Tissues, Cultures, Art: Towards a NeoVitalist Perspective 303125886X, 9783031258862

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PALGRAVE BIOART

Tissues, Cultures, Art Ionat Zurr · Oron Catts

Palgrave BioArt

Series Editor Ionat Zurr, School of Design, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia

Reconfiguring living organisms into technologies can change our relationship with the environment, our bodies, and with concepts of materiality, nature, and life itself. What happens when we treat life as a raw material for artistic expressions? Palgrave Studies in BioArt presents a series of books written by researchers and artists who manipulate life in scientific laboratories. These artists develop new meanings relating to the concept of life through engaging, provoking, and creating contestable living and semi-living biological artworks. They ask: What is life? What is a body? What are the futures of life? And who is allowed to manipulate life? Such BioArtistic investigations are vital in articulating this new somatic-cultural space. The series will present important and diverse voices discussing frontier biotechnologies and their effects on society, ecology, industry, and life itself. This interdisciplinary series will be of interest to those working in the areas of art and design, science, cultural studies, bioethics, science fiction, and much more. We welcome proposals from researchers and practitioners in the field of BioArt, and cultural/experiential laboratory engagement.

Ionat Zurr · Oron Catts

Tissues, Cultures, Art

Ionat Zurr School of Design University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia

Oron Catts School of Human Sciences, SymbioticA University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia

ISSN 2731-3026 ISSN 2731-3034 (electronic) Palgrave BioArt ISBN 978-3-031-25886-2 ISBN 978-3-031-25887-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Robert Foster Nutrient Bag – Stir Fly, 2016 Custom made Bioreactor, insect cells, nutrient media. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to our best collaborative biological labour – Lilit & Rosa

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all of The Tissue Culture and Art Project collaborators throughout the years and the many projects; Guy Ben-Ary, who joined the Tissue Culture & Art Project in 1999 and collaborated with us on the Stone Age of Biology, Semi-Living Worry Dolls, Pig Wings, fish’n’chips and Disembodied Cuisine until 2003 when he embarked on his own artistic journey; Stelarc for Extra ear ¼ Scale; Bioteknica (Jennifer Willet and Jason Knight) for Teratological Prototypes, Marcus Canning for NoArk 1, Hideo Iwasaki for his support of Victimless Leather in Japan and in many other projects, Corrie VanSice for The Mechanism of Life - After Stephane Leduc, Robert Foster for Better Dead then Dying and other projects, Chris Salter for Futile Labor which also included Davon Ward who worked with us on Vapour Meat [HP0.3.1]alpha and different versions of the Compustcubator and Tarsh Bates for Crossing Kingdoms. We would also like to thank Professor Miranda Grounds our forever mentor, and Professor Stuart Bunt who were both the co-founders of SymbioticA Laboratory. Special thanks to Professor Traian V. Chiril˘a who was the first to invite us into his laboratory to get the first wet lab experience. To Professor Stuart Hodgetts, SymbioticA scientific advisor and ‘tissue culture guru’, we hope to continue working with you into the future. Jane Coakley, Amanda Alderson and Chris Cobilis for their managerial and administrative support.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is not enough space to acknowledge and thanks all the artists, scientists, humanities scholars, students and curators we worked with and shared personal and professional exchanges in the SymbioticA Laboratory. We hope to write about these experiences in a follow up book exploring the 22 years of SymbioticA. Lastly, thank you Kelly Somers for editing this manuscript and for your insightful comments and suggestions. This book builds upon and expands on previous published papers as well as original material. It is the first time, though, that our practice is narrated into a one book.

Introduction

This book is a story about how ideas regarding the concept of life need to be re-examined. It illustrates the complexity of human relationships with life in the laboratory and outside it, and above all about our uneasiness yet paradoxical joy in the hands-on exploration of the transformation of life into the object and subject of our artistic work. Life becomes a raw material which escapes full control and escapes being fully mechanized, both literally and conceptually; this is a story about the semi-living. In 1996 we came up with a question that we are still pondering in this book: ‘Can living tissue be used to make art?’ This question took us on a journey into much uncharted terrain and opened up so many more questions, such as: What are biological bodies? What is this thing we call life? What is art? And are there limits to interfering with life and art? Very early in our work, on 5 August 1997, we were invited to an interview on Australia’s ABC Radio National Art show to talk, for the first time on radio, about our work. The idea that artists can work in the biological laboratory with the stuff of life was unheard of then. After a short chat, the host invited listeners to call in to comment and ask us questions. The first caller, an older man, introduced himself as a painter who uses watercolours to draw and paint birds. He questioned whether we were artists at all and accused us of engaging in unnatural activity; he might as well have said that we were dealing in the unhallowed arts. Pausing for a moment to reflect, we responded, somewhat cheekily, by saying that putting marks on a surface to make them look like birds seemed to us much less natural

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than working directly with living biological tissue and spending time and effort in keeping these tissues alive and propagating. It might sound like a flippant response, but for us it raised a profound issue at the core of our and many other artists’ explorations. This book, Tissues, Cultures, Art, is the first in the Palgrave Studies in BioArt series. It narrates our collaborative artistic practice from 1996 to date. It reflects, through discussion of our artistic projects, on the dynamic and sometimes dramatic developments and changes that have happened to humans’ understandings of and relationship to life and bodies. It explores how aesthetic intervention can craft different narratives of the joy and pain experienced by life and the often paradoxical nature of making sense of life while being alive. This is our artistic and scholarly exploration of humans’ changing relation to life, both as a material and as a concept, following the shift from the linguistic turn (e.g. Foucault and Derrida) to the new materialist school of thought (e.g. Braidotti and Grosz, to name only two) and its apparent limitations. In the ethos of the arts, we do not attempt in this book to resolve or to provide solutions or answers but rather to contest, problematize and deliberately provoke. In a somewhat messy methodology, we narrate this book as a hybrid of personal reflections, poetics and anecdotes with a more rigorous, scholarly approach while mixing in visual representations of our artworks. These are poor relatives to the living, semi-living and dying artworks we have presented materially in different locations around the world, whether in scientific laboratories, art galleries and art fairs, science and natural history museums, public spaces, cafes or other strange places. These artworks, when presented in the flesh, we believe, have much more of their own stories to ‘tell’. Yet this is our humble and somewhat futile attempt to narrate postanthropocentric stories, to explore whether a critical engagement with life (sciences) can be sustained in an increasingly neoliberal and capitalistic society which treats life as a technology and a resource to extract profit from. This book is being published in a pivotal time of human history, when notions of sentiency and agency usually associated with living systems are being transferred to technological ones. Furthermore, not only is sentiency being attributed to machinic bodies, it is literally and conceptually being engineered out of the living in the quest for standardization, efficiency and automation. One of the questions we ask here is, is this the world we desire?

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Tissues, Cultures, Art is concerned with our – humans’ – current psychopathologies of control, in particular when it comes to controlling life. One of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens is that it modifies and manipulates its surroundings to fit its needs; its extended phenotype now reaches every corner of the Earth and further out into space. Life and living systems are not immune to this reach of humans. In other words, as human knowledge about life increases, so does the tendency to control and shape living things for human-centric wants and desires. Life is not only increasingly becoming a raw material to be engineered but, in new and complicated ways, manipulated living systems are being used as cultural objects and subjects. Artists, scientists, designers and engineers all play their part in this transformation of life itself. This creates a range of ontological conundrums and fantastical expectations as to what life could be and what life can do. Following the experience and success of our Tissue Culture & Art Project back in 1996 (the story of which is narrated here), SymbioticA laboratory was founded in 2000. SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, enabling artists and researchers to engage in wet biology practices in a research-intensive university’s biological science department. With an emphasis on experiential practice, SymbioticA encourages better understanding and articulation of cultural ideas around scientific knowledge and informed critique of the ethical and cultural issues of life manipulation. The establishment of SymbioticA has encouraged the growth of BioArt laboratories and centres within and outside academia, many of which have been set up by residents of our laboratory. Given the historical scope of this institution and its influence on the field, we are dedicating a separate book in the Palgrave Studies in BioArt series to the story of SymbioticA. In addition, many of the follow-up books in this series are written by artists who were residents at SymbioticA laboratory and were mentored by us. Living things exist as cultural objects in all human societies throughout history, as utilitarian as well as ritualistic and symbolic objects. Domestication shifted the power dynamics between humans and the nonhuman living world around us, resulting in anthropocentric aesthetic and emotional biases driving some of the selection pressures on domesticated organisms. It was only at the end of the twentieth century that artists started to experiment, in a serious yet playful way, with the manipulation of living biological systems, organisms and their parts. This may not be surprising, as humans’ perceived ability to manipulate living systems,

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from the molecular to the ecological level, has become systematic, more predictable, more reproducible and easier. It is important to qualify this assumption as this view is very short-sighted; in the long term, the cascading impacts of these newfound ways of manipulating life are nothing but messy, unpredictable and unreproducible. The complexity of life and its interaction with itself and the environment is still out of the grasp of the human ability to comprehend, let alone to control. The new ways of engineering life come in a time when human-made dry, hard and digital technologies are becoming more lifelike (e.g. ‘autonomous’ driverless cars and artificial intelligence systems). In the twenty-five years since we began our artistic project, many things about life and how humans relate to it have changed. This book narrates some of these changes and concludes with our proposal, given the poverty of language especially as it relates to the concept of life, of the notion of Secular Vitalism. This is a way of being in which we extend to life special consideration that is different from our treatment of non-carbon-based things. As ‘nature’ breaks down and we are on the verge of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, where living systems and biological processes are harnessed to undo environmental destruction and usher in a guiltfree time of plenty, we believe that critical artistic expression with and about life is called for. Our almost three decades of working in scientific laboratories and the corresponding range of scientific understanding and technological development over this time are reflected here. Those who are familiar with our work may recognize some of the discussion from numerous published papers. This is the first time these thoughts have been gathered into one extended and reflective manuscript. We ask what compels us, or, in other words, what is the human imperative which drives us, to assert control over living systems that exist independently from us, while nonliving technologies, computergenerated algorithms and other human-made systems escape our control? Our artistic expressions are a visceral struggle to articulate our human complicity in this paradox. This book is a hybrid product of embodied aesthetic and conceptual investigation, yet is based on contesting attempts to understand and control life. It is also a book about our own personal journey starting as young enthusiastic artists entering biological laboratories with the hope of making ‘a better world’ through advancing the knowledge and technologies of the life sciences. Once embedded in this niche and its different

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manifestations in the real world, we were forced into a reality check and now – older, weary and, following Haraway’s words, ‘staying with the trouble’1 – we immerse ourselves in the unpredictability of materials and phenomena such as sunlight, soil and shit (the title of our most recent artistic project). Chapter 1 goes back to the mid-nineties, when we coined the evocative term ‘semi-living’ to refer to tissue-engineered constructs/sculptures hosted in techno-scientific ‘bodies’ (petri dishes, incubators, bioreactors – manufactured devices or systems that support a biologically active environment). Here we outline the technological and conceptual backbone of the semi-living as both objects and subjects, maintaining that the semi-living applies to an array of issues, such as historical and evolving relationships with scientifically constructed living entities; the fragile and ambiguous boundaries between the living, nonliving and/or dead; the interdependency of living systems, including humans, and technology; and popular culture and political and social-based metaphors concerned with the undead, among others. Chapter 2 explores our artistic projects which contest the DNA-centric view of life, particularly responding to the ‘genohype’ following the socalled completion of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000. Our artistic exploration challenges the scientific reductionism, and public perception, of the idea that there is not much more to life than the DNA code. We argue that not only is this wrong, but it is also an ideological stance that entrenches a chauvinistic perspective using DNA and its associated epistemologies and metaphors. We, through our artworks, called for a more contextualized and diverse view of life and the fallacy of the desire for one ‘elegant’ universalized, systematic way to explain and categorize life. This was also the time, in our own artistic development, when we shifted our interest from cells and tissues to the context within which they operate – their surrogate techno-scientific machinic bodies. Chapter 3 takes the incubator as a starting point for the investigation of systems which support life. From the invention of the chicken incubator by the early Egyptians to current research into artificial wombs, we explore the outsourcing of care for life to the automated machine.

1 Donna J. Haraway. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Chapter 4 explains how we ended up, despite our best intentions, creating artworks which became precursors to industries such as biofabrication and cellular agriculture. Here we introduce the term ‘metabolic rift technologies’ to point to the growing rift between humans and their environment, and the ridiculous fantasy of living in a technologically mediated utopia, whether it is producing food without ‘nature’ or an existence free from nature and free of consequences. Chapter 5 illustrates artworks that explore life’s resistance to systemization and human categorization. Context again is explored through positioning living and semi-living artworks in different institutional settings – from the natural history museum to art galleries and luxury goods retailers. It is an opportunity to celebrate some of the strangeness of living systems, whether they are human-made or not. The concluding chapter visits and revitalizes the idea of Secular Vitalism, asking whether there is something unique to life that we can relate to (as we are life!) without resorting to metaphysical explanations. This is more of an artistic provocation rather than a careful philosophical study and it is very much needed today.

Contents

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1

The Semi-living

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Information, Genohype and DNA Chauvinism

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3

Who Cares? Outsourcing Labour to Incubators

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The Reverse Ontology of Sentience: The Technologically Mediated Victimless Utopia

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Taxonomies, Categorizations and Queer Life

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Concluding Notes: Secular Vitalism

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.7 2.1 2.2 2.3

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

B(w)omb, 1998 Hamsa 1998 Stone Age of Biology 2000 [Carrel and Lindbergh’s organ perfusion pump, 1938] on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003 Extra Ear – ¼ Scale, 2003 Pig Wings, 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’ Pig Wings, 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’ Oron near a sculpture of the Golem in a restaurant at Prague Mechanism of Life, 2013 Mechanism of Life, 2013 Mechanism of Life, 2013 The Semi-living Worry Dolls 2000 The process of giving birth to a Worry Doll 2000 Semi-living Doll H 2000 Compostcubator 2019 Compostcubator 2019

3 4 7 14 18 19 29 41 42 48 52 52 53 63 64 65 69 71

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Fig. 3.6

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1

Growth of cells in Compostcubator and control (with Kalle Sipilä, Christina Philippeos and Jess Sells from the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Kings College London) Tissue-Engineered Steak No. 1, 2000. Pre-natal sheep skeletal muscle and degradable PGA polymer scaffold. Part of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr Research Fellowship in the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School From Disembodied Cuisine installation, Nantes, France, 2003 Victimless Leather – A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific ‘Body’, 2004 Stir Fly, 2016, in collaboration with Robert Foster Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle, 2022, in collaboration with Steve Berrick OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia ‘Untitled’ From the Monsters Series 1998

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The Semi-living

The cardboard box was delivered to Traian Chirila’s laboratory at the Lion’s Eye Institute, an Australian medical research institute affiliated with the University of Western Australia. We opened it to discover the somewhat gruesome contents of about ten fluffy white rabbits’ heads cut into halves, the white fur stained with fresh red blood. We were told that the rabbits had been slaughtered earlier that morning; the bodies had been delivered to a gourmet restaurant while the heads were sent to a neuroscience laboratory, where they were cut in half and the brains extracted to be used for research. Chirila’s laboratory then received these halved heads, requiring the eyes for research into the development of an artificial cornea. Our next step was to ‘pop out’ the eyes. Using small scissors, we cut the skin around the eyes and severed the optic nerve at the back of the eyeballs. Once the eyes were disembodied, we immersed them in nutrient media liquid with a high concentration of antibiotics in a 50 ml flask. Once sealed, the flask was put in a fridge overnight. The following day, in sterile conditions, we learnt how to cut the eyeball open and gently dissect the thin layer of epithelial cells covering the front part of the eye. Using scissors, we then mechanically dissected the layer of tissue. With an enzymatic agent, we further separated the tissue into disassociated cells that were seeded in a tissue culture flask with the appropriate nutrient media for their growth. Finally, we placed the flask in a 37 °C incubator. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_1

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In only a few hours, the cells attached to the bottom of the flask and began to multiply. This was back in 1997, while doing a research residency1 in a laboratory that was developing an artificial cornea.2 A routine procedure of obtaining cells from a primary source (an animal body) shifted our own perception regarding life: we were able to get living cells from something as dead as half a head with no brain, more than 24 hours after the animal was slaughtered; we viscerally realized that life can be extended by culturing cells taken from a dead animal. Here, the boundaries between life and death are gradual, and the life (or death) of the animal is decoupled from the life of its parts (the cells). By growing living cells derived from dead flesh – with technological support – we were working with entities that were both (or neither) dead and alive. This was the first instance, as part of our artistic journey, that we encountered the poverty of language as it relates to life. We felt that there were no words to describe these different forms of liveness; therefore, we referred to the living fragments from the dead rabbits, sustained alive by technology, as semi-living entities. Our first series of artworks, titled simply The Tissue Culture & Art, Stage 1, was concerned with growing, observing, documenting and presenting partially living ‘objects’ as pieces of art. At the time we did not even entertain the idea of taking the artistic tissue sculptures to the gallery due to technical hurdles and the perceived health and safety issues of having living tissue-engineered constructs in a public space. We grew tissues (fibroblast and epidermal cells) over miniature three-dimensional glass figurines in shapes of human-made technological artefacts, such as cogwheels. We used microscopes, a three-dimensional computer scanner and medical imaging technologies to generate animated sequences, and digital montages that described the growth of the living artefact and the semi-living sculptures. We were especially fond of the artwork of a glass figurine 2 cm high and 0.5 cm wide/deep that we designed to depict the iconic image of a bomb, a symbol of humans’ destructive technologies. We grew connective tissue over its surface to later photograph its 1 Funded by an arts grant from the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in Western Australia. 2 T.V. Chirila. 2001. An overview of the development of artificial corneas with porous skirts and the use of PHEMA for such an application. Biomaterials 22: 3311–3317. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-9612(01)00168-5.

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Fig. 1.1 B(w)omb, 1998

different angles, focusing on different areas, using an inverted microscope. Once we overlaid all the images (using Photoshop software) into a poetic montage, it resembled more of a fertility goddess (Fig. 1.1). Therefore, we titled it B(w)omb. From the same series of works (Fig. 1.2). Looking back, the catalogue text that accompanied our first exhibition in 1998 seems very naïve and earnest (as were we), though it offers a starting point of epistemological liberation from the life sciences or biomedicine into a different, and public, context: Current and future development in biological derived technologies, in particular in the field of tissue engineering, may yield objects that could be designed and artistically manipulated. This possibility raises many issues

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Fig. 1.2 Hamsa 1998

that have to be addressed. Those issues concern aspects of human development and scientific progress, and the interaction of humans (whatever kind they may be) with their environment. The use of artificially grown living skin (or living surface coating) as an independent tissue (by that I mean living tissue that is sustained alive and grows not as part of an organism but with artificial support) can become an exciting new artistic palette which never existed before. The use of this palette will not be just a method of creating new art forms, but also the actual process can be seen as an artistic statement and investigation of possible futures. In those futures the use of organic systems may replace and/or seamlessly interact with human-made structures to the extent that our cultural perceptions of what is alive and what is artificial will be redundant. This possible shift will represent a change in values and a shift in the perception of humans and nature. The purpose of the proposed project is to enable the artists to address some of those issues … Why? To be able to use and generate a completely new art form that is yet to be explored and utilized. The manipulated growth of living cells in in-vitro conditions represents a new way for artistic expression with the

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unique combination of shapes, colours and movement. An exploration of such aesthetics in three-dimensional space was, as far as we know, never utilized and explored artistically. To highlight current technological developments and their cultural and social implications. It is obvious that technological and scientific developments are exceeding the cultural capacity to comprehend these changes. This is why this kind of artistic expression is so important now. Art that can be seen as the optimal medium to generate a discussion and a debate dealing with the contradictions between what we know about the world and society’s values, which are still based on old and traditional perceptions of the world. To generate broader discussion concerning these issues and their ethics: Our project will be a genuine attempt, free from scientific or commercial hidden agendas, to raise different possibilities for the future as a base for pure discussion about the ethics and values of manipulating living matter and incorporating it with non-living systems. To create a dialogue between the wider community and the scientific community, using art as a generator of critical and aesthetical debate. To create a radically different point of view, from which both the wider community and the scientific community will be able to gain practically as well as philosophically and culturally.

