not inevitable or necessary narratives; rather, they are social constructs, threaded by politics. If the immune system exists as a concept rather than a given material truth, there are possible alternatives for our epistemological approaches. Haraway presents illustrations of the immune system as an orchestra rather than a battleground for a pictorial reference point. This is just one of many alternatives. Interviewees in Emily Martin’s book Flexible Bodies also suggest the use of other metaphors such as a food chain or house cleaning. We see that, at the point where the concepts and categories that we utilize are shown to possess fallacies or ambiguities, there is a window of opportunity to conceptualize different ways of reconstructing our language and myths. The immune system, holding as much social clout as it does, could be “a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological” (Haraway, 204). In Flexible Bodies, Martin quotes one of her interviewees:

“the military motif is an unhealthy way of constructing it (the immune system) because…it supports the military’s kind of power structure and sexism of society…I think another effect of this military conception of the whole thing is it puts the conception into that foreign invasion, and there’s this outsider that we don’t like who’s in our midst, and we want them to get out, and we have to resort violence to get rid of them. I think that only sparks violence against people. I think that only supports everyone’s homophobia. I think it only supports everybody’s xenophobia” (70).

Through Haraway and Martin, we see how the map begins to precede and supersede the territory (to borrow Jean Baudrillard’s famous metaphor). Perhaps it always did. In our attempts to access the objective world and, consequently, in an attempt to access forms of objective truth, we mediate the reality that we are trying to access. We do this through our own cultural lenses, our subjectivities, and through the non-neutral technologies that are utilized. This, however, is only begging an aged question – a long-running debate between the empiricists and the rationalists. Is it still a germane question? Arguably, our time is better spent in an arena of discussion that accepts the premise that reality is always somewhat mediated. From there, we can begin to pull apart questions with more substance. We might start with a few simple questions and then proceed forward to investigate larger, political questions. For example:

(1) To what extent is reality mediated by our investigation of it? (2) How imposing are our mediations? (3) What are we doing with the representations that we take from our investigations? Donna Haraway is critical of the militaristic, capitalist ‘explanatory’ imagery and language that is scripted onto the immune system. (4) Even in our attempts to “see” the world, we can do damage (e.g. the types of effects that the electron scanning microscope has on the cells it is ‘observing’). (5) How do we negotiate our (moral?) role in processes that actually destroy in order to create (knowledge)? (6) From here, we need to ask what the value of ‘knowledge’ is and how this value can be assessed. (7) In what ways, and under which hegemonic ideologies, are our negotiations mediated? (8) Why do general medical/scientific discourses insist on finding and then revealing truth to the public? (9) What is the effect of these “truths” – both on the body politic and on the individual bodies who must, for example, live as “diseased” bodies? (10) Why have we accepted this teacher/pupil role with the institutions? (11) What is the power dynamic embedded in these types of exclusive access? (12) What are the dangers of living in a social setting where a push for “truth” is inextricably linked to a push for profit?

Perhaps the most important question of all, and definitely the one that preoccupies Haraway, is how are these mediations (and modifications) used to support and/or inscribe existing paradigms and powers structures? That is, in the space that we mediate reality, what types of power structures or profit margins are at bay? In order to begin accessing some explanations related specifically to the immune system, we may want to examine the mandates of organizations like the World Health Organization or the proceedings of our own government in its dealing with the H1N1 virus. What are the intentions of the large pharmaceutical companies who profit from vaccines and antiretroviral drugs should be critiqued. Undoubtedly, there is a myriad of angles to approach these questions from. Bioartists definitely have a role to play in asking the pertinent questions, by reimagining possible angles of access, and by providing alternative and alterative maps. Only by recognizing how and where truth is found and constructed, can artists begin to subvert the very structures involved. Perhaps, as a (re)appropriation of mediation?

Sources

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, An Introduction. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

Haraway, Donna. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self In Immune Systems Discourse, in Symians, Cyborgs and Women. (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Jaret, Peter. The Wars Within. National Geographic.Vol. 169, No. 6. (June 1986).

Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

Links:

NPR Radio Pictures, Flu Attack! How a Virus Invades your Body.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpj0emEGShQ.

UNAids, Uniting the World Against AIDS.

http://www.unaids.org/en/default.asp

WHO’s H1N1 Hype: Experts not Surprised.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCvTbi-L9DQ

World Health Organization, Global Alert and Response: Pandemic H1N1 (2009).

