Bio Art Inspiration - the Batura Frog

Just a little inspiration and intrigue for those interested in genes and cloning:
http://io9.com/5850292/the-bizarre-toad-thats-part-clone-part-lover-and-all-hybrid

And another plug from me for io9.com -- Current topics include the Bubonic plaque's similarity to modern bacteria, design's enhancement of the egg, and make-out robots. This is a fun site to inspire those interested in the fusion of art and science. It's written to appeal to the armchair scientist so don't expect too much depth in these articles; they're a jumping-off point.

Pondering Pigeons

I started writing about the pigeon article we read with the intention of having a point, but then it turned into a story from my youth (posted below). So I wanted to add one more post with a few thoughts on pigeons and the urban environment.

I write this as I sit in an airport, watching people scurry to and from their own homing pigeons – large metal birds - and this has made me think about environment and home. I’m thinking – in particular – about pigeons as metaphor for human adaptability and movement.

The article by Boris Palameta says of the pigeon that it’s as if “evolution has prepared them especially for human intervention.” As humans have reconfigured nature into urban centers, pigeons have thrived due to an abundance of food in the city, have thrived due to the warmth of the city, and have survived due to their development of a keen sense of direction and landmark. As the city has been built to convenience the needs of the human, it has also given the pigeon a lifestyle of convenience.

And the problems with pigeon overpopulation mirror human problems both directly and metaphorically. The spread of disease associated with overpopulation is not dissimilar to the passage of illness between humans in high-density areas. Also, the problem of pigeon overeating has parallels to health problems and early deaths in humans who, in these times, are overeating convenience foods that threaten their health. Palameta writes that the urban pigeon is smart enough to seek the path of least resistance to food (i.e. going to a person who feeds the pigeon on a regular basis for meals). Humans, opting out of home-cooked meals in favor of fast foods, are harming themselves in much the same way. Humans seek a path of least resistance that may cause long-term harm.

What interests me most, though, is the idea of the pigeon (the passenger pigeon in particular) as a metaphor for humans in terms of home and environment. As I sit in the airport, I am linking “species” of humans to their airline gates. For instance, at the gate for Duluth, Minnesota, I see flannel-attired old men and women in Green Bay Packer sweatshirts. For the most part, this flock is blue collar and wears a layer of warmth directly referring to the cold, northern climate it originates from. At the gate for NY-JFK, I see some business-attired men, some young hipster-looking adults, and a thin, beautiful woman wearing a wisp of a dress that reeks of money. I see money at this gate but I also see diversity (monetary and cultural). This group is not made up entirely of native New Yorkers; like pigeons, they have carved New York out as a home. As pigeon-people, they nest in the city but they “home” to their roots – to Kansas or India or Utica or where ever they originally migrated from. And…like the pigeons of the city who have been well-fed on account of their attractiveness, I can see the New Yorkers who may have been well-fed financially in part due to their fine feathers…

And all of these people in the airport – like pigeons – have survived NOT by following the light out of the tunnel, but by memorizing the intricacies of their environments: the clothing, the culture, the food, the social scene…

I have many more thoughts on this, but they aren’t particularly organized. And I’m writing under a time constraint. In closing, I’m thinking about how we (as humans) can benefit by comparing our human selves to animals rather than to anthropomorphize the animal. The animal can be the starting point in the thought experiment, not the human. Let’s see how we are like pigeons or rats or monkeys rather than fitting them into our human-based understanding of the world.

Pigeon Problems - A Musing That Got Out-of-hand

I was introduced to the passenger pigeon as a child – not personally but through a gritty classroom filmstrip probably meant to relieve the teacher more than it was meant to educate her young students. I’m not sure what the plot of the film was, but I recall a stranded man struggling to overcome his wilderness entrapment. At some point, a homing pigeon entered the picture and the man was saved via the pigeon’s delivery of a message to civilization.

And with that, my daydreams of a pet passenger pigeon commenced. I imagined I would send the bird out of my bedroom window – message tied to its leg – with the explicit instructions to find and deliver a message to Michael Jackson (how the pigeon would actually find MJ was its own problem). As my imaginings went, my pigeon would return to me with a note from Michael Jackson and thus THE correspondence would begin -- the correspondence that would put me at the top of the fan mail and lead to my own discovery as the next big singing sensation. These were the days before email or cell phones or GPS existed, so this was clearly a brilliant plan. The only hitch was that I needed to locate a passenger pigeon and convince it that my house in Northern Wisconsin was its home base.