Stage Two of the project further explored the materiality of tissue and nonliving material hybrids. In this stage, we grew muscle, epidermal and connective tissue over biopolymers. As the cell cultures developed, they grew inside the scaffolding as well as around it and had a better ‘grip’ on the structure. The result was a collection of images that documented the ‘fusion’ of living tissue with human artefacts that were presented as visual montages in the gallery space, sometimes alongside relics from the process such as the semi-living constructs with fixed dyed tissue. We titled Stage Three of the project Force and Intelligence on Plastic as we extended our skills to growing muscle (‘force’) and neurons (‘intelligence’) over P(Hema) hydrogel structures we moulded in different shapes. The experiments led to the exhibition we titled The Stone Age of Biology, which was shown in 2000 as part of the Perth International Arts Festival at Scitech Science Centre in our home city of Perth, Western Australia. The context of the exhibition – a science centre – as well as the theme of the exhibition reflected that our early engagements with biotechnology were rooted in a kind of awe and the relative innocence of non-experts coming to work in a scientific laboratory. As will be shown

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through the narrative of this book, this changed rapidly as we further embedded ourselves within the biological laboratory, releasing the knowledge and know-how (epistemology) we gained from working in the lab to the cultural realm, which inadvertently was picked up by the consumer goods industry. The Stone Age of Biology posited, at the turn of the new millennium, that we are in the midst of a major technological shift in which advancements in biotechnology will radically alter life in ways we cannot possibly imagine. The series of images featured mouse and rabbit muscle cells and fish nerve cells grown over hydrogels shaped like European prehistoric stone artefacts borrowed from the Western Australia Museum. Each artefact was scanned in three dimensions using a touch sense scanner, which allowed for the creation of miniature hydrogels. In an analogy to the ways, the production of stone tools changed humans into a technologybased organism and changed human society in ways the original stone tool producers could not imagine, the same is happening now as we enter another period of technological advancement, this time with biotechnology. For the first time we are treating life – in all of its conceptions, including ourselves – as a resource for new biological tools that will be part of our industrial society. The early humans carving their stone tools was a result of a mental shift that separated them from nature for the first time, and we have never looked back. We asked through the exhibition what kind of mental shift we would go through as part of this (bio)technological revolution? How will we treat our biological bodies? How will we perceive manufactured living matter? How much technology will invade the body and how much of the body will invade technology? (Fig. 1.3). In order to contextualize further our own initial shift regarding our understandings of life, we need to dwell on the years back when living bodies were first fragmented into separate (semi) living cellular colonies independent of their original body.

Early Years of Tissue Culture Much of the biomedical and biotechnological (and some artistic) research done today is enabled through experimentation on cells in vitro. The literal meaning of in vitro is ‘in glass’ and this term is now used to describe a process ‘performed or taking place in a test tube, culture dish, or

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Fig. 1.3 Stone Age of Biology 2000

elsewhere outside a living organism’.3 This research includes developing vaccines and generating antibodies. Cells in vitro have paved the way to fields such as artificial reproductive technologies, tissue engineering, stem cell research and development, and biofabrication (which will be further discussed in Chapter 4). Aesthetic and performative considerations, ideologies and some frivolous engagements developed alongside. Here, we would like to travel back to the early years of tissue culture and its socio-cultural and onto-epistemological affects, which linger on today. Well into the twenty-first century, our scientific and cultural understandings of the concept of a ‘living body’ are continuing to shift. This century we have added to the mid-to-late twentieth-century dominant narrative of the body as coded DNA, offering an alternative view of the 3 Lexico. 2022. In vitro. https://www.lexico.com/definition/in_vitro. Accessed 22 July 2022.

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body as an ecology, not only of parts, but also of different kinds of living organism. The study of the microbiome has revealed that each body, including the human body, is a symbiont within itself – we are more than human. The human microbiota consists of 10 trillion to 100 trillion symbiotic microbial cells, primarily bacteria in the gut that play a role in our health, mood and behaviour. As this book will argue, there is a need for a further shift in the mind-set of ‘a body’ (or a self) to the understanding that, rather than a discrete entity, it is an ongoing semipermeable process of ecological being/becoming. Yet the endeavour to understand, fix, enhance and automate bodies by fragmenting them into discrete parts is still an important part of human enterprise and is lurking in our onto-epistemological formation of discovering and articulating what life is. The cell is considered to be, from a western materialist perspective, the basic unit of life – an organic automaton. Anything less complex than the unit of the cell is not considered to be living. The realization that communities of cells can be sustained alive and even grown externally to the body if given the appropriate conditions is not just the result of scientific advances; it has also required a cognitive shift regarding what a body is or, more appropriately, what constitutes a body as well as new interpretations of what life is. The first shift required an ‘assault’ on the notion of the singular body. In western philosophy, which is based on dialectics and dichotomies, it arose from the demonstration that an individual body can be fragmented into smaller entities or semi-beings and that these ‘collectives’ have complex and autonomous relations even when they are completely disconnected from their original host body. Hence the divide between a body and its environment is not a sealed one but rather is diffused by membranes, and furthermore the divide between a whole body and parts of a body is gradual and enables the fuzzy zone of the semi/partial living. Philip White, writing in 1963, dated the origin of the idea of tissue culture back to Aristotle (340 BCE) and Theophrastus (320 BCE) because they described animals and plants as being made up of unified elements: blood and sap, flesh and fibre, nerves and veins, bone and wood. Malpighi (1675) and Grew (1682) theorized that these elements are literally ‘woven’ (tissé) into tissues of still finer elements.4 In 1667, 4 Philip R. White. 1963. The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells. New York: The Ronald Press.

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Robert Hooke, using one of the earliest microscopes, observed cell structures in a thin slice of cork. He coined the word ‘cell’ as the structure reminded him of a honeycomb. As observed by Georges Canguilhem, already at this point the underlying notion of a body as a collective of cells had been raised by the choice of the word ‘cell’. Canguilhem asks: ‘Yet who can say whether or not the human mind, in consciously borrowing from the beehive this term for a part of an organism, did not unconsciously borrow as well the notion of the cooperative labour that produces the honeycomb?’ He then answers: ‘What is certain is that affective and social values of cooperation and association lurk more or less discreetly in the background of the developing cell theory.’5 Hence the notion of the cell was intrinsically linked to a larger body, the way an individual citizen is linked to her social community and to its productive labour. The second important development was the realization that the cell was in fact an autonomous agent, as if a ‘little body’ by itself. In making this claim, H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells argued that the term ‘cell’ was thus misleading, and offered a more ‘individualistic’ metaphor – a corpuscle. They expressed their disapproval in a somewhat emotive way in their book, The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge about Life and its Possibilities (1929): The word ‘cell’ is a most unfortunate word in this connection. That is why the triplex writer has put fastidious inverted commas about it in the last two sentences. He dislikes handling and using it … and many people at the outset of their biological reading are misled, therefore, into imagining that our living tissues have a sort of honeycomb structure. Nothing could be farther from the reality. The proper word should be ‘corpuscle’ (little body) and not cell at all.6

Furthermore, they argued, cells which are taken away from the body and grown in vitro are cut loose from its labour: ‘An organ such as the brain or liver is like the City during working hours, a tissue culture is like

5 François Delaporte (ed.). 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. New York: Zone Books, p. 162. 6 H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells. 1929. The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and Its Possibilities. Vol. 1. London: Amalgamated Press, p. 26.

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Regent’s Park on a Bank Holiday, a spectacle of rather futile freedom.’7 Also implied here is that the body is like the nation state and the cells are its productive citizens. The botanist Matthias Schleiden (1838) and zoologist Theodor Schwann (1839) were the first to formulate modern ‘cell theory’. Schwann wrote: One can thus construct the following two hypotheses concerning the origin of organic phenomena such as growth: either this origin is a function of the organism as a whole – or growth does not take place by means of any force residing in the entire organism, but each elementary part possesses an individual force. We have seen that all organisms consist of essentially like parts, the cells; that these cells are formed and grow according to essentially the same laws; that these processes are thus everywhere the result of the same forces. If, therefore, we find that some of these elementary parts … are capable of being separated from the organism and of continuing to grow independently, we can conclude that each cell … would be capable of developing independently if only there be provided the external conditions under which it exists in the organism.8

Wilhelm Roux (1885) isolated, or removed, a medullary plate from a chick and kept it alive for some days in saline solution.9 Julius Arnold (1887) was ‘cultivating’ leucocytes and other cells by soaking very thin slices of pith of the Elder tree in aqueous humour from the eyes of frogs.10 These were then implanted under the skin of frogs, which were soon infected by leucocytes. He then removed the slices of pith at intervals to dishes of saline solution or of aqueous humour and observed that the leucocytes migrated from the pith into the nutrient, where they survived for some time. The first successful ‘tissue culture’ was grown by Ross Harrison (1907, 1910) when he cultivated the neuroblast of the frog in its clotted lymph and observed the growth of the fibrillae from

7 Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life, p. 29. 8 Theodor Schwann (1839) cited in White, Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells,

pp. 188–190. 9 Wilhelm Roux. 1890. Über die Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen. 10 Jorge R. Pasqualini and Robert Scholler. 1992. Hormones and Fetal Pathophysiology.

New York: Informa Health Care, p. 602.

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the central body.11 Harrison was able to grow and proliferate cells rather than merely sustain fragments of a body; therefore, he could legitimately claim to be the first to have successfully ‘created’ partial life. However, Harrison had devised the method only to solve a particular problem, and once this was done he made no attempt to develop it further. Harrison experimented with isolated pieces of living frog embryonic tissue and grew them in hanging drops of frog lymph enclosed in glass slides. His aim was to view and learn about the growth of a neuron cell over time.12 The experiment was designed for the purpose of solving a specific ‘riddle’ which puzzled neuroscientists at the time: the debate whether an axon grows from its stem (like a fingernail) or from its end part. The then method of histology, in which cells were fixed (killed), dyed and mounted on a slide as a two-dimensional specimen, did not allow such an observation. It was Harrison’s technical solution to a problem of representing change over time in living biological matter that led to the technique of tissue culture. Harrison’s ability to sustain life in in-vitro conditions did not come as a result of a development of a new technology but rather as a shift in and combination of ideas: ‘Any originality, therefore, that may be claimed for this work is due to combination of ideas rather than to the introduction of any particularly new device.’13 In retrospect, he said: it seems rather surprising that recent work upon the survival of small pieces of tissue, and their growth and differentiation outside of the parent body, should have attracted so much attention, but we can account for it by the way the individuality of the organism as a whole overshadows in our minds the less obvious fact that each one of us may be resolved into myriads of cellular units with some definite structure and with autonomous powers.14

11 Ross G. Harrison. 1910. The outgrowth of the nerve fiber as a mode of protoplasmic movement. Journal of Experimental Zoology 142: 5–73. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.140 1420103. 12 For more see, H. Landecker. 2002. New times for biology: nerve cultures and the

advent of cellular life in vitro. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33: 667–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1369-8486(02)00026-2. 13 Harrison (1913) cited in Landecker, New times for biology. 14 Ross G. Harrison. 1913. The life of tissues outside the organism from the embry-

ological standpoint. Transactions of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons 9: 63–75.

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Harrison did not make the mental shift that would enable him to see the long-term implications of the technique he developed not only in the scientific sense (tissue culture is a technique that is widely and extensively used for many purposes from tissue engineering to stem cell research, reproductive technologies, therapeutic cloning and pharmaceutical uses such as drug and vaccine development), but also in its radical implications to conventional ontological understandings of life, bodies and today’s notion of material agencies. Montrose Burrows (1910) studied with Harrison and introduced the idea of substituting blood plasma for lymph in the cultivation of chick cells. Together with Alexis Carrel (1910 onwards) they developed the use of embryo extracts as growth-promoting nutrient and elaborated the methods for growing a great variety of animal tissues. Carrel continued to explore the technique of tissue culture as the beginning of a wider investigation into the notion of partial life.

Alexis Carrel and Revivalism Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

The person who made in-vitro life a central object of scientific interest and beyond was Dr Alexis Carrel. By prolonging the life of body parts inside a new artificial ‘body’, he showed that cells in culture were almost/sort of a new life form. Carrel’s assistant, 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; i.e., a new form of cell environment, in many respects different from the normal body that nature has given the cell in which to develop’ (emphasis added).15 Tissue culture, in a sense, coupled two opposite narratives: (1) the Frankenstein-like fantasy of revivalism from the dead (and nonliving matter) and eternal growth;

15 Eduard Uhlenhuth. 1916. Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of Rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions. Journal of Experimental Medicine 24: 689–699, p. 690. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC212 5483/.

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and (2) the outsourcing of bodily functions and a symbolic agency to the machine (‘a new type of body’). While Harrison’s interest lay in observing differentiation and movement, Carrel’s was directed towards observing ‘life’ and its essential characteristics – growth and reproduction – outside the body, as part of his continuing interest in the field of longevity, organ transplant, suturing and surgery techniques. Carrel was the first to look at the technique of tissue culture and growth of cells outside the body as a central object of interest separated from other techniques – a technology that, he believed, would enable him to capture the minimum ‘essence’ or vital force of life. In addition, Carrel, in the spirit of the transhumanists, believed that this human technological advancement would not only extend life but also make immortality possible. Carrel won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 and became a popular public figure who interweaved onto his discoveries ontological, political and ethically questionable ideologies far from the strictly biomedical or even scientific realms. In his visceral organism (or reduced organism) experiments, the most explicitly stated goal was to attain ‘autonomous life’ for isolated organs or systems of organs and to understand life processes through body reduction and the visibility of its isolated organs.16 Needless to say, these experiments involved invasive vivisection procedures. Together with the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, Carrel devised the organ perfusion pump, a mechanical pump for circulating nutrient fluid around large organs kept alive outside of their host body. This was successful in keeping animal organs alive for several days or weeks, but this was not considered long enough for practical application in surgery.17 To describe the use of the perfusion pump, Carrel and Lindbergh jointly published The Culture of Organs in 1938 (Fig. 1.4).18 The pump was a technological device designed not only for function (to maintain the life of an organ) but also for aesthetics – to present the new wonders and utopian potentials of techno-scientific advancement.

16 Alexis Carrel. 1912. Visceral organisms. JAMA LIX: 2105–2106. https://doi.org/ 10.1001/jama.1912.04270120090001. 17 In 1953 surgeon John H. Gibbon developed this idea further by introducing the heart–lung machine for open heart surgery. 18 Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh. 1938. The Culture of Organs. New York: Hoeber.

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Fig. 1.4 [Carrel and Lindbergh’s organ perfusion pump, 1938] on display at the International Museum of Surgical Science

The affiliation with Lindbergh, the great American hero, extended to a shared ideology of eugenics, which Carrel outlined in his 1935 publication, Man, the Unknown.19 A conviction view of science combined with religious, even mystical, declarations led him to speculate on the great problems of human destiny. Carrel theorized that humankind could reach perfection through selective reproduction and the leadership of an intellectual (male) aristocracy. Through scientific enlightenment, humanity would be free from disease and would gain long life and spiritual advancement. Carrel suggested gas chambers as a solution to eradicate unwanted

19 Alexis Carrel. 1935. Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper & Row.

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elements in society.20 ‘Eugenics’, Carrel wrote in the last chapter of the book, ‘is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race must propagate its best elements.’21 The book, a worldwide bestseller translated into nineteen languages, brought Carrel international attention. A 1954 article in Collier’s magazine described Carrel as, ‘A brilliant man … Dr. Carrel made valuable contributions to the science of tissue culture’.22 Yet he is considered an eccentric mystic and fascist, or at least a Vichy-collaborating eugenicist.

The Laboratory Laboratories are places of labour-performance by the living, semi-living and nonliving apparatuses (actants) occupying it. Techno-scientific innovation and performance art share elements of the spectacle, the affective and aesthetic considerations. Life sciences laboratories are also places of extraction, isolation, reductionism and manipulation, where life is controlled, colonized and mechanized. Carrel’s practice in the lab and in the public domain involved a production of elaborate theatrical performance, to the point that he was accused of being ‘a hindrance rather than a positive force in the further development of tissue culture after its initial establishment’.23 This was also due to Carrel’s eccentric, mystic attitude towards ‘life’; Carrel’s practice and laboratory were heavily involved in rituals. While head of the laboratory for experimental surgery in the Rockefeller Institute in New York, he designed it to conduct his experiments in a unique way. His contemporaries criticized him on the grounds that he treated tissue culture as an occult art; the lab walls were grey and he insisted his assistants wear 20 ‘Those who have murdered, robbed … kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts’ (Carrel, Man, the Unknown, pp. 290–291). 21 Carrel, Man, the Unknown, p. 299.

Hannah Landecker. 2004. Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’: the origins of tissue culture. In Creating a Tradition of Biomedical Research: Contributions to the History of the Rockefeller University, ed. D. Stapleton. New York: Rockefeller University Press, pp. 151–174. 22 Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’. 23 Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’.

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flowing black robes and hoods in the laboratory. ‘The whole tissue-culture field suffered in the 1930s because of his eccentric behavior.’24 Carrel together with the popular press mythologized tissue culture, as illustrated by the headlines in the Daily Express when he visited London in 1924: ‘Alive without a body, heart that throbs by itself. Twelve years. US wonder surgeon here’.25 By giving a scientific technique a theatrical edge, whether through the use of mise en scène, performative elements, and so on, Carrel was attempting to ignite human imagination to the ‘nature’ and possibilities of these new ‘lives’. P.R. White wrote in the 1950s: 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 polloi.26

It can be argued that the Hollywood version of Dr Frankenstein was based on Dr Carrel through the laboratory aesthetics, rituals and the mythical stories propagated about him, as well as his belief in a technological utopia that led to conceptual disastrous consequences. Carrel was called a ‘modern Frankenstein’.27 On 27 March 1910, ten days after the release of Edison’s Frankenstein – half a page of the New York Times Sunday edition was devoted to Carrel’s success at what we would now call open-heart surgery on cats and dogs … He stitched a damaged vein in a newborn’s leg to a major artery in her father’s wrist, thus creating a live transfusion that, according to the article, saved the life of the baby.28

24 Bill Davidson (1954, May 14. Probing the secret of life. Collier’s Weekly, 81) cited in Landecker, Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’. 25 Daily Express (1924, July 21, 3) cited in Susan Merrill Squier. 1994. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 210. 26 White, The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells. 27 Susan Hitchcock Tyler. 2007. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, p. 134. 28 Tyler, Frankenstein, pp. 133–134.

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Was it the realization that complex bodies are a collection of communities of cells that led Carrel to his eugenics beliefs? The ontological questions thrown up by Carrel’s scientific experiments ironically resulted in his mystic and eugenic tendencies. However, rather than looking at tissue culture or partial life as a metaphor for the human endeavour to achieve pure and perfected life, through our sometimes uneasy experience with cellular manipulations in the scientific laboratory, we have understood and communicated partial life or semi-life as a hybrid, fragile, context-dependent and far from perfect entity. It is important in our artistic work to resurrect the tainted history of the life sciences and the deliberate or nondeliberate ideologies it raised (and raises) through our histories. As this book will demonstrate, life is going through yet another ontological shift with technological and automated acceleration intertwined with ecological devastation. While the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project abhors Carrel’s mysticism and belief in eugenics and considers his aesthetic accomplishments the poor cousin of his science, his work cannot but help set the tone for aesthetic engagements with tissue culture and the disintegration of the body as a whole. It is also a constant reminder that the sciences, and especially the life sciences, do not operate independently of the society and culture they stem from. In the early years of our practice, we had to construct a laboratory in the gallery to be able to care for the semi-living sculptures (in later years we resorted to using existing or fabricating automated systems that stood for the laboratory itself). The laboratory became a dominant mise en scène which many times overshadowed the small uncharismatic tissue construct. The laboratory acted as a functional and theatrical setting. It communicated the authenticity of the artwork (these are living, growing cells!) as well as highlighting a scientific aesthetics. In order to change the biomedical context, we had to redesign the laboratory to offer new affective scenarios and reflections. For this reason, the design of the TC&A laboratory, used in the 2003 exhibition L’Art Biotech in Nantes, referenced Carrel’s laboratory where the first successful tissue culture experiments were performed in 1910 (see Fig. 1.3). We are interested in the wider history of the development of tissue culture technique and its different articulations, and make many references in our work to this history. Of particular importance to us have been two scientists, Honor Fell as well as Alexis Carrel, because these

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Fig. 1.5 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003

researchers were driven by their investigations and discoveries to ask fundamental ontological questions about the nature of semi-life (Figs. 1.5 and 1.6). As opposed to Carrel’s ideology, in which he proclaimed ‘A great race must propagate its best elements’, and by default eradicate those elements perceived as bad or ‘weak’, the artistic semi-living are defenceless, bare life – an aggregation of cells. Through aesthetics and ritualization, we have wanted to create an intellectual and emotional situation in which the act of caring for or neglecting life, even partial life, is not devoid of self-reflection regarding what the act symbolizes.