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/en/

**These links as interesting examples of more recent immune system-related discourse.

Bioreactor (image taken from www.stelarc.va.com.au)

Tissue regeneration (image taken from http://saurav-muskan.blogspot.com/2007/05/interesting-innovations-alpha-nail-that.html)

Many of us are comfortable with conceptions of our bodies that identify them as organic; we are bombarded (and have long been confronted) with hegemonic discourse that considers the body as natural, regarding it as the macrobiotic vessel we are born into – an idea that simultaneously understands the augmented/transformed body as a site for ontological shifts that displace it from its inherently natural state to one of technological complication where the body’s identity has yet to be engendered and society, in its fright of technohype, takes clear aim. As Eugene Thacker demonstrates in The Thickness of Tissue Engineering, tissue engineering (TE) biotechnology relies on and is only possible because of a discrete division between the body and technology, but that in its practice it continuously transgresses this split. Consequently he calls for a medical-philosophical reconsideration of the radical possibilities TE offers to both bodies and culture by reading the aporias it presents in new ways. An aporia – a site of two equally valid but incompatible situations – is assumed to arise inevitably here for Thacker due to the hybrid nature of TE biotechnologies, which straddle and blend distant medical-philosophical worlds. He proposes that such conflicting coordinates of biotech be embraced to find new ways of articulating meaning about human bodies in medical practice beyond the immediate tensions they are more easily assumed to bring to the field.

Rat hearts generated using tissue engineering (image taken from www.cloningresources.com)

Tissue engineering is the in vitro (laboratory) or in vivo (corporeal) regeneration of living tissues from biomaterials that uses the body’s given tissue generation processes to integrate the tissues into the bodily matrix so that they function more or less “seamlessly” with the surrounding flesh, as though the body had grown them without any technological interruption. It was developed as a response to the lack of donor organs circulating to patients and was not successfully used in humans until 1996 (Thacker 1999). In much reference to TE, the word natural is heavily emphasized as the mode by which tissue generation processes are guided, thus supporting Thacker’s claim that TE is “a way of mobilizing biological components towards novel ends”. The three TE techniques outline by Thacker are as follows:

1) Traditional method

- Obtain cell sample by sourcing cells from a biopsy
- Cultivate the cells, often with bionutrients (like bovine serum), by inserting them into a biomaterial skeleton or scaffold, which is usually a biodegradable polymer and allows for the formation/sculpture of the tissue’s shape
- Place scaffold in an environment that induces regeneration → a bioreactor jumpstart
- Surgically reimplant the growth where it can mesh with surrounding tissue (a temperamental phase where one hopes that the reinsertion will take)

2) Stem cells (undifferentiated cells that have yet to grow into specific tissues)

The main aim is to control cell differentiation:
- Obtain stem cells from embryos, umbilical cords or sometimes pluripotent stem cells from adults (where cell differentiation is restricted to a limited amount of tissues, though still flexible enough to be of value to TE)
- Lace the stem cells on scaffolds with growth factors (proteins that bind to receptors on the cell’s surface) and the process continues as in the traditional method

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr effectively play the role of the scientifically accurate bioartists in their article Growing Semi-living Sculptures when they outline how differentiation is finally achieved in the manipulation of stem cells (a vital detail often skipped in the rhetoric that surrounds the power of stem cells). They explain “stem cells can differentiate into any kind of specialized cells by entering discrete lineage pathways which involves the action of specific growth factors and cytokines and other internal and external factors”. Cytokines are secretions of the immune system that carry signals between cells and allow for messages to be relayed during cell proliferation and thus tissue growth. If you can control what cytokines act upon what cells, the type of tissue their division will create can be controlled.

3) In vivo

- Cells are seeded and placed on a biopolymer scaffold, but then they are surgically implanted into a living organism with genetically modified plasmids (extra-chromosomal bacterial DNA molecule)
- Plasmids insert themselves at target sites inside the organism and carry codes for the production of proteins that eventually become tissue

Stelarc's 1/4 scale ear, as engineered by Catts and Zurr (image taken from www.stelarc.va.com.au)

Now, let’s examine the aporias that such biotechnologies present to the conceptualization of the body and the regeneration of its parts according to Thacker:

Aporia 1)
The regenerative body finds itself torn between idealism and empiricism
a) Idealism – notion of tissue engineering and retraining the body to act in non natural contexts
b) Empiricism – the organic resource that is the body itself is what is being regenerated

Tension: TE allows us to regenerate any imaginable body part, but the part itself is limited to the parameters of the body as source material.