There were a few problems with pigeon acquisition, though. First of all, my parents brushed off all of my questions about pigeon breeders. We did not live in a place of pigeons; we lived near a lakefront swarming with the most boorish of birds: seagulls. No. My parents would not entertain my pigeon obsession. Judging from my preceding Alec Guiness obsession - which my parents wouldn’t even throw an Obi-Wan Kenobi figurine at – I’d have to go this alone.

Then there was the problem of the local pet store – The Aqua Hut. The Aqua Hut was located in my town’s dying shopping mall and was the only place other than the roller rink that provided a kid under the age of 11 any entertainment. The Aqua Hut owners knew all of us town kids. After school, they’d find us pressed up against the aquariums, taunting fish and iguanas with our tap-tap-taps. If they found one of us particularly doe-eyed over a guinea pig or hamster, the owners campaigned for us to campaign our parents for a pet. They were the interest group fueling the pint-sized politicians. Our presence and affinity for the furried and feathered worked to their advantage; fingerprints on the glass aquariums were a small price to pay for potential business.

One day – hands placed coolly in my corduroy pants pockets - I asked the store owner when she thought the next shipment of passenger pigeons would arrive (granted they wouldn’t simply fly to the store’s location with leg-bound adoption papers). The owner looked at me and cocked her head a little. The feather dangling from her earring caressed her face. “This way,” she labored through a saloon-style door near the store counter and led me to a far-away corner populated with chirping and whistles. Here, I saw preening white birds and fussy little gray birds in bright wire cages. But there were no bona fide pigeons. “Here you go,” the store owner pointed toward the spastic avians. I looked at her questioningly. “Why don’t you bring your mom by, and we’ll talk,” she responded while gesturing toward a small yellow bird. I dug my hands deeper into my pockets and shrugged.

I was not going to find a passenger pigeon and the limits of my imagination stopped me short of pondering the possibility of training a canary. Lifetime obsession #2 halted just a few weeks after it began. There were surely other routes to fame for an isolated Midwestern girl and a new set of television reruns about a pre-fabricated rock band got my brain churning. Soon I had posters of The Monkees adorning my wall and a promise from my father that we could attend a Monkee reunion concert in Minneapolis. As I transitioned into great lifetime obsession #3, I abandoned the idea of pigeon-as-conduit and wistfully began daydreaming about backstage break-ins.

Food Art

Flavor tripping and DNA isolation

Eco Chic lab/ September 14

Lab #1 Food
Flavor tripping workshop!
Lab #2 Food
Hybrid DNA isolation lab

check out our lab photos!

Forgive me I am going to mention the readings from last week with this one. I identified with photographer Edward Steichen that brought delphiniums into the Museum of Modern Art

“The first artist to claim plant breeding as a fine art was the photographer Edward Steichen, who, from the 1920s until the outbreak of World War II, hybridized delphiniums, cleomes, nicotianas, poppies, and sunflowers at his country home in Connecticut.”

“ ...genetics was destined to play an extremely important role in human affairs, and consequently was everybody's business, including artists.”

In my work, I also use food to start conversation, storytelling and also go into nutrition and ways the degree of proximity with food changes our lives.

In the article Lee The Work of Art as Life, he says “The movement away from art objects has been precipitated by concerns within natural and man-made systems, processes, ecological relationships, and the philosophical-linguistic involvement of conceptual art. All of these interests deal with art that is transactional; they deal with underlying structures of communication or energy exchange instead of abstract appearances...”

recently:

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/11/16/transporting-nature

“One question that stands out for me is: What are and were the ethical and spiritual dimensions of our relationship to plants in our zeal for invention—and where are we going with this? I think this NASA video about Plant Productivity in a Warming World tells an interesting story.”

In this article:
http://biomediale.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/?blang=eng&author=gessert
"Today there is no serious philosophical opposition to genetic art, but a mature art of evolution remains almost as distant as it was before World War II. Full exploration of genetic art will require, as a bare minimum, new kinds of museums, spaces that welcome rather than exclude diverse forms of life. We can imagine traditional gallery spaces combined with gardens, zoos, and wilderness areas.
Art involving DNA is extremely diverse, but individual works often bring up the same questions: what kind of consciousness does the work serve? To what extent does it aestheticize the biological revolution, help commodify life, and further the holocaust of nature? On the other hand, does the work contribute to awareness that plants and animals did not arise for our sake, that they have their own ways of becoming and their own paths to fulfillment? How does a particular work of art affect the community of life? These are social questions but ones that in genetic art are inseparable from aesthetic experience."

few more thoughts:

food policy

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011

Caryn in a local raw chef that will come to the StoryHarvest http://www.rawteacher.com/halleluna/?p=about

Rewildering!