Honor Bridget Fell and the Tissue Culture Point of View Tissue culture came to Great Britain when Thomas Strangeways made the technique the sole focus of his laboratory (founded in 1905). In the

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Fig. 1.6 The Tissue Culture & Art laboratory at L’Art Biotech, Nantes, 2003

early 1920s, Strangeways decided to focus the laboratory’s activities on the microphysiology of disease and for that he introduced the new techniques he had learned from Dr Carrel – tissue culture. With Strangeways’ death in 1926, Dr Honor Bridget Fell became the director of the laboratory (which by then was funded by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain).29 Fell independently developed quite a different type of investigation of animal materials. Whole embryonic ‘organules’, such as bones, teeth, eyes and glands, were grown in relatively large volumes of nutrient in simple watch glasses and their metabolism was studied. This approach is different to Carrel’s single-tissue pure-line studies.

29 Susan M. Squier. 2000. Life and death at Strangeways: the tissue culture point of view. In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Theories of Contemporary Culture), ed. P. Brodwin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 27–57, p. 31.

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The British engagement with tissue culture presents a different approach to the field not just scientifically but also in perception and ritualization. The reasons might partly stem from the fact that the head of the tissue culture lab, called (somewhat poetically, when considering the wider context of tissue culture) ‘Strangeways’, was a woman. In her laboratory, like in our SymbioticA laboratory, the personal relationships with the cultures were openly discussed and, in what can be considered today a posthumanist approach, Fell coined the term ‘the tissue culture point of view’ in an attempt to explore partial life from the perspective of the fragment of the body in the dish. In that sense the fragment of life was not only transformed to be some sort of semi-being but, furthermore, it was allocated a sort of agency. This empathic approach to tissue culture created a different kind of ritualization – more of a nurturing one, as illustrated by Susan Squier.30 Dr Fell, a known and credible scientist, was able to take the scientific method of tissue culture beyond the methodology and scientific discourse into the philosophical realm, discussing tissue culture as a method which drew attention to the permeable border between life and death, the embryonic and cancerous, the relations between humans, nonhumans and Others. Tracing back through the history of tissue culture, it is noticeable that the relations between the tissue culturalist and the tissues growing in vitro were more than just an objective experiment. Tissue culture often suffers from its admirers. There is something rather romantic about the idea of taking living cells out of the body and watching them live and move in a glass vessel, like a child watching captive tadpoles in a jar, which sometimes causes imaginative people to express many extravagant claims and hopes that experience fails to justify.31 As Squier writes, ‘The writings on tissue culture reveal a tendency to identify with the tissue culture as subjects rather than objects of study.’32 However, ‘the Strangeways researchers had no access to the point of view of the culture itself. The point of view they articulate is that of the tissue culturalist.’33 Though this position might skew the scientists from their

30 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways. 31 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways. 32 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways, p. 44. 33 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways, p. 45.

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so-called objective methodology, it also ‘encouraged scientists to draw on their imagination as an aid to epistemology’.34 Honor Fell offers a small and symbolic gesture towards a post-anthropocentricism, in which the point of view taken is that of the fragmentary and context-dependent entity that can survive only with technological support.

Tissue Culture and the Popular Imagination If Dr. Strangeways had lived in the time of Julius Caesar and set a series of sub-cultures growing from a scrap of him, fragments of that eminent personage might, for all we know to the contrary, be living now.35

A decade prior to the discovery of tissue culture technique, in the late nineteenth century, H.G. Wells wrote in a short journalistic meditation, ‘The limits to individual plasticity’, printed in the London Saturday Review in 1895, ‘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.’ In this article, Wells wondered just how far shape and mental superstructure in one individual could be altered while the ‘thread of life’ was kept going. Somewhat similar to Carrel’s concerns, the search for the essential bare life and its versatile epi-body were a fascination. Wells’s answer, which only months later was put in the voice of Dr Moreau, was that the living body of an individual could hypothetically be so ‘extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being’.36 Wells in a sense was creating a unique teratologist discourse; in contrast to Shelley’s Frankenstein’s attempt of making new life from discrete parts, Dr Moreau was testing the limit and plasticity of a living being as an entity that is becoming or continues through time. In a chapter about biotechnology and speculative fiction, Brian Stableford explains:

34 Squier, Life and death at Strangeways, p. 57. 35 Wells, Huxley and Wells, The Science of Life, p. 29. 36 H.G. Wells. 1975. The limits of individual plasticity. In H.G. Wells: Early Writings in

Science and Science Fiction, eds. R.M. Philmus and D.Y Hughes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 36–39.

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Two scientific advances made in the first quarter of the 20th century provided important stimuli to speculative thought. These were the tissue culture experiments carried out by Alexis Carrel, Ross Harrison and others, and experiments employing X-rays to induce mutations in fruit-flies carried out by H. J. Muller and others. It is not surprising that Muller’s revelations became the parent of vast numbers of stories in which animals and humans were mutated into monsters, but there is some cause for surprise in the fact that the speculative spinoff of the tissue-culture experiments was also uniformly anxious.37

Judging by the literature of the day it seems the anxiety was about the use of parts of living complex organisms – the disintegration of the individual body. The sustenance and manipulation of parts were more disturbing and confronting because it put into question our sense of the inseparable, whole living being. If we can sustain parts of the body alive, manipulate, modify and utilize them for different purposes, what does it say about our perception of our bodies, our wholeness and our ‘selves’? Even in today’s literature we see these two meta-narratives lingering: mutation and genetic engineering versus cellular disintegration and reaggregation into an object with liminal agency. For example, in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), a genetically engineered green rabbit ‘glows in the dusk, a greenish glow filched from the iridocytes of deep-sea jellyfish in some long-ago experiment’ (luminescent green is reminiscent of radioactive mutation) and tissue-engineered ChickieNobs come from ‘a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitishyellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing’. Atwood herself, inspired by recent biological experiments and, more importantly, by biological arts (aka BioArt), discussed some ontological questions arising from our Victimless Leather project (discussed in Chapter 4): Last week I came across a ‘project’ that’s a blend of art object and scientific experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it – something straight out of a 1950s B movie, you’d think – is a strangely eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of ‘Victimless Leather’ – leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is ‘victimless’ because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is 37 Brian Stableford. 2001. Biotechnology and utopia. In The Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, pp. 189–195.

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alive – or is it? What do we mean by ‘alive’? Can the experiment be terminated without causing ‘death’? Heated debates on this subject proliferate on the Internet.38

In ‘The Tissue Culture King’, written in 1926, Julian Huxley reflects and articulates some of the anxieties surrounding early tissue culture experiments.39 ‘The Tissue Culture King’ is a story about a western scientist, Hascombe, who is captured by an African tribe. In order to save his life, he employs his skills in the service of the African king. He decides to merge scientific principle and techniques with the religious beliefs and rituals of the tribe. Hascombe then employs tissue culture techniques to create ‘The Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the Wellspring of Ancestral Immortality’.40 The idea is to culture parts of the kings’ and ancestors’ bodies and by that increase the biomass of the king, extend the ‘lifespan’ of parts of the dead ancestors and enable the people of the community to own parts of the king, to physically and ritualistically nurture, care and worship them. Furthermore, this technique will ‘increase the safety, if not of the king as an individual, at least the life which was in him, and I presumed that this would be equally satisfactory from a theological point of view.’41 Hence the fragment stands for the whole. There is a direct reference to Dr Carrel’s personality, his laboratory and its tissue culture rituals, in Huxley’s impressions: ‘If you prefer a more prosaic name,’ said Hascombe, ‘I should call this the Institute of Religious Tissue Culture.’ My mind went back to a day in 1918 when I was taken by a biological friend in New York to see the famous Rockefeller Institute; and at the word tissue culture I saw again before me Dr. Alexis Carrel and troops of white-garbed American girls making cultures, sterilizing, microscopizing, incubating, and the rest of it.

38 Margaret Atwood. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, p. 211. 39 Julian Huxley. 1926. The tissue culture king. In Great Science Fiction by Scientists, ed. Groff Conklin. 1962. New York: Collier Books, pp. 147–170. 40 Ibid., p. 155. 41 Ibid., p. 156.

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The Hascombe Institute was, it is true, not so well equipped, but it had an even larger, if differently colored, personnel.42

Huxley considers the wide implications of the discipline of tissue culture and associated epistemological revelations by looking at the option of mass production and the economic potential of the use of scientific knowledge and applied technologies in the context of the social sensitivities of society: ‘The most important new idea which I was able to introduce was mass production. Our aim was to multiply the King’s tissues indefinitely, to ensure that some of their protecting power should reside everywhere in the country.’43 It is important to note here, and which will be covered more extensively in later chapters, the labour that this mass production entails – ‘troops of white-garbed American girls’. The citizens still need to work for their kings, even if these are mere fragments in artificial ‘bodies’. In another part of the story: “This laboratory is the most amusing,” said Hascombe. “Its official title is ‘Home of the Living Fetishes.’”44 There is a great emphasis on the idea of life (rather than death) and the vast possibilities involved with partial lives: Not a necropolis, but a histopolis, if I may coin a word: not a cemetery, but a place of eternal growth … A public proclamation was made pointing out how much more satisfactory it would be if worship could be made not merely to the charred bones of one’s forbears [sic], but to bits of them still actually living and growing … A spurt on the part of great-grandmother’s tissues would bring her wrinkled old smile to mind again; and sometimes it seemed as if one particular generation were all stirred simultaneously by a pulse of growth, as if combining to bless their devout descendants.45

Huxley’s emphasis on the labour and ritualization surrounding the practice of tissue culture, the epistemological wonder in regard to the extension of life of parts of bodies, even if these bodies ceased to live, and the complex relations with those fragments of life in vitro is a satire on the role of science in modernity. By setting his story in Africa, which 42 Huxley, The tissue culture king, p. 155. 43 Huxley, The tissue culture king, p. 157. 44 Huxley, The tissue culture king, p. 161. 45 Huxley, The tissue culture king, pp. 158–160.

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Huxley presented as primitive and unenlightened, he aimed to make a link between modern science and religious superstition. He thus questions a fundamental supposition of modernity and science, in which a binary opposition is drawn between supposed ignorance and enlightenment, and points to the cosmological rather than just technocratic issues raised by science to the tendency to use scientific findings or tools for cultural and ideological means.

Dr Joseph P. Vacanti and Tissue Engineering The history of tissue culture and the following development of tissue engineering (TE) represent a series of major conceptual shifts in the perception of partial life and its impact on other fields of biomedical research and practice. These shifts span a period of more than a hundred years. It took more than eighty years to develop the idea that cells can be grown in three dimensions to form a functional tissue of eventual implantation into bodies or new parts or whole organs. This development came from the collaborative work of a surgeon, Dr Joseph P. Vacanti, and a material scientist, Dr Robert Langer, in the 1980s.46 They developed a system that used specially designed degradable polymers to act as a scaffold for the developing tissue. The term tissue engineering was coined in 1987.47 While early experiments with tissue culture emphasized the autonomy of the fragment of life and questioned its ontology, tissue engineering discourse relocates the living fragment literally and conceptually back to the body. In tissue engineering, the growth of organs in vitro – neoorgans – was developed as a surgical solution for fixing and reconstructing body organs. In modern medicine, the replacement of body parts has widely been with mechanically engineered, nonliving apparatuses, mainly constructed out of metal, ceramics or plastic. From this grew the notion of the cyborg – a human body enhanced by mechanical means – which

46 Charles A. Vacanti. 2006. The history of tissue engineering. Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine 10: 569–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1582-4934.2006.tb0 0421.x. 47 François Berthiaume, Timothy J. Maguire and Martin L. Yarmush. 2011. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: history, progress, and challenges. Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 2: 403–430. https://www.annualreviews.org/ doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-chembioeng-061010-114257.

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was dominant in the sciences and in the arts until the late 1980s. As explained by Charles Vacanti: The idea of improving on nature by using man made materials was nurtured by the discovery and availability of the new synthetics during World War II. Since that time of technological expansion, the quest for substitutes for autologous tissues has been a roller-coaster ride … Many of the postwar synthetics are still in use today, with major questions regarding their efficiency hanging over us.48

The conceptual shift was to look at and treat the body as a regenerative site, to use the body’s own tissue to repair itself – the use of the patient’s own cells, grown in vitro and re-implanted back into the damaged site. This would not only avoid the problem of rejection of foreign materials and foreign cells (from other bodies), but would also, in American philosopher Eugene Thacker’s words, ‘produce a vision of the regenerative body, a body always potentially in excess of itself’49 – a body that is not dependent on artificial means to fix itself, but is an endless ‘natural’ resource. This resonates with the recurring human fantasy of technologically mediated natural resources which are in abundance or limitless and can be used without consequences. The earliest European example of such a concept of the body as a regenerative site was recorded in the sixteenth century, when Tagliacozzi of Bologna reported in his book, De Custorum Chirurigia per Insitionem, ‘a description of a nose replacement that he constructed from a forearm flap’.50 However, the technology of tissue engineering – taking a fragment of a body and regenerating it in vitro before its re-implantation into the body – ‘as it exists today, arose in Boston in the mid-1980s, first with the development of artificial skin by Ioannis Yannas and John Burke, and then with engineered cartilage’, pioneered by Dr Joseph Vacanti and colleagues.51 It was not a scientist or an engineer who came up with the novel idea of growing tissue in three dimensions over scaffolds, but 48 Robert Lanza, Robert Langer and Joseph P. Vacanti (eds.). 2000. Principles of Tissue Engineering, 2nd edn. San Diego, SF: Academic Press, p. xxxv. 49 Eugene Thacker. 1999. The thickness of tissue engineering. In Life Science: Ars Electronica 99, eds. G. Stocker and C. Schopf. New York: Springer, p. 183. 50 Lanza et al., Principles of Tissue Engineering, p. 3. 51 Charles Vacanti. 2004. Cells for building. The Scientist 18(22): 22–23.

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rather, like Dr Alexis Carrel, it was a transplant surgeon with a pragmatic approach to hands-on, immediate solutions for pressing problems – Dr Joseph P. Vacanti. Vacanti came up with the solution – one now used for most engineered tissues – in 1986, while standing in shallow water at Cape Cod staring at seaweed. Inspired by nature’s use of branching networks in plants, he returned from vacation and proposed a scaffold made out of bioabsorbable material. Cells could be seeded along the branches of the scaffold and they would grow to fill in the spaces in between. TE is widely considered a ‘natural’ or transparent, almost non-technological technique. ‘It’s like growing the branches of the tree, and then you add leaves.’52 ‘As engineers, scientists and doctors, we are simply trying to duplicate nature as closely as possible to work out a successful design’, Vacanti has said.53 Thacker emphasizes the concept of ‘nature’ or the ‘natural’ in relation to TE by looking at the flesh value and malleability of TE and its reliance on ‘natural’ body processes: ‘There is no body-anxiety with tissue engineering; it is, rather, an explicit (and medical-political-economical) investment in the very value of the body as a potentially infinite natural resource.’54 However, TE is a highly technological application within the biotech industry. Furthermore, as will be illustrated through the narratives of this book, TE (and its entanglement with arts – we were visiting researchers at Joseph Vacanti’s Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, [at MGH (Massachusetts General Hospital), Harvard Medical School], in 2000–2001) would lead to the diversification of TE principles outside the biomedical realm to food, consumer products and so forth. TE work led to one of the most important icons of the late twentieth century: the mouse with the ear on its back, created by the Vacanti brothers and other collaborators in the mid-1990s. The image of the ‘real flesh and blood’ mouse was broadcast and printed throughout the globe.

52 ‘In the late 1970s, they (Jay Vacanti and Robert Langar) had worked in the laboratory of Dr Judah Folkman, the pioneering researcher who seeks to kill cancerous tumors by cutting off their blood supply. The flip side to Folkman’s work was encouraging blood vessels to grow in new tissue.’ (Jeffery Krasner. 2001, March 11. The replacements. Boston Sunday Globe, D4.) 53 Joseph P. Vacanti, quoted in Pepita Smyth. 2000, October 30. Organs on demand. The West Australian, p. 15. 54 Thacker, The thickness of tissue engineering, p. 186.

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It seemed to represent the horrors and the dreams of the new era of a biomedical-driven consumer society. For many it also indicated that the fantasy of the surrealist project could be manifested through the aesthetics of scientists and medical professionals. According to Joseph Vacanti’s brother and collaborator Charles Vacanti: ‘Our goal wasn’t to grow an ear, it was to prove you could grow cartilage.’55 In a series of informal interviews with us, the creators of the ear-mouse acknowledged that the choice of the shape of the ear was partly driven by the visual impact on potential funders and the public. We believe that just like their previous research in partial life, the Vacanti brothers were very much aware of the perplexities raised by their field of work and knowingly and actively ‘helped’ with creating a larger context around the field of partial life. Such ‘creations’ as the mouse with the ear cannot but help cross over into the territories of ethics and art. While Carrel staged the laboratory and Fell through her public talks attempted to project a tissue culture point of view, the Vacantis brought into the public realm a ‘real’ chimera. This chimera was more ‘successful’ in triggering the public imagination than any other biotechnological development of that time. It was also a trigger to form our own artistic project. The mouse we used acted as a life-support ‘vessel’, providing the conditions needed for the cartilage cells to grow and gradually replace the polymer scaffold. The aim of this experiment, at least formally, was to prove that cartilage tissue could be coerced to grow into complex geometry and remain viable for the replacement of injured, defective or missing body parts. Chapter 4 has more about the earmouse, as it came to be known, and its transformation into an artefact. Developments in the design and construction of bioreactors opened the possibilities of creating replacement body parts without the need to use a mouse as a surrogate body and gave birth to the promise of the creation of semi-living tissue entities (Fig. 1.7). The earmouse influenced many artists, showing, as Wells wrote in the late nineteenth century, that bodies can become a malleable material. In our collaborative project with Australian artist Stelarc, we created a work that shows our mutual interests as well as our differences. While our

55 Krasner, The replacements, D4. This also refers to the ear-mouse as the ‘poster boy’ for the field of tissue engineering.

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Fig. 1.7 Extra Ear – ¼ Scale, 2003

artistic practice is not about the human, intentionally avoiding humancentred discourses and human exceptionalism, Stelarc’s practice is about the human body and its interactions with technology. For us, Extra Ear – ¼ Scale, although presenting a recognizably human part, is semi-living and brings into question notions of the wholeness of the body as well as broader cultural perceptions of life, given our increasing ability to manipulate living systems. While we were looking at the ethical and perceptual issues stemming from a disembodied, semiliving quarter-scale replica of Stelarc’s left ear, Stelarc, ultimately, was concerned with the attachment of the ear to the body as a soft prosthesis. Extra Ear – ¼ Scale was a partial-life form – partly constructed and partly grown – waiting to become a soft prosthesis.56 The semi-living 56 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award Catalogue. 2003. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, p. 30.