For me this first aporia brought to mind the investment of tissue engineering in biomateriality, which contradicts what we’ve discussed in light of Massumi and Stelarc, whose work attests to bodily obsolescence. Rather here, tissue engineering is committed to the organic, normatively “natural” body state just as much as it is to the extensions of the body (technologies) that literally stretch outside of the biocorporeal realm, whereas Massumi and Stellarc focus more so on the surpassing of bodily importance by technologies that serve the body as extensions of it and affect value to bodily action beyond what the body itself is capable of. I think tissue engineering can thus be considered a useful site to examine when questioning the material importance of bodies in contemporary life as they show examples in which physical bodies are still necessary structures from which the very technologies that create their so called obsolescence can extend.

Aporia 2)
- TE as transparent technology
- A biomedia invisible to the body since it does not get rejected as foreign nor immunoincompatable since regenerated tissues are cultured from cells that belong to the host body
- Aiming for transparency as TE does inherently implies that a body without technology is healthier

Tension: Regenerating the body in ways that the body cannot do without mediation, but only using natural processes that disguise any mediation has taken place.

What’s interesting is that Thacker notes the more this narrative of TE as transparent to the body is used, the more instituted the regenerative body will become as normative. What gets lost when we do not distinguish between bodies made from technologically grown parts and bodies made from organically grown parts? How does this affect the ontological nature of the body? And, does it matter?

Aporia 3)
- The natural can exist through the non-natural and the organic can exist through the non organic
-The body is more than a body, always surpassing itself through regenerating parts, not wholes

Aporias- so what?
The existence of such aporias and fact that they make sense to us shows a still present will to preserve the bio/tech divide while simultaneously harmonizing the radical difference and simultaneous truths that division presents, allowing for the possibility of boundary transgressions that can be used to ease general social anxieties found surrounding daunting expectations of progressing technological dehumanization.

In all cases, Thacker claims that it is only the extracellular environment that has changed, whereby the context of the tissue and thus body has shifted from its own interior, to the lab and then back again. All else stays as normal, dare we say natural. However, what Thacker neglects is those tissue regeneration technologies that have the same end result of engineering biomaterial, but do so in a way that violates or brakes this code of “natural building as it was in vivo”. One such example is that of tissue printing:

watch?v=7SfRgg9botI

Check it out around the 11 minute mark.

I wonder what such a drastic reorganization and appropriation of biological growth methods used in this example of TE achieved via tissue printing presents to the discourse of TE as transparent biotechnology? Does it matter that cells do not automatically grow in a striated fashion as the printing process forces them to when comparing a printed tissue to a regenerated one that was grown on a scaffold that allows room for more “natural” communication and proliferation between cells? Where has TE drawn the border across its methodologies that allow some technologies to be classified as transparent, while others, like tissue printing, seem more appropriately grouped in with other possible cyborg byproducts? I wonder if the distance from the “natural” when considering body part manipulation outside of the corporeal realm affects their value and cultural status as body parts once they are reinserted (?). Has the subversive examination of TE that understands it as “transparent technology” actually given birth to more divisions between practice and meaning when we take a closer look at spectrums of transparency? This too should be reconsidered alongside the medical-philosophical questioning provoked by the tensions that Thacker calls to order here.

In addition, Thacker argues that TE emerged as a biopolitics of the population (to borrow from Foucault) because it deals with the availability of biomaterials (addresses the lack of donor organs) and regulation of these biomaterials (in the case of off the shelf organs). He claims it has given birth to an economy of autogeneration (tissue derived from one’s own cells to get beyond immunoincompatability problems) that has replaced an economy of body parts (transplantation, xenotransplantation, etc). I would argue it has not been replaced, but added to since former notions of organ transplants are still widely practiced horizontally (that is, between different organisms), suggesting that we should consider Thacker’s arguments as additive discourse but not replacement considerations in light of how TE radicalizes biomedical culture.

The Thickness of Tissue Engineering also traces the historical specificity of how instances in medical thought engendered the ways we think about bodily malfunction (pain, disease, breakdown) in order to show how TE forged a new tunnel through which to encompass thoughts about the biomedical body. From Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (review of medical thought) Thacker highlights the two philosophies that have dominated how we see the biomedical body, which lie under two modes of measure: quantitative and qualitative. The former defines the pathological state as different only in degree of distance from the normal, healthy state. That is, under this conception, very pathological state differs only as its deviation from a normal equilibrium – that which is considered a healthy balance. This is why homeostatic medicine and restorative/therapeutic practice aims to bring the body back to a pre-existing state of higher value. The latter articulates the relation between pathology and physiology as qualitative, outlined by the understanding that pain and disease are separate phenomena from health whereby the experience of disease is a distinct state different from the normative albeit healthy condition and therefore, pain is a disease in itself.