In this weeks readings I found the concept of rewildering and of species adapting to human life interesting. In general we think of cities as diverse cultural centers but the high concentration of humans causes ecological diversity to be low. While some species have found ways to adapt many have not. From a personal experience, I live in northern Vermont, where the Moose has been repopulated but the wolf has not. Wolves are one of the only predetors of Moose and this has resulted in a large population of moose that run into the human population. This happens on highways late at night and in towns or personal properties. Moose are so large that cars, buildings and people may not survive these encounters.
'I do agree that rewildering is essential for a homeostatic continent and do hope that it is achieved. However lobbying the governement for new legislation is only part of the solution. As a society I think there needs to be more respect towards nature.

Death Design

Check out this article on a eco friendly burial design:

http://the-scientist.com/2011/09/09/man-eating-mushrooms/

Spore 1.1

In reading the texts regarding using plants for making artwork I was really surprised on the influence that ideas and artworks mention in them had in some more recent artworks. In particular one work that gain some notoriety not so long ago by the duo of SWAMP.

The work that I'm talking about is Spore 1.1

Spore 1.1 is a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree plant purchased at Home Depot. In this project, Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: first, an unconditional guarantee to replace any plant they sell, for up to one year; second through an implied cybernetic contract. This second responsibility is the creative content for the work, where the economic health of Home Depot is transitioned through a series of physical computing techniques to a mechanism for controlling the watering of the rubber tree.

An onboard computer uses a Wi-Fi connection to access Home Depot stock quotes once per week, keeping a database of the week’s ending stock values. From the fluctuations in Home Depot stock, programs and circuitry connected to the rubber tree are controlled accordingly. If the company does well by showing stock growth, so does the plant - if the company suffers losses, Spore 1.1 does not get watered. If the plant should parish, due to poor stock performance, it is returned to the Home Depot and replaced with another-at no additional cost.

So the plant received more water if Home Depot's value in the market went up. Here then the life of the plant is regulated by the market and thus we can see how the market acts as a filter to regulate the propagation and survival of one species. Gesert affirms that: "Class-inflected taste exerts pressure on plant breeding, but economic pressures are much greater, at least in the United States. The marketplace is a filter that screens all of today's ornamental plants except for volunteers and the informal trades and gifts that escape commodification."

The project renders visible the relation between the plant and the multinational in real time over the internet, by doing this Hans Haacke's "real time systems" are addressed: "The new conceptual art... was more preoccupied with its mediation of and by the environment and seemed literally more expansive as suck... the new art was like an organism embedded within, and extending towards, the environment, with changes that took place in the object as a function of information introduced into its system".

In the end the rubber tree plant died. But not because it didn't had enough water:

"Home Depot’s stock ratings varied the whole time of the project. In November and December, however, Spore1.1 received water on 8 consecutive weeks. Its health seemed to steadily deteriorate after that, as its roots became rotted, and eventually died in January 2004. This was an unexpected result, as we assumed a weekly 1 minute watering would not kill the plant, rather only a lack of water would kill it. But it somehow seemed appropriate that the plant would die because of an overabundance of Home Depot stock gains".

http://swamp.nu/doug/bioFi_06.pdf

Cactus Grafting/Talk

On Wednesday afternoon from 2-6pm there are going to be a couple of amazing speakers
and workshop in my Eco Chic: Living Art class - and you are all invited to attend!
West Hall Rm 211!  >From 2-3:30pm
Jung Yoon aka Soyo Lee will conduct a Cactus Grafting Workshop and also talk
about "The Naming of Things" - the history of taxonomy!

 Then from 4-5:30pm Boo Chapple, Australian artist extraordinaire will present
a talk about her art work which includes themes such
as food,carbon offset projects,
consumables and wearables.