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extra ear cannot hear (and probably cannot listen) but it can definitely evoke subversive future scenarios regarding humanity and its relations to semi-living entities and other alternative living systems, depending on technological intervention for their survival. Extra Ear – ¼ Scale was presented (among other venues) as part of the 2003 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, at The Ian Potter Gallery of The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), at the heart of the arts establishment. According to the curators of the NGV, a few weeks before the show was to open, they realized that the NGV had no policy on presenting living tissues in the gallery. The director instructed the curator to seek clarification on the project, including a statement from us that the work did not raise ethical issues in general and in particular to the biomedical community. We, obviously, could not reassure the gallery that this was the case as we see our work as a tangible affective artefact of issues that need further ethical scrutiny, and that it should critically engage with the biomedical project. Disregarding the fact that this installation received ethics, safety and health clearances from our university, the NGV decided to cancel the installation – only to later ‘compromise’ and allow it to go ahead on the condition that we did not use human tissue. This was an interesting twist in our relationship with the arts establishment in our attempt to deal with the human form. Much of the attention we received was a strong reaction against both the disfigurement of the body through the suggestion of implanting an ear on Stelarc’s body, and repulsion from the presence of a living, disassociated part of the human body. This seemed also to trouble the NGV, as on several occasions they cited the Piss Christ affair.57 The correlation of perceived blasphemy with proposed modification to the human form meant that in the eyes of some we were disfiguring the image of God. The compromise of using nonhuman animal cells, while keeping the proposition of the piece, seemed appropriate to us as it directed the piece more in our direction – using Fell’s view of attempting to adopt the point of view of the semi-living construct, which may have the form of a human ear but consist of mouse cells. In another exhibition, an anonymous person wrote using chalk on the pavement at the entrance to the gallery, ‘Free the ear’.

57 The National Gallery of Victoria closed an exhibition of works by American artist Andres Serrano on 12 October 1997 after two youths attacked the work Piss Christ, which shows a crucifix immersed in urine, with a hammer.

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One of the presentations of this installation was given as a single performance, together with Stelarc, as part of the National Review of Live Art at Midland, Western Australia, in 2003. The surroundings of the Powerhouse in the Midland Railway Workshops influenced the atmosphere of the evening: the meticulously restored turbines and the early twentiethcentury industrial aesthetics brought to mind the stories of the modern Prometheus, while the microgravity bioreactor seemed to directly respond to the rotary motion of the electricity/life generator. We have frequently performed the ‘ritual of killing’ as part of our exhibitions (alongside the ‘ritual of feeding’). On this occasion, once the semi-living ear was taken out of the bioreactor, we gave the human audience the opportunity to interact with it in a more direct and tangible way. The audience could touch the semi-living ear while wearing protective gloves. In this gloomy event, the audience silently touched the ear until every living cell in it succumbed to the hostile environment. The semiliving confronts the viewer with the realization that life is a continuum of different metabolizing beings with the transition from life to death and from the living to the nonliving. Their existence contradicts the conventional dichotomies that govern traditional and current western ethical systems.

TE for Non-biomedical Purposes One of the acts that art can do is to release knowledge/technology from its epistemological confines which, in return, allows for new ontologies. This was the case with the use of TE knowledge and know-how away from the biomedical field into the realm of aesthetics. Oron Catts, in his thesis ‘Growing Custom Grown Living Surfaces: Biotechnology and the Design Way’ (1996), suggested another perspective for the development of TE.58 While TE is mainly concerned with growing neo-organs for implantation into the body, Catts explored ideas surrounding the existence, maintenance and use of 3D tissue constructs as objects in the environment. He suggested the design of 3D structures that are radically different from the original design of the body and that the maintenance and growth of tissue construct be part of the environment. Furthermore, body parts could be used as autonomous mechanical 58 More in Oron Catts. 1996. Growing custom grown living surfaces: biotechnology and the design way. Honours thesis. Curtin University of Technology.

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devices, for example, kidney cells used as a filter, muscle cells used to move and rotate elements, and so on. Catts asked, If we can grow something as complex as an organ outside of the body, why re-implant them back into the body? If we can grow and sustain alive for long periods of time something as complex as an organ, why stay loyal to the original design? If this is possible, why not grow/construct tools for our use? And if this is possible, there is still the major question, should we go down this path?

In 1996, Catts and Zurr (the authors) initiated an artistic project called Tissue Culture & Art. Our aim was to look tangibly at the growth/constructions of tissue-engineered entities outside the body and explore the ethical and philosophical implications of such an endeavour. After receiving funding from an arts funding body, we began working ‘hands-on’ at the laboratories of Dr Traian Chirila, the Director of Biomaterials and Polymer Research at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth. The first TC&A exhibition, in 1998 at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, presented nonliving artworks made in the laboratory as well as some relics of the glass structures on which we grew tissue described at the beginning of this chapter.

Cells Plasticity in Vitro When animal cells are extracted from their host body and its immune system, they can still grow and proliferate in-vitro subject to certain conditions, such as sterility and nutrient supply. Different cells from different bodies (regardless of sex, race, age or species) can be co-cultured. Furthermore, in some cases the cells fuse. Cell fusion is ‘the nondestructive merging of the contents of two cells by artificial means, resulting in a heterokaryon that will reproduce genetically alike, multinucleated progeny for a few generations’.59 In the case of an undifferentiated stem cell fusing with a mature differentiated cell, the resultant cell retains the mature cell phenotype. The phenomenon of cell fusion, besides its practical applications, such as for producing antibodies, compelled Oxford University Professor 59 The Free Dictionary. 2012. Cell fusion. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary. com/cell+fusion. Accessed 22 July 2022.

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Henry Harris to write about his experience as a pioneer in cell fusion techniques.60 Harris’s 1985 article opens with a somewhat posthumanistic quote by American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist and researcher Thomas Lewis: There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, whenever possible. This is the way of the world. The new phenomenon of cell fusion, a laboratory trick on which much of today’s science of molecular genetics relies for its data, is the simplest and most spectacular symbol of the tendency. In a way, it is the most unbiologic of all phenomena, violating the most fundamental myths of the last century, for it denies the importance of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things. Any cell – man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect – given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it. Cytoplasm will flow easily from one to the other, the nuclei will combine, and it will become, for a time anyway, a single cell with two complete, alien genomes, ready to dance, ready to multiply. It is a Chimera, a Griffon, a Sphinx, a Ganesha, a Peruvian God, a Ch’i-lin, an omen of good fortune, a wish for the world.61

In the body of the article, Harris presents a more complex view of cell fusion and the breach not only with the essentialist view of a species but also with the sanctity of the human as separate and unique: ‘What caught the imagination of journalists was the fact that the species barrier could be crossed. This seems to have shaken some deeply cherished assumptions about the uniqueness of man, and many of the newspaper reports showed striking similarities with the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch.’62 Cell fusion among different species and different families along the evolutionary tree has been carried out successfully since the 1970s. One example of crossing the biological kingdom barrier was the fusion of Xenopus and carrot cells in 1978:

60 Henry Harris. 1985. Roots: cell fusion. BioEssays 2(4): 176–179. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/bies.950020409. 61 Thomas Lewis, cited in Harris, Roots. 62 Harris, Roots, p. 178.

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Cultured Xenopus cells have been induced to fuse with carrot suspension cell protoplasts using PEG at high pH in the presence of high Ca2+ . Ultrastructural observations confirm unambiguously that the fusion bodies seen by light microscopy are animal/plant cell heterokaryons. The cytoplasmic events occurring in these Xenopus /carrot fusion products during the first 48 hours of culture provide evidence for their viability.63

Human and nonhuman animal cell fusion (mainly in the form of hybridomas) has been known and used for scientific research and biotech production since the mid-1970s. In 1975, César Milstein and Georges Köhler at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge developed the production of therapeutic antibodies using hybridoma – research that won them the Novel Prize for Medicine in 1984. TE was developed as part of the biomedical exploration of creating spare body parts. It represents a major conceptual shift in the treatment of many ailments, injuries and deformities. TE, as identified by Catts and explored by us from an artistic perspective, also offers the opportunity of growing and sustaining functional tissue outside the body for long periods of time, and to create a form of life that could never exist in nature – parts of complex organisms designed and grown independently of the organism from which they originally derived.64 As will be explored further in the following chapters, the peak hype around TE as a biomedical promise was in the early twenty-first century; however, the yield was limited. Growing thick tissue structures is limited due to the inability, for example, to fabricate the body’s capillary system. In addition, organs develop as part of the complex, context-dependent embryonic development, which is, at least as we write today, impossible to replicate. The TE field has created a big industry to support it, especially to do with bioreactor development and construction. The progression of the techniques and technologies of sustaining tissue constructs as part

63 M.R. Davey, R.H. Clothier, M. Balls and E.C. Cocking. 1978. An ultrastructural study of the fusion of cultured amphibian cells with higher plant protoplasts. Protoplasma 96: 157–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01279583. 64 There are a few exceptions which occur in ‘nature’, one example being transmissible cancer, such as in the case of the Tasmanian Tiger (DFTD) and canine transmissible venereal tumors (CTVTs), in which colonies of cells exist on bodies and can be transmitted from body to body via physical interactions (e.g. through bites).

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of the environment has moved from the creating of semi-living sculptures in the mid-nineties and artistic in-vitro meat and leather in the early 2000s to a fully fledged industry of biofabrication and cellular agriculture. Further, TE is being explored as part of the field of soft robotics – semi-living automatons – as in, for example, the semi-living xenobots designed in 2021 by Kriegman and colleagues, which ‘show that clusters of cells, if freed from a developing organism, can similarly find and combine loose cells into clusters that look and move like they do, and that this ability does not have to be specifically evolved or introduced by genetic manipulation’.65 In other words, the concept of the semi-living as a tangible, extended posthuman with post-anthropocentric agency, which is in need of care and questions humankind’s preconceived ideas about life, death, identity, individuality, species and so on, has become a multibillion-dollar capital venture industry. The semi-living has become a new labour force. Huxley refers to tissue in culture as an entity without a purpose. Cells in culture might seem to us ‘a spectacle of rather futile freedom’ as they are operating outside their natural context and are dependent on an artificial system, supplied by us, humans, for their survival. Yet by controlling and caring for them, observing them and learning from their behaviour, they ‘force’ us to reflect back on some fundamental issues. Only when artists use the semi-living for what seem to be frivolous purposes can a true ethical discussion begin, when there is no fallback to the utilitarian arguments governing biomedical, agriculture or defence discourses. A rough estimate would put the biomass of living cells and tissues, which are disassociated from the original bodies that once hosted them, in the thousands of tonnes. In addition, there are many tonnes of fragments of bodies (cells, tissues, organs) that are maintained in suspended animation in cryogenic conditions, all of which requires an intensive technological intervention to prevent transformation to a nonliving state. This type of being (or semi-being/semi-living) does not fall under current biological or even cultural classifications. In using symbolic means to suggest that the extended body is a category of life in its own right, artists deliberately aim to destabilize conventional perceptions and classifications of living beings. Much of this living biological matter can, in 65 S. Kriegman, D. Blackiston, M. Levin and J. Bongard. 2021. Kinematic selfreplication in reconfigurable organisms. Biophysics and Computational Biology 118(49): e2112672118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118.

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theory, be co-cultured, and fused or shared in its sterile environment (to varying degrees of success). Age, gender, race, species and location do not play the same roles in the extended body as with other living bodies. This means that, in theory, every tissue in every living being has the potential to become part of a collection of living fragments brought together as an extended body. As described earlier in the chapter, the birth of tissue culture techniques ushered in new imaginings – some are feasible, but most are fantastical. These imaginings created an artistic palette which purposely or otherwise is partly responsible for the development of an industry based on the labour and agencies of the semi-living. In addition, tissue culture continues to propagate the Frankenstein-like fantasy of revivalism from dead and nonliving matter. It also outsources bodily functions and a symbolic agency to a machine as the new type of automated ‘body’, to the point that the machine/technology is fetishized and stands for life itself. Further, more and more, rather than having the machine as its support, life is now performing for the machine and labouring for its maintenance.

References Atwood, M. 2003. Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury. Atwood, M. 2011. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Berthiaume, F., T.J. Maguire and M.L. Yarmush. 2011. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine: history, progress, and challenges. Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering 2: 403–430. https://doi.org/10. 1146/annurev-chembioeng-061010-114257. Carrel, A. 1912. Visceral organisms. JAMA LIX: 2105–2106. https://doi.org/ 10.1001/jama.1912.04270120090001. Carrel, A. 1935. Man, the Unknown. New York: Harper & Row. Carrel, A. and C. Lindbergh. 1938. The Culture of Organs. New York: Hoeber. Catts, O. 1996. Growing custom grown living surfaces: biotechnology and the design way. Honours thesis. Curtin University of Technology. Chirila, T.V. 2001. An overview of the development of artificial corneas with porous skirts and the use of PHEMA for such an application. Biomaterials 22: 3311–3317. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0142-9612(01)00168-5. Clemenger Contemporary Art Award Catalogue. 2003. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria.

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Davey, M.R., R.H. Clothier, M. Balls and E.C. Cocking. 1978. An ultrastructural study of the fusion of cultured amphibian cells with higher plant protoplasts. Protoplasma 96: 157–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01279583. Delaporte, F. (ed.). 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. New York: Zone Books. The Free Dictionary. 2012. Cell fusion. http://medical-dictionary.thefreedicti onary.com/cell+fusion. Accessed 22 July 2022. Harris, H. 1985. Roots: cell fusion. BioEssays 2(4): 176–179. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/bies.950020409. Harrison, R.G. 1910. The outgrowth of the nerve fiber as a mode of protoplasmic movement. Journal of Experimental Zoology 142: 5–73. https://doi. org/10.1002/jez.1401420103. Harrison, R.G. 1913. The life of tissues outside the organism from the embryological standpoint. Transactions of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons 9: 63–75. Huxley, J. 1926. The tissue culture king. In Great Science Fiction by Scientists, ed. Groff Conklin. 1962. New York: Collier Books, pp. 147–170. Krasner, J. 2001, March 11. The replacements. Boston Sunday Globe, D4. Kriegman, S., D. Blackiston, M. Levin and J. Bongard. 2021. Kinematic selfreplication in reconfigurable organisms. Biophysics and Computational Biology 118(49): e2112672118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118. Landecker, H. 2002. New times for biology: nerve cultures and the advent of cellular life in vitro. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 33: 667–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1369-8486(02)000 26-2. Landecker, H. 2004. Building ‘a new type of body in which to grow a cell’: the origins of tissue culture. In Creating a Tradition of Biomedical Research: Contributions to the History of the Rockefeller University, ed. D. Stapleton. New York: Rockefeller University Press, pp. 151–174. Lanza, R., R. Langer and J.P. Vacanti (eds.). 2000. Principles of Tissue Engineering, 2nd edn. San Diego, SF: Academic Press. Lexico. 2022. In vitro. https://www.lexico.com/definition/in_vitro. Accessed 22 July 2022. Pasqualini, J.R. and R. Scholler. 1992. Hormones and Fetal Pathophysiology. New York: Informa Health Care. Roux, W. 1890. Über die Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen. Shelley, M.W. 1818. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones. Smyth, P. 2000, October 30. Organs on demand. The West Australian, p. 15. Squier, S.M. 1994. Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Squier, S.M. 2000. Life and death at Strangeways: the tissue culture point of view. In Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Theories of Contemporary Culture), ed. P. Brodwin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 27–57. Stableford, B. 2001. Biotechnology and utopia. In The Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, pp. 189–195. Thacker, E. 1999. The thickness of tissue engineering. In Life Science: Ars Electronica 99, eds. G. Stocker and C. Schopf. New York: Springer. Tyler, S.H. 2007. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Uhlenhuth, E. 1916. Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of Rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions. Journal of Experimental Medicine 24: 689–699. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC2125483/. Vacanti, C. 2004. Cells for building. The Scientist 18(22): 22–23. Vacanti, C.A. 2006. The history of tissue engineering. Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine 10: 569–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1582-4934. 2006.tb00421.x. Wells, H.G. 1975. The limits of individual plasticity. In H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, eds. R.M. Philmus and D.Y Hughes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wells, H.G., J. Huxley and G.P. Wells. 1929. The Science of Life: A Summary of Contemporary Knowledge About Life and Its Possibilities. Vol. 1. London: Amalgamated Press. White, P.R. 1963. The Cultivation of Animal and Plant Cells. New York: The Ronald Press.

CHAPTER 2

Information, Genohype and DNA Chauvinism

Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments. (Uexküll 1934)1 Here again we see a slippage between two models. This is not to say that DNA replication and protein synthesis do not bear a striking resemblance and perhaps even a functional analogy to executable digital code, but more significant is the general equivalence drawn between the lines of code included in the software of an electric car and the lines of code that are present in the genome of a mouse. DNA is imagined as just one more programming language, making the two rhetorically equivalent, if not functionally so … Within the discourse of datafication, it is not simply that more and more data is being accumulated or that more and more sensitive tools are being used to create and discern this growing wealth of data. Rather, this slippage between representation and ontology is an epistemological effect of datafication itself: imagining the world as data rather than a space that contains data. (David Bering-Porter 2022)2

1 Jakob von Uexküll. 2010 [1934]. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Trans. J.D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2 David Bering-Porter. 2022. Data as symbolic form: datafication and the imaginary media of W. E. B. Du Bois. Critical Enquiry 48: 262–285, p. 271.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_2

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Late capitalism and the so-called innovation paradigm rely heavily on cultural amnesia. In the last few decades, we have experienced cycles of hype and disappointment, boom and bust, where unrealistic expectations promise us abundance without consequences and guilt-free extraction, nowhere more so than within the field of biotechnology. Here, the molecularization of life will bring about plenty by delegating production to the paradoxically insentient biologicals. Through our art projects, we have explored these ontological rifts during the making of and in response to the promises of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in the mid1990s, the Human Genome Project in 2000 and the current rhetoric of the field of synthetic biology. If only pigs could fly!

Pig Wings, 2000–2001 In 2000 we received an invitation for a commissioned work from the Two10 Gallery in London, which was fully funded and operated by the Wellcome Trust for their coming exhibition marking the completion of the Working Draft of the Human Genome Project (HGP). The commission brief outlined the gallery’s philosophy: to ‘challenge received ideas’ and ‘encourage critical dialogue about important cultural issues’ (Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). The invitation was a surprise as our work up to then dealt with the concept we had developed of the semi-living. We purposely did not focus on genetics but rather aimed to counterbalance the popular and hegemonic perception of living systems as a direct reflection of their DNA sequence or ‘code’. We, therefore, decided to address what was referred to by Neil Holtzman as the genohype that was generated by the HGP.3

3 Neil Holtzman. 1999. Are genetic tests adequately regulated? Science 286(4539): 409–410. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5439.4. According to Holtzman, Director of Genetics and Public Policy at John Hopkins University, ‘Exaggerating the importance of genetic factors stops people thinking about the need to clean up the environment and tackle socioeconomic inequity.’ His argument is with those who exaggerate the clinical benefits that may arise out of the HGP. He describes claims such as those made in the editorial in the ‘Genome’ issue of Nature that ‘the application of knowledge from the project will, in time, materially benefit almost everyone in the world’ as ludicrous. These claims are based on the assumption that it will be possible to unravel the polygenic forms of common diseases even though clinical outcomes are determined by complex genetic, environmental and behavioural interaction.

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Fig. 2.1 Pig Wings , 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’

The Pig Wings project, developed as part of our research fellowship at Joseph Vacanti’s Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory (at MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital], Harvard Medical School), consisted of three sets of wings grown out of pig mesenchymal cells

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Fig. 2.2 Pig Wings , 2000–2001: ‘the good, the bad and the extinct’

(bone marrow stem cells) over/into biodegradable/bioabsorbable polymers (PGA, P4HB). Together with a scientist we harvested the cells from a pig’s knee as part of an experimental procedure. The stem cells were bathed in a specialized ‘cocktail’ of nutrient media which gave the cells cues to differentiate into bone cells. We used digital 3D modelling to design and made 3D prints of three sets of small wings (4.0 cm × 2.0 cm × 0.5 cm) in the shapes of the three evolutionary solutions for vertebrates’ flight – bat, bird and pterosaur. In doing so we also developed the 3D printing protocols for scaffold design for the Vacanti lab. Animal wings carry cultural and mythological meanings in many human cultures and have been assigned symbolic value. Bird-like wings are usually attached to angels. Bat-like wings are for evil and demonic characters. As the existence of the pterosaurs was not widely known until around two centuries ago, there is no culturally established value attached to their extinct shape, rather a sense of fascination and lost potential (which is ironically fulfilled by the hype of synthetic biology as applied to the de-extinction movement – the fantasy of re-creating extinct organisms from DNA samples). In our narrative to the commissioning body, the Wellcome Trust, we explained that cultural perceptions of these three evolutionary solutions for vertebrate flight could be seen as an analogy to our perceptions of gene technologies and the promises and hopes surrounding the HPG (both private and public). Poking fun, we added that, ‘we will also attempt to file a patent for “Pig Tissue Wings” and present our desire to “initiate and control” the pig wings “market”.