In light of TE, Thacker posits that it presents us with another relational model that lies external to these founding qualitative/quantitative biomedical philosophies. Because TE is founded on the unique notion that bodies are regenerative as a sum of their parts and recognizes self-healing as a bodily capacity made possible through the technical interruption of “natural” growth processes, it inevitably stands alone among all other types of medicine because in TE, the body generates itself from its own materials, making it both generative and synthetic whose properties cannot be measured qualitatively nor quantitatively.

This body generating itself brings other questions to mind though: Thacker asks philosophically, how can the self be synthesized and then reintroduced into the self? It seems quizzical, but is not hard to decipher when looked at more closely. It does so through fragmentation, the splitting of the whole into parts, allowing the body to be in more than one place at once. What I find interesting about this question and its answer is that it introduces the idea of the reflexive relationship in TE between body and synthetic body. The original body is the material that creates its transformation (new regenerated body) that we struggle to infuse with meaning, thus blurring the boundaries further between what it means to be natural and what it means to be technological. I see TE as instrumental in our posthuman evolution, though it is an instrument that aims to be based on the most “natural” biological processes possible, yet simultaneously allows the human body to surpass itself into posthuman modes of living as we rapidly progress towards the discovery of a body without death. Interestingly, Thacker never talks about reflexivity or posthumanism in his paper.

Semi living sculpture (image taken from www.lifeinthefastlane.ca)

With their Semi-Living Sculptures Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr use TE to generate stylized life forms from biopsies, or to put it another way – fragmented body parts. The major difference between this artistic application of TE and its use in biomedical practice is that the semi-living sculptures were never reintroduced to the host body from which their cells were cultured. When considering that these artworks are labeled “semi-living”, we see that a clear judgment has been made that qualifies what a “living” creature ought to be. It seems implied here that these sculptures, which are cultivated bodily fragments are not to be labeled as “living” either because they are still in their fragmented form (not reconnected to the whole of the body), or because of how inanimate they are (in their article, Catts and Zurr attest to their hopes of engineering vascularized sculptures so as to enable blood supply muscle contraction, allowing them to seem more “real”). The thing is though, that these “Semi-Living Sculptures” are real and are kept alive in the same way that our hearts could be (in vitro) if they were to be removed as fragment from our bodies. They are also equally as inanimate to several life forms that we do not protest as living (like for example, prokaryotic organisms). I thereby suggest that these artworks should be considered as “Living Sculptures” because doing otherwise devalues the artists’ credence as science-practitioners engaged in accurate scientific methodologies. Indeed they are fulfilling two of the three steps used in biomedical TE (differing only in surgical reintroduction), and so the regenerated tissues should be recognized as ontologically similar in both fields (art and biotech). However, by not granting these works as “living” we either have to match the regenerated tissues in biomedicine as something other than living as well, or enter a discourse that undermines Catts and Zurr’s practice as being “real science” in order to evaluate their existence as same. Moreover, the difference of categorization found between Catts and Zurr’s work and that of the biomedical field regarding TE and its “living” status offers interesting sites to examine, once again, the true “transparency” of the technology and how that transparent notion gets constructed socially rather than in any literal sense.

To elaborate, we are invited to see TE as seamless and mimicking of “nature” when it is used for biomedical ends, but as soon as it is appropriated for the arts through tactical means, it loses its transparency and becomes one with sci-fi, potentially “dehumanizing” discourse (like the birth of “semi-living” creatures) through its embodiment of uncategorizeable meaning, which people find threatening. I suggest that we should reconsider the ease with which we strip authourity from tactical practices as compared with the means for which the appropriated methods were incepted in order to become more fully aware of the discrediting of information we play a role in that simultaneously creates value discrepancies between ideas or practices that we may not intend to judge in such a way. This may just help us engulf and digest the several aporias Thacker mentioned are presented by TE in order to make new meaningful statements about human bodies in medical practice and health care that acknowledge the full social, philosophical and ethical ramifications of this type of work beyond the mere technological realm.

References

Catts, Oron and Zurr, Ionat. Growing Semi-Living Sculptures: Tissue Culture and Art Project. Leonardo, Vol. 35, No. 4 (2002), pp. 365-370.

Thacker, Eugene. “The Thickness of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: we can grow it for you wholesale”. The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics and Culture. MIT press. 2006. pp. 251-274.