May the horse live in me

Some time ago I encounter this work Que le cheval vive en moi (May the horse live in me) while looking at the Golden Nika awards from Ars Electronica.
After the doing the readings I found this work to be more interesting than when I saw it some time ago. Here a very short summary:

"The performance May the Horse Live in Me is an attempt at “bioart” and extreme body art in which the animal foreign body, here the horse, is hybridized with the human body by means of an injection of horse blood (plasma). But far from being a fatal intrusion, such as that of the mythological hero Midas, said to have committed suicide by drinking bull’s blood, the idea is to carry out genuine therapeutic research, with the horse blood being made compatible and having a protective effect. For this purpose, Marion Laval-Jeantet has tried out different horse tissue immunoglobulins. The horse immunoglobulins recognize the targeted tissues and induce a functional regulation of these tissues that is specific to them. This ceremony of blood-brotherhood raises a debate on barriers between species and the supposed priority of human over animal concerning the earth’s resources. Will the animal be the future of the human?" http://prix2011.aec.at/winner/3043/

Here some very interesting comments of the artist:

"Horse immunoglobulins by-passed the defensive mechanisms of her own human immune system, entered her blood stream to bond with the proteins of her own body and, as a result of this synthesis, have an effect on all major body functions, impacting even the nervous system, so that the artist, during and in the weeks after the performance, experienced not only alterations in her physiological rhythm but also of her consciousness. "I had the feeling of being extra-human," explained the artist. "I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse." http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/08/que-le-cheval-vive-en-moi-may.php

Sorry for the long quotes but they are key to getting the piece I think.
It is interesting to me that in this work there seems to be a special attention on how the horse is treated in fulfilling the artist desire of becoming animal. It appears that it was the artist the one "adapting" and not the other way around. With the risk of over simplifying it might be argue that the work is subverting that idea that in order to understand the horse it is necessary to kill it, dissect it, etc. If we acknowledge that is our desire, our need to be "extra human" as the artist says then it makes sense to take the risk of going into this procedure. Who didn't have in some point the fantasy of flying like a bird, swimming like fish, etc? This drive seems to me as old as mankind.
At the same time the work also shows how much artworks like this owes to performance and body art. And even more, it seems to engage with a very interesting problem of representation, specially when we read the artist words. Did she felt like a horse does? Is it anthropomorphisation? A guess on how a horse might feel from the artist perspective. And if she did felt something else, how can she communicate this? Can it be communicated? Endless questions... I'll leave it here for now.

On a side note, I watch this movie last weekend: http://www.earthlings.com/ .
If you choose to look at it, be aware that is really hard to watch, very hardcore stuff. Which brings the question on how this "conscious making" messages are constructed...

Responce to Articles and Previous Posts

To begin, I would like to address some of the questions posed in the previous post. Would I modify an animal? Well if you extend this to organism or cell lines, then I already have in lab and class work. It is a normal procedure to do this and almost odd to question. For example, I have worked with tagging genes with GFP in bacteria and studied GFP tagging in C. elgans, a very small worm. My question is why these ethical concerns are not raised towards these organisms. C. elgans are so well studied that a group of scientists in England have traced each cell division form embryo to mature cell. This makes C. elgans an incredibly good model organism. Creating organisms with GFP or any added DNA sequence takes an incredible amount of work and patience. To the scientist who finally see a success, in the case the C. elgans a green nervous system, that moment is beautiful, inspiring and makes up for many failures it took to get to that point. Successfully adding DNA sequences is in fact an art form in itself and takes many repetitions and man hours to create.

Its seems that part of this question of what is bio art lies the question of what is art. In A history of Art Involving DNA it states that one theory "that art arose from the human mind or spirit and was therefore outside of and superior to nature." pg 270 Also stated that one argument against why plants could not be art was "the claim that their aesthetic attributes did not sufficiently reflect human choice" pg 271. Both of these thoughts create a gap between art work and subject. As if the subject does not have the same meaning as the art work itself. That these two entities are separate in their core. In my mind this is not the case. The work is mearly a the capturing of a moment of beauty, emotion, and/or meaning. The artist either creates, envisions, or recognizes a moment of importance and captures it in the medium of choice. And if art is defined by our own choices one could chose to see meaning and importance in many things in life, making those things art themselves. Life forms in art carries the traditional paintings and photographs that capture a moment one step further towards a better representation of the moment because the art form is fleeting. Bio art creates an extended moment of the artists mind that for a time may be seen but keeps more of the essence of what makes a moment important, the fact that it does not last.