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Anyone who will try to make pigs fly (by growing wings on them) will have to get our consent.’ In retrospect it is not surprising that our proposal was rejected, as this ironic piece struck at the heart of the hidden agenda behind employing artists as agents in the service of the genohype. The rejection letter from Two10 Gallery and the events that followed illustrated this point so well that it became, for us, an integral part of the whole Pig Wings piece. For legal reasons we are unable to quote the letter of rejection from the gallery directly, but it is enough to say that it was a revealing document. Both the artistic and scientific merits of our proposal were questioned, and the gallery advisory group felt that our project was an unrealistic reflection of the public’s opinion of the HGP, as if this is the role of the artist. We respected the rejection decision; however, we felt we needed to respond to these extraordinary claims by apologizing to the gallery and the advisory group in a letter: ‘We are sorry that our work did not reflect your perception of what the public opinion should be.’ Their response to this apology was that their choice of words could have been different, but their main objection was that they did not approve of our vision of what the HGP represented. That was just too good for us to let go, so as an integral part of the Pig Wings project we published the correspondence with Two10 Gallery on our website. Three years later we had to remove the correspondence after our university’s legal department was threatened with legal action and the possibility that funding from the Wellcome Trust to other research at the university might be affected. We ended up presenting the Pig Wings in other venues and exhibitions; in all the iterations, the aesthetics of the presentation were deliberately underwhelming. We adopted what we refer to as the aesthetics of disappointment . The audience coming to see flying pigs and other biotechnological wonders were confronted with tiny, humble-looking detached wings, made of bone tissue, which would never fly. This was our artistic resistance to the reductionist view of life as mere DNA code.

DNA Chauvinism The discovery of the DNA structure by James Watson and Francis Crick with Rosalind Franklin’s vital contribution in 1953 has led to one of the durable and persistent symbols of biological life – the double helix. The parallel developments in computer science and molecular biology brought about the fixation with the ontological supremacy of what was to become

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known as the genetic code. Lily Kay (2000) in her seminal book Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code illustrates how ‘The genetic code is a “period piece”, a manifestation of the emergence of the information age.’4 Kay traces the discovery of the genetic code and developments in genetics (1953–1970) to the rise of communication techno-sciences (cybernetics, information theory and computers), the connexion of molecular biology with cryptanalysis and linguistics, and the social history of post-war Europe and the USA. She argues that genetics as a written code is a metaphor literalized, which neutralizes the fact that genes are not a code, DNA is not a language, and the genome is not an information system but rather a biological contextualized and dynamic material. Evelyn Fox Keller (2003) adds that: ‘one form of explanation has come to dominate biological thought over the last few decades – the assumption that a catalogue of genes for an organism’s traits will constitute an “understanding” of that organism.’5 Kay summarizes, in short, from the 1950s on, the diachronic resonances of the Book of Life as a transcendent writing were amplified by the synchronic articulations of DNA as a programmed text, and information became the animating Premium Mobile. The genetic code became the site of life’s command and control.6

This reductionist metaphor may be a reflection of a larger masculinist, capitalistic, persistent worldview in which sentient living material is taken from its relational and entangled existence, and is fragmented and abstracted to fit within human fantasies of control and automation (while, ironically, human-made code-operated tools are fetishized and gain assumed ‘intelligence’ and autonomy). The storytelling behind the ‘new’ organism named Synthia illustrates the interdependence among the sciences, cultural ideologies and aesthetics as well as a persistent constructed DNA-chauvinist understanding of life. Biologist Craig Venter made a name for himself as the lead researcher of a private company (Celera) that was set up to 4 Lily E. Kay. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 5 Evelyn Fox Keller. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 3. 6 Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, p. 5. Original emphasis.

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compete with the public Human Genome Project, and claimed ownership over finding the human genome. In 2010 Venter announced that he had created ‘the first self-replicating cell we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer’.7 Venter’s group had synthesized the genome of the mycoplasma genitalium – a sexually transmitted parasitic bacteria that affects humans and other primates. M. genitalium was chosen by Venter’s group because it was the species with the smallest number of genes known at that time. The DNA of the bacteria was removed, and synthesized DNA was inserted into the bacterial cell. This ‘synthetic’ life form was nicknamed Synthia by the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group),8 an international organization dedicated to ‘the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights’. Venter and colleagues embraced this name, a reference to its synthetic origin and a homophone of the female name Cynthia – assigning a feminine quality to the altered bacteria. Venter used an existing cell, with all its ‘machinery’ and components, minus a strand of bacterial DNA. The DNA strand was ‘read’ and sequenced by a machine, stitched inside a yeast cell, and inserted back into its ‘incubation’ body – the mycoplasma genitalium cell – which was then put into a growth medium/environment. Venter responded to accusations of misleading the public by claiming to have made life from scratch, by holding a DNA-centric position, dismissing the argument as neovitalist: ‘vitalism today manifests itself in the guise of shifting emphasis away from DNA to an “emergent” property of the cell that is somehow greater than the sum of its molecular parts and how they work in a particular environment’.9 He then asserted that: When there is mystery, there is an opportunity for vitalism and religion to thrive. However, when my team successfully booted up the synthetic DNA software within a cell, we demonstrated that our basic understanding of the machinery of cellular life had advanced to a significant point. In answer to

7 The New York Times. 2010, May 29. Editorial: one cell forward. https://www.nyt

imes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun3.html. 8 ETC Group. 2007, June 6. Patenting Pandora’s bug: goodbye, Dolly…hello, Synthia! https://etcgroup.org/content/patenting-pandora%E2%80%99s-bug-goodbye-dol lyhello-synthia. 9 J. Craig Venter. 2013. Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life. New York: Viking, p. 24.

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Erwin Schrödinger’s little question ‘What is life?’ we had been able to provide one compelling answer: ‘DNA is the software and the basis of all life.’10

Venter, taking a somewhat human male position on the ‘creation’ of life, emphasized what a male can provide in the act of procreation – a packet of DNA in sperm – and downplayed (or even ignored) the female contribution of the egg (with all of its machinery and non-DNA-based heredity traits) as well as the womb/developmental context within the female body. In an ontological reversal, Venter attributed nurturing properties to the computer used to sequence the strand of the DNA by referring to it as a ‘parent’. Venter expressed ‘ectogenic desire’ and the ‘anxiety with/of the maternal; an anxiety that usually manifests itself in philosophical, literary and scientific aspirations towards “self-creation”’.11 Venter’s DNA-chauvinist, paternalistic and anthropocentric approach narrated femininity into a sexless bacterium. Synthia was allocated a feminine name and it belongs (is patented) to a corporation. While claiming a rationalist and anti-metaphysical approach, some of the publicity images of Synthia seemed to tell a different story. Images of two blue round colonies of the bacteria, with darker centres, looked like two blue eyes gazing back from the petri dish. We speculated that either Venter himself, or at least someone from his marketing team, was aware of the symbolic power of such an image and deliberately released these images to highlight the power over the creation of the blue-eyed Synthia who gazed back at us. After Catts presented this theory in a lecture at a synthetic biology conference, a former employee of the Craig Venter Institute, who was part of the team that worked on Synthia, corrected us. They had another speculation: ‘knowing the people and the culture of the lab, it is very likely that what they had seen was two human female nipples, rather than eyes.’ Apparently, the chauvinistic gaze in the lab ran deeper than the metaphysical symbolism of eyes.

10 Venter, Life at the Speed of Light, p. 126. 11 Irina Aristarkhova. 2012. Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and

Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 89.

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Crude Matter, 2012 Loosely based on the story of the Golem, which literally means, in the Hebrew language, ‘crude’ or ‘unshaped’, Crude Matter explores the potential ‘alchemical’ transformations that occur when a cell’s substrate (rather than its DNA) is manipulated – when life is understood as relational and material-based. In the story of the Golem, a new life form is created from a raw, inanimate material: mud from the banks of the Vltava River in Prague. In Jewish mythology from the sixteenth century, an android is being made by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who uses the mystical branch of Judaism, Kabbalism, to help defend the Jewish population in Prague. The vital force ‘inserted’ into the mud mould enabled an entity to become sentient and forceful, but at the same time incapable of common sense let alone the ability to differentiate between right and wrong. Rabbi Loew had miscalculated the power of his spell, causing errors particularly in invoking the concept of continuous creation. In all traditional versions of the Golem story, when Rabbi Loew realized the potential or real harm that the Golem was capable of, he terminated it before more damage could be done. This is in contrast to Dr Frankenstein, who neglected to take responsibility for and let the Creature stay alive without guidance, support or love. In pictorial representations of the Golem, it is almost always depicted without eyes, as it may be sentient and alive but it has no soul. When we assumed that Venter had deliberately depicted the two cultures of Synthia as eyes, we felt as if the missing eyes of the Golem had finally been made (Fig. 2.3). As illustrated in Chapter 1, our first encounter with extending the life of animals’ fragments using tissue culture technique was done using eyes (from rabbits). These semi-living entities – disembodied partial life – were sustained alive through an artificial, techno-scientific support system. The eyes, as an organ, have an important role in the development of the field of tissue engineering and the use of inanimate/nonliving/humanconstructed materials as support to living tissues. British eye surgeon Sir Harold Ridley is often cited as founding modern biomaterial science as he drew on prior observations as a military surgeon that both glass and acrylic, under certain conditions, appeared to be inert within body tissues. During

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Fig. 2.3 Oron near a sculpture of the Golem in a restaurant at Prague

World War II some airplane cockpit and gunnery canopies were fabricated from glass and PMMA [polymethyl methacrylate, known by its common name acrylic glass and Plexiglas]. When a canopy was shattered by gunfire, fragments of this material sometimes penetrated the eyes of the flight crew. Ridley observed that ‘unless a sharp edge of the plastic material rests in

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contact with a sensitive and mobile portion of the eye, the tissue reaction is insignificant.’12

‘If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes!’ says the ‘replicant’ Roy Batty to his creator in the Blade Runner movie. The eyes, the opening to the soul, the eyes which gaze back at us. We might have tried to pack too many narratives into Crude Matter. While not dealing directly with the mysticism of the creation of life, Crude Matter, among other things, comments on the ability to ‘turn off’ human technology and the interface between living and nonliving. Most importantly, it is concerned with the importance of the substrate – the context – for life. Countering genohype, the focus here is on the agency of the substrate, its significance in playing an active role in determining life’s fate. Biologists increasingly appreciate that the extracellular matrixes in which cells grow regulate the paths that cells take. Even a subtle change in substrate morphology will have a fundamental effect on the cell’s plasticity and the lineage it will take. Nicholas D. Evans and collaboratorsdemonstrate how changes in the stiffness of a substrate (PDMS – polydimethylsiloxane) will change the path of differentiation of stem cells into types of tissue, such as bone, fat and so on.13 Through this work we explored the ‘alchemy-like’ transformation of materials into active substrates which have the ability to act as surrogates for life. The story of the Golem describes the emergence of life from inanimate matter: life that is forceful, brute and can be shaped, with limited control, for different purposes and intentions. The work itself constituted a series of meditations, grown with amphibian cells, that represents the dream of renewal through regenerative biology, and the water/land interface of the origin of the Golem. The cells were grown over an array of substrates that would determine the cells’ eventual fate. Our aim was to explore, in a poetic way, and bring back to the forefront the materiality of life in context. This differs from

12 David J. Apple and John Sims. 1996. Harold Ridley and the invention of the intraocular lens. Survey of Ophthalmology 40: 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0039-625 7(96)82003-0. 13 N.D. Evans, C. Minelli, E. Gentleman, V. LaPointe, S.N. Patankar, M. Kallivretaki, X. Chen, C.J. Roberts and M.M. Stevens. 2009. Substrate stiffness affects early differentiation events in embryonic stem cells. European Cells and Materials 18: 1–14. https:// doi.org/10.22203/eCM.v018a01.

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the hegemony of the metaphor of life as a code and moves away from the anthropocentric, colonialist, tainted history of the linguistic turn. Drawing on historical references taken from the Middle Ages, we looked at engineered life on the edges of what we consider animate or inanimate – and provided it with some sort of sentience, even if only symbolic. The performativity of the semi-living material is complex and not fully understood – an agential mattering. Life is always relational and is context dependent, always existing in concert with its internal and external environments. Even Venter’s synthetic DNA strand required a semi-permeable homeostatic environment – the cell – to ‘become’. DNA-centrism is resurfacing through the field of synthetic biology (SynBio), in which engineering principles are applied to biology. As Australia’s CSIRO says, ‘It involves the design and construction of biological systems and devices, usually based on DNA-encoded componentry, and their application for useful purposes.’14 The field of SynBio strips life of any residue of vitalism and turns it into a mechanical construct to be engineered by humans for useful purposes. It is then with some irony that the field has commissioned from its inception designers and artists to create ‘non-useful’ cultural and artistic articulations (and public acceptance?) of the concepts and techniques of SynBio. Most synthetic biologists are not aware that the origin of the phrase ‘synthetic biology’ dates back to the early twentieth century, to the publication of The Mechanism of Life by Dr Stéphane Leduc (1911). Leduc suggested that he had demonstrated spontaneous generation – a process by which living organisms develop from nonliving matter – using a series of experiments of diffusion and osmosis of different salt solutions to create what looked like cells. Chapter 10 of Leduc’s book is titled ‘Synthetic Biology’ and contains images of living structures with visual similarity to the shapes Leduc created using chemical osmosis. In a Nature article from 1913 titled ‘Synthetic biology and the mechanism of life’, the author writes: The presidential address delivered by Prof. Schäfer to the British Association in 1912 … served, as was pointed out by Prof. Armstrong … ‘as a useful corrective to the wave of vitalism that has passed over society of late years owing to the pervasive eloquence of Bergson and other writers.’ 14 CSIRO. 2022. Synthetic biology future science platform. https://www.csiro.au/en/res earch/production/biotechnology/synthetic-biology.

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Probably the majority of those who have studied the phenomena of life from the chemical side will agree with Prof. Schäfer in his dictum that ‘at the best vitalism explains nothing,’ and accept his opinion ‘that we may fairly conclude that all changes in living substance are brought about by ordinary chemical and physical forces.’15

More than a century later vitalism is still dominant, while we experience a new wave of an extreme engineering approach to life – life as a pure mechanistic process that should be exploited for anthropocentric wants and needs.

Mechanism of Life – After Stéphane Leduc, 2013 In his 1911 book Leduc tried to prove that life is merely a chemical process. In a series of experiments, he showed the emergence of life as a phenomenon of different degrees of complexity. In our collaborative piece Mechanism of Life, we re-created one of Leduc’s experiments using a custom-made rapid prototyping printer to create ‘protocells’. We reenacted one of the simplest protocell protocols offered by Leduc, working with the diffusion of two concentrations of salt solutions to create transitory, cell-like droplets. The droplets resembled cells with membranes and nuclei; they lasted for a few moments before succumbing to entropy and dissolving into a murky liquid, ‘much like life’ (Figs. 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6). The protocol was automated using another hyped technology at the time (2013 – 100 years after Leduc published his Nature paper): three-dimensional printing. There is much discussion about 3D printing technology as the next industrial revolution – something that parallels the assembly line of Fordism at the time Leduc was working on The Mechanism of Life. The promise of 3D printing technology is, at its core, based on information transfer as the business model; the focus is on the instructions/data as the currency, while the materiality is merely an optional manifestation. This is problematic as the 3D printing industry suggests it has the ability to print actual life, or at least parts of the living. This very seductive scenario of printing life from scratch is played off in our artwork against the unstable, uncontrollable and transient nature of 15 W.A.D. 1913. Synthetic biology and the mechanism of life. Nature 91: 270–272. https://doi.org/10.1038/091270d0.

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Fig. 2.4 Mechanism of Life, 2013

Fig. 2.5 Mechanism of Life, 2013

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Fig. 2.6 Mechanism of Life, 2013

the protocell droplets as a material. To a large extent, this piece deals with issues of cultural amnesia and reimagining, drawing attention to the use of certain visuals and expressions to persuade, hype and then disappoint. The printed ‘protocells’ are unstable and temporary; they take on forms that appear organic and then disappear. More than a proof on the mechanism of life, they are a suggestion for a humble approach to the question of what life is and how far we are willing to make life into a raw material for our own ends. Chapter 3 describes our desire to bring to the forefront the context of life: the cell, the womb and the incubator.

References Apple, D.J. and J. Sims. 1996. Harold Ridley and the invention of the intraocular lens. Survey of Ophthalmology 40: 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0039-6257(96)82003-0. Aristarkhova, I. 2012. Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Bering-Porter, D. 2022. Data as symbolic form: datafication and the imaginary media of W. E. B. Du Bois. Critical Enquiry 48: 262–285, p. 271. CSIRO. 2022. Synthetic biology future science platform. https://www.csiro.au/ en/research/production/biotechnology/synthetic-biology. ETC Group. 2007, June 6. Patenting Pandora’s bug: goodbye, Dolly…hello, https://etcgroup.org/content/patenting-pandora%E2%80%99sSynthia! bug-goodbye-dollyhello-synthia. Evans, N.D., C. Minelli, E. Gentleman, V. LaPointe, S.N. Patankar, M. Kallivretaki, X. Chen, C.J. Roberts and M.M. Stevens. 2009. Substrate stiffness affects early differentiation events in embryonic stem cells. European Cells and Materials 18: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.22203/eCM.v018a01. Holtzman, N. 1999. Are genetic tests adequately regulated? Science 286(4539): 409–410. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5439.4. Kay, L.E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keller, E.F. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The New York Times. 2010, May 29. Editorial: one cell forward. https://www. nytimes.com/2010/05/30/opinion/30sun3.html. Uexküll, J. von. 2010 [1934]. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning. Trans. J.D. O’Neil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Venter, J.C. 2013. Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life. New York: Viking. W.A.D. 1913. Synthetic biology and the mechanism of life. Nature 91: 270–272. https://doi.org/10.1038/091270d0.

CHAPTER 3

Who Cares? Outsourcing Labour to Incubators

Here we will explore the inability to know life, let alone be alive, without considering life’s milieu (umwelt ): the cell (egg), tissue and the extracellular matrix (womb), the body (incubator), and the larger environment (earth and cultures). We will explore these entanglements by tracing humankind’s ongoing ambition to decontextualize life and outsource it to a techno-scientific apparatus. Rather than caring for the environment we have evolved in/with, humans are looking at propagating technologically mediated spaces and beings and imagining the construction of artificial, automated environments separated from mother Earth – whether these are on other planets or in the metaverse. But firstly, let us begin with some of the basic needs of the biological body as an environment: regulating temperature for optimal biological performance is something that Earth and many of its inhabitants share. Endotherms such as mammals and birds evolved to maintain and regulate their body’s temperature in near optimal condition for biological processes. A deviation in the temperature range of operation indicates a potential problem – be it global heating or a COVID-19 symptom. In COVID-19 cases, as the body often responds by raising its temperature, monitoring body temperature is now part of the biopolitical theatre of control and containment, executed through our heat measurement instrument – the thermometer.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_3

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The technological tool to regulate temperature is the thermostat, invented in 1620 by Cornelis Drebbel to control the temperature of a chicken incubator. It is considered to be one of the first (first order) cybernetic devices as it allows for feedback control. Not surprisingly, it has become a surrogate device for bodies or parts of bodies out of context. The invention of the thermostat enabled care for lifeforms to be outsourced to a ‘machine’. It was firstly used to outsource care for eggs out of bodies – to regulate the temperature of the chicken incubator. An incubator is an isolated environment that controls heat and humidity and, in some cases, gas content, pH level and other mechanical conditions. It is a homeostatic, dynamic, surrogate body that shields the fragile life from the external environment.