As part of Bio-art many ethics questions are raised. I question the necessity of some of these questions. Yes, we should question whether the proper care is given to animals being studied and question current and proposed practices. However some questions that are raised involve circumstances that may never arise. One in particular is the dilemma about genetically choosing one trait over another. The arguement is that we may one day be able to use science to select for certain traits that will offer a better life for our children by removing genes that could lead to heart disease or other genetically linked diseases. However the fact of the mater is that we have just begun to unravel the gigantic yarn ball moster that is the cause and effect of many of these diseases. There is not telling what we may find a few layers in. It is very possible that one day we will discover that removal of genes that cause disease cause other worse conditions or that nature plays a more direct impact on. These ethical concerns about whether this should be allowed are no where near relevant as we do not see the direct situation in front of us. The application of this potential procedure, along with many others, cannot be judges as a whole but on a case by case basis and not until those situations arise.

Initial Thoughts and Links...

Hello Everyone! I'm posting to prod some initial discussion and also to share a couple of links.

After our first class, I must admit that I was initially caught up in the mechanics or the what-is-possible-as-an-artist-ness aspect of our introduction to bio-art. On a personal note, the last time I took any sort of biology class was my first semester of college. I had always enjoyed biology and thoroughly enjoyed the labs/experiments that went along with it. When push came to shove, and I realized I couldn't be a dedicated student of every field, the humanities nudged out any room for meaningful exploration of the sciences. From there, I became an armchair student of science, looking at the sciences through an art/humanities lens. This class presents itself as a bridge between two fields.

After completing the readings for Wednesday's class and doing some research on both bio-art and related topics of interest, I've been thinking less about experiments in the lab and more about approaches (on the conceptual level) to biological and neurological topics that interest me. While I still harbor an interest in conducting hands-on experimentation, the issue of ethics in bio-arts practice has made me look ahead a bit more cautiously. The Stracey article points out that Victimless Leather's existence is partially due to the sacrifice of fetal cows and that the florescent molecules in GFP Bunny may actually be toxic. Ultimately, Stracey states that bio-art is "least successful...when science is reduced to mere aesthetic spectacle," and most successful when it "can show that life is more than brute matter and more than the sum of cells, proteins or genes..." I'm not sure I have the best words for my thoughts at the moment, but these seem like good thoughts to govern how I - personally - will move forward as an artist in relation to the sciences. As we move forward, I wonder if anyone in the class already has rules set-up to govern what he/she will/won't do in bio-artistic practice. Let's say the sky is the scientific limit and you, as an artist, can clone or genetically modify an animal or life form... would you do it? Would you set up restrictions for yourself? When would/wouldn't it be OK to clone, modify, etc.? Any thoughts?

Moving on... I should note that the photo I've included in this post is of a schizophrenic mouse (supposedly). As an artist, some of my interests include mental illness and, more recently, autism. I found several articles online about scientists at Duke, MIT, and the NIH who've created transgenic mice that mimic behaviors of humans diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism. The humanities/arts side of me kicks in with a number of questions -- questions I may explore this semester...

Next.... I wanted to post a couple of links. A site that I enjoy is io9.com . It's a hodgepodge of science and pseudo-science and science fiction that can get the creative brain churning. Specifically, I found a fun article on the site yesterday about nanobots taking over the world: http://io9.com/5836916/when-the-world-ends-will-you-be-covered-in-grey-goo

Also - in terms of food - a number of articles appeared earlier this year about a food printer. So...here it is...food for thought (bad pun, I know) : http://www.physorg.com/news199080001.html

ECO CHIC CLASS DISCUSSION

Hi there!
This is the Eco Chic class blog. We are participating in the course "Eco Chic: Living Arts" as part of the Arts Department at RPI, in Troy, NY.

The class description (in short) is as follows:

"Eco Chic: Living Art" is a production and theory class about art, biology and the study of life covering topics such as environmentalism, land art,food art, sustainable practices with art, body art, bio-art. Part lecture, part hands-on
workshop, "Eco Chic" will encourage students to redefine and experimentally express their relationships with the varied aspects of everyday living systems and manipulating life. We will experiment with edible materials, collaborate and build new interspecies relationships, and conduct lab experiments. There will be field trips, guest lectures, and heated debates about the ethical issues surrounding biological art that deals so directly with life and death.

This blog site will be used as a sounding board, a discussion arena - a place to respond to readings, lectures, site visits, etc.

Happy posting!!