The Story of the Incubators The story of the development of the incubator and consequentially the ‘artificial womb’ (an incubator with an added placenta-like mechanism) is full of anecdotes and narratives reflecting attempts to understand and automate life, and particularly feminized bodies and labour, through the interplay of care and control. Artificial incubation by humans can be traced back to ancient Egypt in one of the earliest references to it, from Aristotle: ‘Eggs are hatched by the incubation of the mother-bird. In some cases, as in Egypt, they are hatched spontaneously in the ground, by being buried in dung heaps … Instances have occurred of eggs being deposited in warm vessels and getting hatched spontaneously.’1 Using heat from rotting manure and later on building a cylindrical structure with a fire at the bottom to incubate the eggs, they had a supply of chicks throughout the year, regardless of the seasons. The eggs had to be rotated by human hands, with the heat of the egg measured by placing the egg on one’s skin. While multispecies faeces provided the heating mechanism, human skin acted as the thermometer.2 Mechanical incubating was invented in 1749 by Réne Réaumur in Paris and was controlled by the alcohol-based thermometer he also invented,

1 Aristotle. 350 BCE. The History of Animals, Book VI. Trans. D. Wentworth Thompson. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.6.vi.html. 2 J.H. Sutcliffe. 1909. Incubation, Natural and Artificial. London, p. 9.

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which is named after him. These incubators were often referred to as ‘artificial mothers’.3 The first American incubator was invented in 1844 with the ability to hatch up to 360 chicks per batch. The incubator allowed chick production on an industrial scale. By 1896, in Buffalo, New York, Cyphers commercial incubators were as large as a room and capable of hatching 20,000 chicks.4 It was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, around the same time as the birth of tissue culture by Alexis Carrel who devised ‘an artificial body in which to grow cells’, that the use of incubators was extended to act as a surrogate to premature human infants. The human body was decontextualized and fragmented. The human incubator was initially ‘modeled after [the] chick incubator by Stéphane Tarnier, an obstetrician who was a pioneer in the care of the premature infant’.5 However, it was Martin A. Couney, nicknamed ‘the Incubator Doctor’, who promoted the idea of mechanical incubators as an aid for prolonging and saving the lives of neonates who otherwise would have died.6 Couney, whether by necessity or choice, acted as a showman, promoting this idea through public exhibitions – entertainment – rather than the more orthodox biomedical outlets of professional publications and in hospitals. Visitors to Couney’s exhibit had to purchase a ticket to watch a display of premature babies inside incubators who were periodically fed through a tube by the nurses. This would be similar to watching the Semi-living Worry Dolls on display in a bioreactor, being fed by us as part of the ‘ritual of feeding’. The creation of the ‘need’ for a machine that would ‘passage’ an infant from a fragile, ambiguous zone into a person is a complex story. One impetus for developing the incubator was originally to stem population decline. There was a need not only to save these otherwise doomed ‘lives’, but also to strengthen the mother–child bond, which was directly related

3 R.-A.F. de Réaumur. 1750. The Art of Hatching and Bringing Up Domestic Fowls, by Means of Artificial Heat. London: Royal Society. 4 Cyphers Incubator Co. 1908. Complete Catalogue 1907–8. Buffalo, NY. https://ult

imheat.com/s3-museum/1907%20Couveuses%20Cyphers%20A-20170106.pdf. 5 Lawrence M. Gartner and Carol B. Gartner. 1992. The care of premature infants: historical perspective. In Neonatal Intensive Care: A History of Excellence. Bethesda, Maryland: National Institutes of Health. NIH Publication No. 92-2786, p. 4. http://www. neonatology.org/classics/nic.nih1985.pdf. 6 Ibid., p. 4.

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to infant survival. As well as its biomedical function, the initial design of the incubator was already aesthetically geared to make certain meanings out of the technique and the life it sustained; to make visible and generate empathy towards the bare life on display. According to Katie Proctor: An expensive device, it was designed to be used for [sic] either by wealthy private patrons or by the poor, who in lieu of payment allowed their babies to be publicly exhibited. Its design is ideal for exhibition purposes, with the large glass windows placed at eye-level and the tiny infant’s bed suspended in the center. It is precisely these design specifications, relevant not to health care but to health care funding, which shape the path of the Lion incubator.7

The way these incubators were promoted in Europe and the USA was through public fairs, in which the enthusiastic public had to pay for admission to watch the show of the ‘Infant Incubators with Living Infants’. Proctor continues, ‘no London hospitals were willing to entrust premature babies to the show, so Couney was forced to return to Paris and retrieve “three washbaskets full of premature foundlings”’.8 Couney had an incubator on permanent display as a sideshow on Coney Island, New York, from 1903 to 1943 and was instrumental in Cornell University’s New York Hospital opening the city’s first neonatal ward. This happened after his meeting (initially in 1914) with Julius Hess, a recognized and well-respected physician. Hess was the first in the USA to transfer this technology from the realm of the sideshow to the hospital, and for a while confined this epistemology within the biomedical field. Our Semi-living Worry Dolls as part of the Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs installation at Ars Electronica Festival in 2000 can be 7 Katie Proctor. 2004. Transferring the incubator: fairs and freak-shows as agents of

change. Science & Technology Studies 700(2): 1–33, p. 10. http://neonatology.com/pdf/ proctor.pdf. Couney purchased Lion’s incubators for his expositions in Europe and the USA: ‘After purchasing a new set of Lion incubators, manufactured by Paul Altmann in Germany, Couney ran a series of sideshow exhibits at various expositions in Europe and the USA, including the 1901 Pan-American Exposition. In 1904, he eventually found a permanent home for his incubators in New York City at Coney Island’s Luna Park, then the largest amusement park in the world, which would open every summer season for nearly forty years.’ B. Wills-Eve. 2021, August 31. Mothers and machines on the midway: the curious case of baby incubators. Epoch. https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/mot hers-and-machines-on-the-midway-the-curious-case-of-baby-incubators. 8 Proctor, Transferring the incubator, p. 12.

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seen as a precursor for the release of this epistemology back to the realm of the public display. As described later in the chapter, the artificial womb technology (EVE) was presented again at Ars Electronica in 2018. Although Coney’s shows had a high neonatal survival rate, the medical establishment was slow to adopt the technology. According to an article in the New York Times from 1939: There are no comprehensive statistics on the survival of babies as small as that who do not receive specialized attention, but pediatricians concede that the percentage is extremely low. In all, Dr Couney has had about 8,000 preemies under his care since the day in 1896 when he opened, in Berlin, his first public showing of babies in incubators, and he has saved the lives of about 6,500 of them. Responsibility for the existence of so many additional human beings might crush a misanthrope, but the Doctor bears the burden lightly. ‘They are good, normal, respectable people, all of them, I bet,’ he says with conviction. ‘I get letters every year from people who their parents told them they were raised in my incubators. I never yet got a letter from a jail.’9

The question to ask is why a successfully working technology, which saved so many lives, was so slow to be accepted by the medical community, while it was thriving within the public entertainment realm? Some say that Couney never intended the technology to become widely available as it would end his ability to profit from it by charging the public to come and see the living display. It may have been that the context of the sideshow exhibit and Couney’s showmanship prevented the medical establishment from accepting the technology. These are interesting and valid points; however, we would like to suggest that such vexed cases, in which liminal beings are in a transition towards not just bare life but also scientific and moral classification, have to be articulated initially via aesthetic rather than scientific modes of presentation. Scott Webel suggests: ‘As a form of technoscience, incubators shared with leisure spaces (1) a violation of the line between public and private spheres; (2) a cyborgian synthesis of animals and machines; (3) an

9 A.J. Liebling. 1939, June 3. A patron of the preemies. The New Yorker, pp. 20–24. Available at Neonatology on the Web. http://www.neonatology.org/classics/liebling.html.

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aesthetics of display and surveillance; and (4) the production of intensities.’10 Furthermore, ‘As liminal beings, the premature babies gathered non-human animal imagery around them, partly through (but despite) the historical trajectory of the technoscientific device itself.’11 In a sense these neonatal humans inside the incubators were sort of semi-living in a techno-scientific body; fragmented, decontextualized life which was recontextualized through a machinic surrogate body first in the context of entertainment and then in the context of the biomedical project. These premature babies who were exhibited in a sideshow (were they located beside the bearded woman or the two-headed lamb?) were yet to be ‘named’ and/or taxonomized, just like the other ‘abnormalities’ or ‘oddities’ presented in the sideshow. As Webel notes, ‘As a spatial technology, incubators performed a mechanization of life-forms that blurred species boundaries.’12 Were they human? Were they living? The neonatal technology assisted in ‘classifying’ premature babies in the realm of the living and of the human, and therefore as persons. The technology which to start with made them liminal eventually ‘un-queered’ them. Today the new cabinet of curiosities is being constructed/grown again in the form of new technologically dependent and yet to be classified lives, created in scientific laboratories by emerging technologies. These new entities do not conform to or fit with natural history museum classifications, let alone with our traditional understanding of what life is and what is alive. These new queer, some incubator-dependent, life forms are further explored in Chapter 5. Some of the artworks that are at the centre of this book also involve the nurturing of ambiguous life forms using advanced technology, this time in art galleries rather than the sideshow; lives which defy species, sex and age boundaries. Here the utilization of technology is not profit driven, biomedical or providing a public face for biotechnology, rather it is critically engaged with and fosters contestable debate about technoscientific developments that challenge the accepted understanding of what it means to be human and, indeed, to be alive.

10 Scott Webel. 2003. Kinderbrutanstalt: leisure space and the Coney Island baby incubators. Text, Practice, Performance V: 1–21, p. 3. 11 Ibid., p. 13. 12 Ibid., p. 11.

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The Semi-living Worry Dolls (2000) In The Semi-living Worry Dolls installation (originally, Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs ) in the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, Austria) in 2000, living semi-living art (as opposed to it being preserved) was exhibited for the first time. Staging tissue-engineered sculptures growing, proliferating and dying in a gallery space (rather than representations or dead relics as presented in previous exhibitions) enhanced the uneasiness and exhilaration felt by both the artists and audiences as life was not only manipulated but also put on display for non-utilitarian purposes – simply to raise this heightened sensation of fragmentation and messy vitality. It also presented a technical challenge: we had to construct a laboratory setting within a public space in order to care for and sustain the lives of the artworks. In this and many of the subsequent installations, we incorporated laboratory aesthetics, the laboratory serving both as function – an environment in which the semi-living entities could thrive – and aesthetic, heightening the concept and the audience experience. As described in this book, the contextualization was entangled with the development of ontoepistemological meanings. This enabled us to perform the duty of caring for the semi-living sculptures while the exhibition was being held, in a way that enabled the audience to observe and comprehend the commitment and responsibility we have towards the living systems we create. This involved the construction of an enclosure and a tissue culture laboratory, featuring a sterile hood, an artificial environment for the semi-living entities (a bioreactor), a microscope and laboratory consumables, which had to comply with the safety requirements of physical containment Level 2 laboratories. The design and construction were an integral part of the conceptualization and theatrical intention of the installation. We thus continued the long tradition of ritualization in growing/dealing with partial life, as seen with Carrel, Fell and Vacanti as well as with the up-andcoming startups in the field of cellular agriculture (as will be elaborated on in Chapter 4). The first laboratory constructed for us was part of the Tissue Culture & Art(ifical) Wombs installation in 2000. We were faced with the challenge of how to construct a PC2 laboratory adhering to all health and safety requirements while successfully maintaining semi-living sculptures alive in a public space. In Julian Huxley’s words, ‘Not a necropolis, but a

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histopolis … not a cemetery, but a place of eternal growth’.13 Together with the team and an architect from Ars Electronica, a square transparent ‘room’ was erected in the lobby of Linz’s Brucknerhaus (the concert hall) made of clear vinyl sheets. A sterile hood, a bench with a microscope and a stand for the bioreactor (with the Semi-living Worry Dolls) were put in this visible containment – everything in view, with no place to hide (and no ventilation). The artists and the artworks blended to perform the basic functions of being alive on stage. Public performances of life’s rites of passage traditionally are accompanied by rituals of cultural and personal articulations. This is especially so for lives that are yet to be culturally defined or even articulated. We, therefore, devised The Ritual of Feeding to perform to the audience: every day during the seven days of the festival, at a set time, we cared for the semi-living sculptures by changing their nutrient media following sterile procedures in the laminar flow hood, all in view of the audience and passers-by. Like feeding time at the zoo, but different – this was a technologically mediated ‘feeding’ which involved pipettes and other apparatuses, devoid of any human touch or exposure to the external (nonsterile) environment to prevent contamination and death of the mammalian tissue. Instead of pellets or chunks of bloody meat, we used two sterile syringes – one to suck out the old nutrient media and the other to inject the fresh one. The lives being fed did not perform in a (human) charismatic way (Figs. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3). The Semi-living Worry Dolls were handcrafted from biodegradable polymers, polyglycolic acid (PGA) mesh, poly-4-hydroxybutyrate (P4HB), poly lactic-co-glycolic acid (PLGA) and various surgical sutures. The dolls are approximately 10 mm tall by 7 mm wide by 5 mm deep. The polymer constructs were sterilized using ethylene oxide (ETO) at 55 °C for two hours; the dolls were seeded with McCoy Cell Line. The first reference to the original McCoy cells was in a paper published in 1957. It stated that the cells originated from the joint fluid in a knee of a human patient with degenerative arthritis. Around 1965 the cells were reported as being human cells; however, it was later found that a subline of these cells were actually mouse cells, ‘possess[ing] marker chromosomes characteristic of strain L mouse fibroblasts’. Some papers indicate that these cells are actually a combination of mouse and human that have 13 Julian Huxley. 1926. The tissue culture king. In Great Science Fiction by Scientists, ed. Groff Conklin. 1962. New York: Collier Books, pp. 147–170, p. 160.

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Fig. 3.1 The Semi-living Worry Dolls 2000

gone through spontaneous cell fusion; other theories are that the original McCoy culture was contaminated with the L-strain mouse cells, who took over ‘like weeds taking over a field’.14 Nevertheless, the McCoy cells have proved useful in virology and microbiological research as they are ‘used to propagate laboratory strains of the 15 recognized serotypes of Chlamydia trachomatis’.15 The dolls were statically cultured for 14 and 21 days in a 37 °C, 5% CO2 incubator, then moved to the Synthecon RCCS ID4 (a rotating bioreactor that provides conditions of microgravity) for the duration of the installation. The tissues were cultured until proliferated cells largely

14 C.K. Fong, T.L. Yang-Feng and M.B. Lerner-Tung. 1994. Re-examination of the McCoy cell line for confirmation of its mouse origin: karyotyping, electron microscopy and reverse transcriptase assay for endogenous retrovirus. Clinical and Diagnostic Virology 2(2): 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/0928-0197(94)90042-6. 15 Ibid.

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Fig. 3.2 The process of giving birth to a Worry Doll 2000

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Fig. 3.3 Semi-living Doll H 2000

covered the polymer surface, growing into the porosity of the polymer scaffold.16 It was the first-time tissue constructs – semi-living entities – had been taken outside the laboratory and into the gallery while they were still alive. Ars Electronica 2000, titled ‘Next Sex: Sex in the Age of Its Procreative Superfluousness’, is where Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs 16 For more, see Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. 2002. Growing semi-living sculptures: the Tissue Culture Art Project. Leonardo 35(4): 365–370, p. 368. https://doi.org/10. 1162/002409402760181123.

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was debuted. At that event, the scientist Nobuya Unno presented his research in the form of a public talk and catalogue essay titled ‘Development of an artificial placenta’.17 The article was accompanied by a colour photograph of ‘a goat fetus after 10 days of extrauterine incubation’,18 showing a fair-skinned kid, eyes closed, tubes inserted into its abdominal area, bathing in a clear and rigid Perspex box. Unno writes that ‘During this series of experiments, we encountered several serious problems which prevented stable long-term incubation. Among these the most annoying was fetal movement … eye rolling … twitching … body stretching’, to the point that ‘In one preparation, a fetus tried to stand up and run [emphasis added].’19 Unno (a male scientist), rather than rethinking the design of the incubator (the environment), hence making the environment soft and stretchable (think about the shape and texture of a mammal’s womb) rather than an inflexible rectangular box, wrote that the ‘annoying’ behaviour of the fetus ‘led us to consider a suppression of fetal activity using sedatives and muscle relaxant’.20 The article ends with a call for careful consideration of the impact of this ‘thermally neutral environment’: Although the idea of EUFI is a simple extension of the pre-existing neonatal intensive care system for the extremely premature newborn, some may regard it as a futuristic style of pregnancy. At this stage of investigation, all we can say is that long-term EUFI using extracorporeal circulation would be destructively expensive as an alternative for natural intrauterine pregnancy.21

In 2018 Ars Electronica went even further to, on one hand, act on creating a ‘futuristic’ imagining of automated reproduction, while at the same time ‘re-enacting’ the historical instance of putting baby incubators on display. Ars Electronica featured a display of an ‘artificial womb’ and the associated apparatuses it requires to function. For this

17 Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (eds.). 2000. Next Sex: Sex in the Age of Its Procreative Superfluousness. Springer, pp. 62–69. 18 Ibid., p. 65. 19 Ibid., p. 66. 20 Ibid., p. 67. 21 Ibid., p. 68. Emphasis added.

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research project, titled symbolically Eve (ex-vivo uterine environment),22 the display presented the latest state-of-the-art technology of the artificial womb: a soft transparent sack, blueish-green hospital cloths, monitoring machines, tubes and more, all arranged for the viewer. Yet something was missing this time – there were no ‘real’ semi-living bodies. The artificial womb was barren. The display was accompanied with this explanation: In our Artificial Uterus platform, gas exchange is performed by a sophisticated artificial placenta connected directly to the fetal umbilical cord, with circuit perfusion driven solely by the preterm fetal heart. The present aim of this work is to bring to clinic a functioning life-support platform for infants born at the current border of viability.23

Developments for artificial wombs began in 1958 ‘when Westin et al. cannulated the umbilical vessels of seven previable human fetuses in a warmed perfusion chamber and connected these to a spiral, plexiglass, film oxygenator, prolonging their life up to 12 hours’.24 An artificial ‘womb’ is, to put it simply, an incubator that attempts to replicate the function of the placenta. Beyond the immense technical and biological complexities (impossibilities?) involved in engineering a placenta, researchers outline the perceptual complications involved in the aesthetics of the device: Fluid submersion has the disadvantage of creating a physical and potential psychological barrier for fetal-parental bonding. Whether prospective parents would accept this distance to their fetus and whether it negatively impacts parental-fetal bonding remain important questions to be investigated.25

22 H. Usuda and M.W. Kemp. 2019. Development of an artificial placenta. O&G Magazine 21(1). https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/21/1-21/artificial-placenta/. 23 H. Usuda and M. Kemp. 2018. Ars Electronica. The artificial uterus. Flickr. https://

www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/43618803835. Emphasis added. 24 Felix R. De Bie, M.G. Davey, A.C. Larson, J. Deprest and A.W. Flake. 2021. Artificial placenta and womb technology: past, current, and future challenges towards clinical translation. Prenatal Diagnosis 41(1): 145–158, p. 146. https://doi.org/10.1002/pd. 5821. 25 Ibid., p. 149.

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The artificial womb is the promise of outsourcing the body of the mother, with the care and the labour, to a machine. It can be presented as a feminist device, releasing the female body from the function of generating new life, as well as a patriarchal device of ‘ectogenic desire’. We have tried to highlight some of this strangeness in a series of artistic interventions loosely clustered under the title of Vessels of Care & Control , which focus on the central place of the incubator as a surrogate body in these new biological frameworks.

Vessels of Care & Control – The Compostcubator (2016 – Onwards) I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost, not posthuman. Donna Haraway26

The Australian bird the Malleefowl (Aboriginal name nganamara) belongs to the Megapodiidae family. Megapode, meaning ‘large foot’, is also called the incubator bird, as will be explained. They are monogamous and spend most of their lives together with their mate. They have a division of labour in the process of making offspring which, relevant to this chapter, involves an elaborate incubation process. The Malleefowl incubates their eggs in a compost mound which is mostly built and maintained by the male. He uses his strong legs to scrape leaf litter and sand into a pile that slowly decomposes and as a result generates heat that keeps the eggs, laid by the female, warm. The female’s labour is focused on producing eggs – she lays an average of twenty eggs each season and each egg is equivalent to around 10% of her body weight. The male’s labour includes maintaining the compost mound at 33 °C by adding, removing and shuffling the organic material to adjust to the changing temperature during the day and night. The male Malleefowl is a biological thermostat. His thermoception device is his beak. Eventually, the chicks hatch and crawl out of the mound unaided with no need for care, guidance

26 D. Haraway. 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/220 11919-3615934.

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or any contact with their parents (a possible dream of some of the feminists and nonfeminists among us?). There is something peculiar in the Malleefowl’s attachment, devotion and care to the mound-incubator and complete indifference to their offspring. Following the example of the Malleefowl parents’ outsourcing the care of their offspring to the incubator, which is a hybrid of a living (microbiota activity) and technological (intentional construction/architecture) ‘body’, we developed our own vessel of care of control, using a compost pile which creates heat to care for mammalian cells in a tissue culture flask – a Compostcubator (Fig. 3.4). In Compostcubator we used compost technology to create an incubator, making living systems that look after/surrogate/consume other living systems in a delicate balance of care and control. The project complicates the incubator apparatus/technology by making it into a living system – a fleshy, smelly, noisy and messy automaton. In a sense we enabled sympoietic systems which may have

Fig. 3.4 Compostcubator 2019

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been assembled by a human but have some sort of independence from her – a mix of wood, decaying food, faeces, worms, bacteria, fungi, larvae, dissociated cells, plastic pumps and the historically first cybernetic device, the thermostat, all somehow contributing to a composite whole. The work plays with and critiques notions of control, optimization, computation and information to kinship, interdependence, multispecies ecologies and genome instability. Living systems consume other living systems that do not just become part of, but also regulate, them in different ways. The Compostcubator project explores these relations where the context/womb/incubator takes a forefront aesthetic position in the attempt to articulate not only its own agency, but also its importance in articulating and transforming the lives it cares for. In the Spare Parts exhibition (2019) at Science Gallery London, the Compostcubator was an outdoors, off the grid, pre-cybernetic (thermostat-free) incubator-vessel. It was heated by two tonnes of compost. For this iteration, horse manure from the London Metropolitan Police Mounted Branch was used to kick-start a bacterial and fungi breakdown of wood chips. Water, running through a long garden hose coiled in the centre of the compost heap, delivered the heat to an insulated waterjacketed chamber where mouse connective tissue cells were cultured in flasks. The temperature was controlled by the rate of the flow of the water and relied on the fairly constant temperature of 60 °C at the core of the compost pile (Fig. 3.5). Working with researchers Kalle Sipilä, Christina Philippeos and Jess Sells from the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Kings College London, we were all surprised to find out that this system was able to keep the mouse cells alive and growing outdoors during London’s freezing winter (Fig. 3.6). This work relegated the care and maintenance of the tissue cells from a mechanical, electrical cybernetic feedback system to a living care system maintained by the bacterial activity of the organic matter decomposing in the compost.

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Fig. 3.5 Compostcubator 2019

Fig. 3.6 Growth of cells in Compostcubator and control (with Kalle Sipilä, Christina Philippeos and Jess Sells from the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Kings College London)

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The Invisibility of the Modern Incubator Eduard Uhlenhuth wrote in 1916, ‘Through the discovery of tissue culture we have, so to speak, created a new type of body in which to grow the cell.’27 In order to be able to grow these tissue cells outside of bodies and in vitro (in glass), a new kind of body needed to be engineered, one that would provide at least the minimum conditions for the cells to act as if they were in a body. Initially that involved the right nutrients, temperature and a substrate ‘anchor’ for cells to grow on. But above all the cells needed a sterile environment: a system that separated them from the rest of the living and hostile world, a spaceship of sorts. New technoscientific ‘bodies’ have been developed as the demands from the tissues in terms of function, form and complexity increase. These devices/bodies are commonly known as bioreactors, a term that to an extent confirms the instrumentalization of living fragments and alludes to the tissue’s new role as a means of production. Some bioreactors go beyond the minimal body conditions outlined above and provide other mechanical and environmental applications, such as pulsation (for the growth of blood vessels), mechanical stress (for the formation of muscle fibres) and timed release of growth and differentiation factors. The aesthetics of these vessels of care and control are not neutral. While earlier examples of incubators and bioreactors were concerned with the visibility of display allowing and guiding the audiences to view the ‘wonder’ inside the vessel, today’s biotechnological incubators are designed to be ‘invisible’ – an opaque rectangular shape in a dull grey or beige colour which indicates temperatures and levels of CO2 . We argue that this aesthetics of invisibility is not accidental, it is ideological, serving the attempt to reduce living systems into non-agential elements – a code, data or information. The ‘boring’ looking square opaque incubator – the environment – is ironically becoming transparent, as if it has no effect on the life it contains. In our work we call for the incubator, a dynamic energy-thirsty agent with a rich history, to be celebrated aesthetically. Rather than a linear continuum from agency to non-agency, sentience to non-sentience, animate to non-animate or living to nonliving, the artistic projects

27 Eduard Uhlenhuth. 1916. Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of Rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions. Journal of Experimental Medicine 24(6): 689–699, p. 690. https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.24.6.689.

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presented here of the semi-living and their techno-scientific surrogates are knots in the sentience and agency conundrum. They are knots which are contextualized in patriarchal post-capitalist construction. Sensing, measuring and regulating temperatures are of ecological, environmental, technological and biopolitical importance. The application of biological and technological thermoception (the sensing of temperature difference) to control different types of bodies (biological, mechanical, planetary) can be referred to as thermobiopolitics. Thermodynamic laws, whether as epistemology, methodology or ontology, point to the longterm futility of isolated systems, and how thermobiopolitics do and undo bodily boundaries through dynamics of care and control. The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. This is true, for example, in the use of incubators, which consume biological or electrical energy to produce heat. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. As an interconnected planetary system, life on Earth creates a temporary reprieve from the second law of thermodynamics, as long as an external energy force, such as the sun, is part of the system. Artistic engagement with these issues can generate awareness and new insights into the multifaceted manifestations of thermal regulation. Living biological systems are agents of fluctuation and interdependence, which cannot thrive in long-term isolation or without some warmth when it gets too cold or cooling mechanisms when heat becomes unbearable – but different bodies adopt different thermoregulation systems. Self-regulation of a body is relative to the bodies within it and outside it. Sensing and measuring heat energy is becoming a tool for many types of politics and control systems. Thermobiopolitics needs to be explored, unpacked and used to question bodies, biological and otherwise, from the viral to the planetary scale. Living biological bodies are dynamic thermobiopolitical-resistant agents which require more intrusive technological disciplining. More control for better care? One must not forget that these techno-scientific bodies not only outsource the female body, but they also require constant maintenance, which is done by feminized labour. Feminized labour is employment characterized by precarious, low-waged, and irregular and sometimes exploitative conditions. Feminized labour once was associated solely with women; ‘secondary’ employment is now held by all sexes and intersects with race, poverty, immigration status and so on (in the COVID-19

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pandemic it has also, ironically, been referred to as the ‘essential’ workforce). Feminized labour encompasses anything from the daily mundane, low-skilled laboratory work of tissue culture to the people who deliver the laboratory supplies and the people who get rid of the laboratory waste and clean its floors, the invisible labour of maintenance. The incubator is but one element of the post-natural economy brought about by the growing fields of biodesign, synthetic biology, biofabrication and cellular agriculture. In this new biotechnological ‘productive’ ecology, many bodily functions are and will be outsourced to surrogate technological bodies. As such these new technological bodies will maintain only the productive parts of the biological bodies, and through a theatre of false efficiency and standardization will make do without ‘feathers, bones and sentiency’28 or ‘roots and leaves’,29 continuing to replace parts of or whole biological bodies as an ever-growing black box of complex relationships. More on this subject in the next chapter.

References Aristotle. 350 BCE. The History of Animals, Book VI. Trans. D. Wentworth Thompson. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.6.vi.html. Beckwith, A.L., J.T. Borenstein and L.F. Velásquez-García. 2021. Tunable plantbased materials via in vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model. Journal of Cleaner Production 288: 125571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcl epro.2020.125571. Bie, F.R. De, M.G. Davey, A.C. Larson, J. Deprest and A.W. Flake. 2021. Artificial placenta and womb technology: past, current, and future challenges towards clinical translation. Prenatal Diagnosis 41(1): 145–158. https://doi. org/10.1002/pd.5821. Catts, O. and I. Zurr. 2002. Growing semi-living sculptures: the Tissue Culture Art Project. Leonardo 35(4): 365–370. https://doi.org/10.1162/002409 402760181123.

28 Isha Datar. 2021, October 19. How we could eat real meat without harming animals. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/isha_datar_how_we_could_eat_real_meat_wit hout_harming_animals?language=en. 29 Ashley L. Beckwith, Jeffrey T. Borenstein and Luis F. Velásquez-García. 2021. Tunable plant-based materials via in vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model. Journal of Cleaner Production 288: 125571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020. 125571.

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Cyphers Incubator Co. 1908. Complete Catalogue 1907–8. Buffalo, NY. https://ultimheat.com/s3-museum/1907%20Couveuses%20Cyphers%20A20170106.pdf. Datar, I. 2021, October 19. How we could eat real meat without harming animals. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/isha_datar_how_we_could_eat_ real_meat_without_harming_animals?language=en. Accessed 11 August 2022. Fong, C.K., T.L. Yang-Feng and M.B. Lerner-Tung. 1994. Re-examination of the McCoy cell line for confirmation of its mouse origin: karyotyping, electron microscopy and reverse transcriptase assay for endogenous retrovirus. Clinical and Diagnostic Virology 2(2): 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1016/0928-019 7(94)90042-6. Gartner, L.M. and C.B. Gartner. 1992. The care of premature infants: historical perspective. In Neonatal Intensive Care: A History of Excellence. Bethesda, Maryland: National Institutes of Health. NIH Publication No. 92-2786. http://www.neonatology.org/classics/nic.nih1985.pdf. Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159–165. https://doi.org/10. 1215/22011919-3615934. Huxley, J. 1926. The tissue culture king. In Great Science Fiction by Scientists, ed. Groff Conklin. 1962. New York: Collier Books, pp. 147–170. Liebling, A.J. 1939, June 3. A patron of the preemies. The New Yorker, pp. 20– 24. Available at Neonatology on the Web. http://www.neonatology.org/cla ssics/liebling.html. Proctor, K. 2004. Transferring the incubator: fairs and freak-shows as agents of change. Science & Technology Studies 700(2): 1–33. http://neonatology. com/pdf/proctor.pdf. Réaumur, R.-A.F. de. 1750. The Art of Hatching and Bringing Up Domestic Fowls, by Means of Artificial Heat. London: Royal Society. Stocker, G. and C. Schopf (eds.). 2000. Next Sex: Sex in the Age of Its Procreative Superfluousness. Springer. Sutcliffe, J.H. 1909. Incubation, Natural and Artificial. London. Uhlenhuth, E. 1916. Changes in pigment epithelium cells and iris pigment cells of rana pipiens induced by changes in environmental conditions. Journal of Experimental Medicine 24(6): 689–699. https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.24. 6.689. Usuda, H. and M. Kemp. 2018. Ars Electronica. The artificial uterus. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/43618803835. Usuda, H. and M.W. Kemp. 2019. Development of an artificial placenta. O&G Magazine 21(1). https://www.ogmagazine.org.au/21/1-21/artificialplacenta/.

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Webel, S. 2003. Kinderbrutanstalt: leisure space and the Coney Island baby incubators. Text, Practice, Performance V: 1–21. Wills-Eve, B. 2021, August 31. Mothers and machines on the midway: the curious case of baby incubators. Epoch. https://www.epoch-magazine.com/ post/mothers-and-machines-on-the-midway-the-curious-case-of-baby-incuba tors.

CHAPTER 4

The Reverse Ontology of Sentience: The Technologically Mediated Victimless Utopia

[Biofabricate is the] annual summit for the emerging world of grown materials, founded by Suzanne Lee, Chief Creative Officer of New Lab member company Modern Meadow. The summit brings together a truly unique and unlikely global audience comprised of designers and scientists, artists and engineers, global brands and startups, investors and policy makers, trendforecasters and media … BIOFABRICATE is the event to experience how biotechnology is facilitating a new material revolution.1

A long table is set up in the main hall of the Newlab building in Brooklyn, New York City. On the table a timeline of the key moments in the history of the fledgling fields of biofabrication and cellular agriculture is laid out as a visual display, a contemporary cabinet of curiosities of grown materials and objects. The timeline begins in 2004 with an image of three glass vessels filled with red liquid to which a pump is connected by clear tubing. Inside the main glass vessel is an odd-looking tiny jacket. Titled Victimless Leather, this tiny jacket is an artwork that the Biofabricate summit is presenting as the trigger that launched these new fields and their associated industries. How did an (ironic and critical) artwork end up being considered the technological trigger for a new, shiny, hyped-up ‘material revolution’? 1 Newlab. 2018, December 13. Biofabricate 2018 [webpage]. https://newlab.com/ event/biofabricate-2018/. Accessed 11 August 2022.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_4

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The Victimless Leather project (full title Victimless Leather – A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a Technoscientific ‘Body’ ) is the second in an ongoing series of research projects/artworks by the Tissue Culture & Art Project. The whole body of works in the series, which we titled the technologically mediated victimless utopia, deals with our ever-shifting relationship with the concept of life and the ways in which technologies of life obscure the real costs and real victims of our (conspicuous) consumption. Some of the works in the series were framed as pseudo-utilitarian, while Others were more obviously symbolic or even purposely absurd. The very first research project in this series dealt with growing meat in the lab. The motivation for this research was less to do with trying to find ways to feed the world and more to do with the fact that the most intimate relationship that can be had with another life form is to consume, digest and incorporate it into one’s own body. In saying that, our initial approach was somewhat optimistic, viewing the project as an actualized gesture towards a future where meat could be produced without killing animals. The work on this project began in the year 2000, when we were serving as research fellows in the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory at the Harvard Medical School at Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the research fellows in the laboratory was working on an in-utero muscle tissue engineering project. She harvested skeletal muscle progenitor cells, known as satellite cells, from a fetal lamb that was yet to be born. These cells grow very fast, and in a matter of days the incubators in the lab had stacks and stacks of tissue culture flasks brimming with them. For whatever reason, this scientist could not bring herself to dispose of the excess cells, so we offered to take some to try to grow meat. We cut a few coin-sized pieces out of one of the degradable polymer mesh scaffolds we were using for our work and seeded them with a large amount of these satellite cells. We then placed the seeded polymers into a microgravity bioreactor and cultured them in an incubator for three months. After feeding the growing pieces of ‘meat’ twice a week for the first couple of months we then changed the type of nutrient media to mature the cells to form myoblasts, making them into muscle tissue. When we finally took the tiny ‘steaks’ out of the bioreactor, they looked very much like small pieces of soft meat (Fig. 4.1). Unfortunately, as the lab was a biomedical research lab, and we shared the sterile hoods and lab benches with other experiments, we could not taste these pieces of lab-grown meat. We had to wait for a couple of years to be able to do so.

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Fig. 4.1 Tissue-Engineered Steak No. 1, 2000. Pre-natal sheep skeletal muscle and degradable PGA polymer scaffold. Part of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr Research Fellowship in the Tissue Engineering and Organ Fabrication Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

When we presented this project to our colleagues in one of the regular lab meetings, the head of the lab was surprised: ‘This is not art, this is business’, he said, seeing a utilitarian potential for lab-grown meat. We had to engage with the commercialization office of the institute, which, after pondering for quite some time, released the ‘intellectual property’ back to us. They did not think this idea had commercial potential and seemed to find it entertaining, as the following quote from an email sent to the head of the lab demonstrates:

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Tell our friends that this is a medium rare event and that it is a hard cell. They should get it [the IP] back before they age too much more. If they have any beef, they can contact me directly. The rest is gravy!2

As we never intended to commercialize this idea, we were relieved and were able to continue our artistic research into lab-grown meat. In 2003 we were invited to present as part of the first major international exhibition dealing with art and biology, L’Art Biotech’, at Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France, curated by Jens Hauser. Jens invited us to present two works: our Semi-living Worry Dolls (discussed in Chapter 3) and a lab-grown meat-related project that we titled Disembodied Cuisine. The funding allocated to us was sufficient to embark on this ambitious project that, as far as we knew, had not been attempted before. We planned to grow meat from cells for the duration of the exhibition and on the very last evening of the show, cook and serve our lab-grown meat in a nouvelle cuisine style dinner. As a way to maintain irony and critical reflection, we decided to play on cultural sensitivities as to what foods are deemed appropriate for human consumption. The show took place in France, which has a reputation for its sophisticated culinary tradition and seems to have a strong animosity towards engineered food. We decided to grow frog meat, a symbol of French cuisine, though frowned upon in many other cultures. Would the combination of a highly engineered icon of French cuisine transcend food cultures? Or make it even less appetizing? We designed a site-specific tissue engineering lab, a black dome with a series of round portholes and two rectangular wings – one clear, which was set up as a dining room, and the other an existing structure with a sink that was used as an extension to the black domed lab. A clear corridor connected the black lab to the dining area. The pop-futurist space station design of the lab corresponded to the first tissue engineering lab of Dr Alexis Carrel as well as the external architecture of Le Lieu Unique, a biscuit factory that had been converted into an art centre. The clear, rectangular dining room had two fish tanks on the sidewalls, hosting aquatic frogs. We were able to obtain frog satellite cells (skeletal muscle progenitor cells) from a researcher in Paris to use in the art project. In addition, we rescued two frogs that were destined for the frying pan from the local 2 Personal communication, Wednesday, 7 November 2001, 5:04 PM.

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edible frog distributor, as well as a few albino Xenopus frogs (African Clawed Frog) as they were the same type of organism from which the cells for the art project had been sourced. We placed all frogs in the fish tanks. On top of the fish tanks, we placed some tissue culture plants growing in small jars, to be used as microgreens to garnish the plates once the meat was served. For the duration of the exhibition, we came to the lab every day to feed the frogs and feed the meat in the bioreactor. The nutrients we provided the growing cells were a concoction of amino acids, sugars, minerals and vitamins as well as 10% fetal calf serum (blood plasma), which was supplemented, at the last week, with horse serum that promoted the maturation of the cells into muscle tissue. We also added antibiotics to the mix to prevent bacterial contamination. We calculated that throughout the growth period, we used around 500 ml of fetal calf serum, which is roughly equivalent to the amount that can be sourced from one calf. By the end, we were able to grow about 5 grams of the frog meat. At the very last day of the exhibition, we invited the curator, Jens Hauser, fellow artist Joe Davies, a philosopher (who will remain nameless) and two volunteers from the public to join us in eating the cultured frog meat. We set up a long table in the clear room, attached to the lab via the constructed corridor; some of the leaves from the plant tissue culture were cut to be used as garnish; and then we got ready to prepare the meat. We removed the small pieces of meat from the bioreactor vessels. As our timeline was constrained by the duration of the exhibition, the polymer scaffold that we used as the substrate for the cell growth had not degraded completely. The cell/polymer constructs were floating in the liquid nutrient media in microgravity conditions, without guides towards muscle tissue alignment. In order to get the cultured muscle tissue to have a meat-like texture, the cells needed to be exercised and the muscle fibres to align. This we did not do. As we were concerned about potential bacterial contamination, we marinated the cultured frog meat in Calvados and asked the French chef who was cooking to fry it in garlic and honey, which are considered to have strong antibacterial properties (Fig. 4.2). The meat was cut into tiny pieces, fried in a small pan and served. It was chewy and somewhat slippery (the chewiness came from the polymer scaffold and the tissue itself had a jelly-like texture). The sauce was good. To our delight, three of our guests could not swallow the meat. We picked up the bits that were spat out and kept them in specimen jars.

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Fig. 4.2 From Disembodied Cuisine installation, Nantes, France, 2003

At the end of the dinner, we took the frogs from the fish tanks and invited the audience to join us for a walk to the local botanical gardens, where we released the frogs into the beautiful ponds. ‘We don’t need you anymore’, we said, ‘go, enjoy your newfound freedom’. It was very likely they would have been eaten by a predator that very night. Even though the gallery had invited the media, there was very little coverage of this event. This was partly due to the fact that the second Gulf War had begun only a few days earlier. The world was otherwise busy. A few weeks after serving the first piece of lab-grown meat, we received an email from a researcher in the USA, Jason Matheny. Jason was very interested in our work and asked for technical details regarding the process. This prompted us to calculate the cost in monetary terms and in the resources we used. We estimated that growing the 5 grams of frog meat cost around e6,000 (labour, use of lab equipment, nutrients and

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other reagents). That meant it would cost e1.2 million to grow one kilogram of meat. As well as the 500 ml of fetal calf serum, we used around 5 litres of L15 nutrient solution and around 20 ml of antibiotics. That is a lot of resources for such a small amount of meat. Jason was volunteering at the American animal rights non-profit organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals at the time and connected us to Ingrid Newkirk, its founder and president. Ingrid wanted to see if we would be able to grow meat from her own cells, as she was interested in demonstrating that ‘eating meat is a form of cannibalism’. Once she realized we would not be able to grow anything close to a Tbone steak, she dropped the idea. Five years later she announced PETA’s X-Poultry Prize, where PETA offered US$1 million to the first person who could grow chicken meat in a lab. In the meantime, Jason went on to found New Harvest in 2004, a non-profit, donor-funded research institute dedicated to research and development of cultured animal products without the animals.3 It became one of the most influential drivers in the fledgling field of cellular agriculture, a term coined by New Harvest executives. We were told that Jason had decided to set up New Harvest after hearing about Disembodied Cuisine. As for the bits of lab-grown frog meat that were spat out by three of our dinner guests, we presented them in 2004 in our follow-up exhibition, The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine, which featured a three-channel video documentation of the project and a setup of a dining table with the original utensils, menu and the spat-out ‘meat’ from the original performative installation. After growing meat in the lab using tissue engineering techniques, we went on to explore lab-grown leather. By that time we were back in Perth and working at SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia. We were asked to come up with a hands-on lab project for a third-year tissue engineering course. We worked with the students on developing a series of prototypes, using different cell types and substrates. We found that a combination of human bone cells and mouse connective tissue, grown over a PLGA scaffold, provided the most leather-like material. We used traditional tanning techniques to preserve the 15 cm diameter disc we grew.

3 New Harvest [website]. https://new-harvest.org/. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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We were then invited to present an artwork at a fashion and textile show titled The Space Between at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth (at Curtin University). We decided to present a growing, semi-living leather jacket alongside the prototypes explored. It was important for us to present this work as a provocation rather than a solution. We ironically titled it Victimless Leather as the work still involved the use of fetal calf serum and other animal-derived substances, but we wanted to remind people that leather is not victimless. It was important for us to present the semi-living leather jacket within the context of the technological apparatus that acted as its surrogate body. In this arrangement, the leather, which is usually perceived as an outer, protective layer, was inside a technological environment that protected and nourished it. With this work, for the first time in our practice, we decided to develop an automated, life caring/controlling device with which we could grow our semi-living work with minimal human labour and maintenance. We consulted one of the scientists in our department, Professor Arunasalam Dharmarajan, who developed a perfusion system for dissected rabbit ovaries. He provided us with the schematics of his system. We then modified it and redesigned it to accommodate a small jacket instead of the rabbit’s ovary. The system consisted of three glass chambers and peristaltic pump, all connected by clear tubes. In the main chamber, the jacket was hung from a glass hooked tube, where it was drip-fed with the nutrient solution. The other chambers were the nutrient reservoir and the oxygenation, or gas exchange, chamber. The system was placed in a glassed-door incubator that in the exhibition was rendered invisible, as it was hidden behind a false wall, museum diorama style. This was a surrogate techno-scientific body, providing the minimal needs for the tissue to grow. The pump circulating the nutrient media through the tubes acted as the heart and blood vessels. The media was like blood, containing all the essential nutrients and growth factors, pre-digested elsewhere and purified to the level that the cells could absorb them. The waste from the cells returned to the reservoir, which had to be replaced with fresh nutrients every couple of weeks. The gas exchange chamber replaced the lungs, and the incubator kept homeostatic conditions. The work was set up in a dark room, where the main light source emanated from the bottom of the incubator, shining light upwards to the main glass vessel, illuminating the small jacket. A dim red light on the pump added an eerie hue to the scene (Fig. 4.3).

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Fig. 4.3 Victimless Leather – A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific ‘Body’, 2004

Victimless Leather became one of our most well-known artworks, often misunderstood and taken at face value. Interest in this work came from many quarters and gave us an opportunity to see how the meaning of the work shifted depending on the context in which it was being presented. The first showing of the piece at the fashion and textile exhibition generated a mixed response. Some read it as an optimistic gesture towards a future of guilt-free leather, while Others found it disturbing. One audience member said: ‘As repulsive as it may seem, I think this is probably the next generation, the next hundred years will focus on that kind of activity.’

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Another made a poignant point: ‘The idea that you can create everything you need without needing to kill anything will in a sense loosen our contract with the earth and disconnect us from things. I think this is a scandal.’ In 2006 the work was presented at the Ontario Science Centre, one of the oldest and largest science museums in the world. Despite efforts to emphasize the fact that this was an ironic and critical artwork, the piece was presented and read as a positivist gesture towards a technological future of new ‘guilt free’ materials. In contrast, in 2007, Victimless Leather was presented at an exhibition titled Free Radicals at the Israeli Center for Digital Art. This exhibition was framed around artists and artistic collectives who transgress and engage with subjects and materials that question the role of art in the twenty-first century, often venturing into the grey zones of the law. In this context, Victimless Leather was presented as a radical and barely legal artistic transgression. Here the piece was about the ways in which we artists were able to enter biological labs and appropriate biomedical knowledge and knowhow for subversive artistic ends. A Reuters news crew commissioned to make a piece about Victimless Leather came to this show; it was supposed to be a good news story about a bright technological future. However, the dissonance of their expectations and the context of this specific exhibition resulted in the story never being released. The ultimate breakthrough for this piece came in 2008, when we were invited to present it as part of a significant design show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Design and the Elastic Mind, curated by Paula Antonelli, was a massive show of more than 250 exhibits celebrating the newfound connections of design with science and technology, in particular digital and biotechnologies. The projects exhibited were an eclectic collection of approaches ranging from students’ work to big corporations’ R&D teams. Some of the works had already been realized in the market, while Others were purely speculative. We shipped the hardware to New York and made contact with scientists/engineers at the bioengineering department of Columbia University, where we could grow the starter cells and assemble the system under sterile conditions. We signed the standard loan agreement with MoMA and booked our flights to New York. The plan was to pick up the hardware (glass vessels, pump, tubes and a stand) and take it to the lab at the university, set everything up including the jacket with the living cells and

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get it back to MoMA to be placed in the incubator that was set up in a recess in the gallery wall. We sent all our standard operation protocols regarding health and safety and handling the work, but the curator realized it would be a hard one to get through the conservators at MoMA, so she decided it would be better to ask forgiveness than permission. Later, we realized that our work was the only one to contain a living component. Even works that were showing air purification systems using plants or algae had plastic plants and green-coloured water instead of the living organisms. It should be mentioned that in our early correspondence with the curator, we insisted that we could only show the Victimless Leather jacket in its living (or semi-living) state. When we arrived to pick up the hardware from MoMA, we encountered an unforeseen obstacle. We were not allowed to take our work to be set up at the lab as the loan agreement stipulated that the artwork could not leave the premises. Lawyers had to get involved and a new agreement was drawn up in haste in the presence of some very unhappy conservators. It took some hours but we were finally allowed to take the hardware to Columbia University. The scientists in the lab had kindly already grown a large amount of mouse embryonic stem cells for us to use. We had never worked with this type of cell before and we were quite curious to see how they would grow. We came across scientific papers that described stem cell differentiation into skin under air/media interface conditions, which is what the Victimless Leather drip-feed system provides. After bringing life into the piece – seeding the polymer jacket with the cells and setting up the system under sterile conditions in the lab – we were ready to take it back to the MoMA gallery space. As we approached the gate to leave Columbia University, a security guard refused to allow us to remove the ‘artwork’ without the proper paperwork as by being on university grounds meant it was the university’s property. Time was running out as, without an incubator, the cells would cool and eventually die. More frantic phone calls and rushed paperwork, and we were finally allowed to take it to MoMA. We set up the system in the gallery and everything seemed to be going well as we headed towards opening night. This turn of events was indicative of the issues around presenting living biological work in institutions that have been set up to display and collect dead art that should be preserved and conserved, delaying the artwork’s deterioration as much as possible.

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As mentioned, the optimistic tune of the exhibition didn’t resonant very well with us. Things became awkward when we saw the text accompanying a work by James King, Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow, that was displayed near Victimless Leather. King’s speculative design work was looking at the future of lab-grown meat. The text made a direct reference to our 2003 lab-grown meat project: ‘Scientists at the University of Western Australia have coined the term “disembodied cuisine” to refer to a new tissue-engineering technique that makes it possible to grow edible meat from sample cells in a laboratory.’4 We had become nameless scientists who had coined a term rather than artists who had developed and performed an actualized project. This was strange. Nevertheless, we were excited to exhibit at MoMA and looked forward to seeing what would happen to our semi-living jacket during the show. We returned to Australia after the opening of the exhibition and kept on checking with the curator and gallery staff. After about five weeks, one of the semi-living jacket’s sleeves fell off, and strange little blobs appeared in the reservoir; it seemed like the mouse embryonic stem cells had grown very quickly and some had sheared off the jacket’s polymer scaffold and formed what is known as embryoid bodies. EBs are an unorganized collection of cells in different stages of differentiation into cell linages forming three-dimensional aggregates. Not long after that, the curator reported that there seemed to be a blockage in the system. After some deliberation, we realized that the only way to deal with this situation was to turn off the techno-scientific body, to switch off the life support to the cells. Rather than hide the fate of Victimless Leather, like many other curators might do, Paula Antonelli decided to go public with the story. She was quoted as saying that the jacket started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always

4 The Museum of Modern Art. 2022. Dressing the meat of tomorrow (model) [webpage]. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110244?artist_id=33097& page=1&sov_referrer=artist. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat … That thing was never alive before it was grown.5

The media had a field day, with headlines such as ‘Museum kills art exhibit’ (New York Times ) and ‘Murder in MoMA’ (Art Asia Pacific), and suddenly from an optimistic design discourse the conversation shifted to a narrative concerning the responsibility and ethical considerations that need to be exercised towards engineered life. What seemed like a design failure was actually an artistic success. Considering that Victimless Leather appeared as the starting point in the timeline of the Biofabricate meeting, the success of generating a nuanced narrative was short-lived. The positivist, solutionist interpretation of the work seems to linger. The ironic title was taken at face value and the idea of guilt-free, victimless consumption has prevailed. In 2006, two years after the first showing of Victimless Leather, we developed the third work in the technologically mediated victimless utopia series. We devised a small site-specific performative piece for an event titled Días de Bioarte at Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain. The DIY De-victimizer Kit Mark One (DVK m1) was based on anecdotal evidence we encountered on repeat visits to Spain. We noticed a strange correlation between the proliferation of American fast-food chains and the growing resistance to bullfighting in the country. It seemed like the small-scale, ritualistic but very explicit violence of bullfighting was being replaced by the massive yet hidden violence of industrial-scale beef production and consumption. The DVK m1 addressed that by attempting to reanimate cells from a bone of a bull killed in a bullfight and from an uncooked beef patty, illicitly obtained from an American fast-food chain in Barcelona. The audience was invited to choose which reanimated semiliving bovine tissue they would care for: the one killed in a bull fight or the one killed through a semi-automated industrial abattoir. Even though we continued showing Victimless Leather and The Remains of Disembodied Cuisine, we felt that DVK m1 was a nice way to bookend the technologically mediated victimless utopia series. DVK m1 was the most explicit, yet symbolic, reference to ideas about how western

5 H. Stoilas. 2008, May 1. MoMA stem cell exhibit dies five weeks into show. The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2008/05/01/moma-stem-cellexhibit-dies-five-weeks-into-show. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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technologies are getting better at hiding, rather than eliminating or even reducing, the victims of so-called guilt-free consumption. We moved on to other projects and interests. Yet the idea of growing animal products, in particular meat, without the animals, seemed to gain interest. In a 2005 paper published in the Journal of Tissue Engineering, titled ‘In vitro-cultured meat production’, the authors stated, ‘Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method’.6 Hailed as both an ethical and environmental solution, lab-grown meat has become a regular good news story that keeps popping up in the media in shorter and shorter intervals. In most cases the story is told as if for the first time, even by media outlets that have run similar stories just months before, often crediting different researchers as the ones who are about to make it a reality. In 2008 we were commissioned by BBC and Discovery Channel to re-create the lab-grown lamb meat experiment we had originally done at Harvard Medical School in 2000. The commission was for a documentary to be aired ahead of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen. It covered near-future technologies that might address and reverse global warming. We agreed to take part in this documentary as it depicted extreme technological approaches intended to solve problems created by technology. The irony of this was hard to ignore. We harvested satellite cells from a fetal lamb that was used in another experiment, seeded the cells on the same type of polymer scaffold we used in the original experiment, and grew the tissue in a microgravity bioreactor. We video-documented the process and after about three months of growing the meat, we removed it from the bioreactor, froze it and shipped it to London. We reunited with the small piece of our lab-grown meat and took it to British celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal. As he had just moved from the BBC to Channel 4, he was not allowed to cook in front of BBC cameras. This segment of the documentary features footage of him examining, visually and olfactorily, the lab-grown meat and engaging in a conversation with us about the future of meat grown outside animal bodies. 6 P.D. Edelman, D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov and J.G. Matheny. 2005. Commentary: in vitro-cultured meat production. Tissue Engineering 11(5–6). https://doi.org/10. 1089/ten.2005.11.659.

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Some years later, in February 2012, a Dutch scientist named Mark Post held a press conference in Vancouver, Canada, where he announced that he would unveil the first lab-grown hamburger. The BBC reported, ‘Prof Post said he was even planning to ask celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal to cook it.’7 We know that Post was aware of our work as he referred to it in a scientific paper he co-authored some years earlier: ‘Some efforts have already been put into culturing artificial meat. SymbioticA harvested muscle biopsies from frogs and kept these tissues alive and growing in culture dishes (Catts & Zurr, 2002).’8 This is a prime example of science imitating art. It so happened that shortly after Dr Post’s press conference we were invited to the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) in Rotterdam. They asked us to produce an evening for the festival; the brief was to engage with a topic in a format that went beyond talking heads.9 We jumped on this opportunity and decided to stage an Iron Chef -style cook-off to explore lab-grown meat, titled ArtMeatFlesh. We invited Mark Post to be one of the ‘contestants’ and to our absolute surprise and delight, he agreed. We paired him with Zack Denfeld from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy10 and got them to cook against philosopher Monika Bakke and artist John O’Shea. One of us (Oron Catts) acted as the MC for the evening. Each contestant was invited to give a five-minute position statement as well as audiovisual material they felt was relevant to their statement and the dish they planned to cook. Two cooking stations were set up on the stage and a camera crew followed the event, projecting live feed of the cooking on one screen while another screen was used for the AV material provided by the participants. The ‘secret ingredient’ (which was revealed to the contestants ahead of the event) was fetal calf serum, and the teams were asked to use it in

7 P. Ghosh. 2012, February 19. Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-16972761. Accessed 11 August 2022. 8 M.L.P. Langelaan, K.J.M. Boonen, R.B. Polak, F.P.T. Baaijens, M.J. Post and D.W.J.

van der Schaft. 2010. Meet the new meat: tissue engineered skeletal muscle. Trends in Food Science & Technology 21(2): 59–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2009.11.001. 9 V2. 2012, May 19. Evening of.. Symbiotica [webpage]. https://v2.nl/events/eve ning-of..-symbiotica. Accessed 11 August 2022. 10 The Center for Genomic Gastronomy [website]. https://genomicgastronomy.com/. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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all their dishes. Mark and Zack took a techno-utopian stance and Monika and John were more critical, questioning the tech gaze on food. Many issues and ideas were explored during that evening and the audience were invited to sample the cooking and engage in the conversation. The event proved to be a successful format to explore the complex and nuanced issues of food futures. Following the first staging at DEAF, ArtMeatFlesh was presented in Europe five more times, as a collaboration with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and a changing cast of scientists and philosophers, sometimes with professional chefs. In August 2013 Mark Post finally unveiled his lab-grown hamburger. It was a performative act, not that different from ArtMeatFlesh, on a stage, in front of a live audience of journalists and invited guests. The burger was cooked by chef Richard McGowan and tasted by food critics Hanni Ruetzler and Josh Schonwald. The mystery funder of the e250,000 burger was also revealed at this event: Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. In the promotional video accompanying the event and wearing the nowdefunct Google glasses, Brin talked about the transformative impact of lab-grown meat. The event itself lacked any scientific validation; the audience was told that breadcrumbs and beetroot juice had been added to the patty. Later on, Post acknowledged that fetal calf serum and antibiotics had been used in the process of growing the burger. After that event, other scientists and companies began to show off their lab-grown creations, always making the point that their prototype was the first: the first meatballs, the first chicken nugget, the first 3D-printed meat, the first fish fillet and so on. In most descriptions the lab-grown meat was presented as if it had been conjured at a magical place, the lab, where close to no resources were used to transform a few cells into an endless supply of meat. Many of the current claims regarding the environmental impact of labgrown meat can be traced back to a 2011 paper titled ‘Environmental impacts of cultured meat production’.11 The authors concluded: What our study found was that the environmental impacts of cultured meat could be substantially lower than those of meat produced in the conventional way … Cultured meat could potentially be produced with up

11 H.L. Tuomisto and M. Joost Teixeira de Mattos. 2011. Environmental impacts of cultured meat production. Environmental Science & Technology 45(14): 6117–6123. https://doi.org/10.1021/es200130u.

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to 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, 45% less energy, 99% lower land use, and 96% lower water use than conventional meat.12

The study, funded by New Harvest, is theoretical in nature and uses unproven and non-existing systems to calculate the environmental impact of lab-grown meat. The assumptions this paper is based on are fantastical speculations at best. One example is a statement that appears twice in the paper, that ‘As cells produce heat during growth, additional energy input in heating of the reactor is not required’,13 and therefore, the authors did not include incubation of the cells in their calculations of the environmental impact of lab-grown meat. This assumption does not correlate with the need to maintain a constant temperature of 37 °C throughout the life cycle of the cells’ growth, proliferation and maturation. Moreover, a 2019 study published in the journal Frontiers of Sustainable Food Systems found that the production of lab-grown meat could generate even greater concentrations of CO2 over time.14 In 2016 we felt compelled to respond to this unsubstantiated hype by creating the first lab-grown insect soup. Playing on the fly in a soup gag, we developed a piece that we called Stir Fly Nutrient Bug 1.0. Working with esteemed hollowware designer Robert Foster, we developed a domestic-scale stirring bioreactor to culture fruit fly (Drosophila) cells. The idea was that after a while of culturing the cells in the nutrient media (which included fetal calf serum) both cells and media would be heated up and served as a soup. We showed the work at the Science Gallery Dublin as part of the Field Test exhibition, alongside a preserved lab-grown burger made by Mark Post at the time he made the one served at his 2013 event. An important component of Stir Fly was a large bag containing 20 litres of nutrient media, drip feeding the cells and hovering as a dark cloud over the domestic bioreactor (Fig. 4.4).

12 University of Oxford. 2011, June 21. Lab-grown meat would ‘cut emissions and save energy’. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2011-06-21-lab-grown-meat-would-cut-emissi ons-and-save-energy. Accessed 11 August 2022. 13 Tuomisto and Teixeira de Mattos, Environmental impacts of cultured meat produc-

tion. 14 John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert. 2019. Climate impacts of cultured meat and beef cattle. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 3: 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fsufs.2019.00005.

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Fig. 4.4 Stir Fly, 2016, in collaboration with Robert Foster

As more startup companies have joined the so-called cellular agriculture race, it has become apparent to us that many of them have adopted the Silicon Valley ethos of ‘fake it till you make it’. As of 2018, there were no lab-grown meat products available on the market, making the whole field a type of biological vapourware – defined by the online Free Dictionary as ‘Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). The term came from Atari users

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and was later applied by Infoworld to Microsoft’s continuous lying about Microsoft Windows.’15 Our next work took a literal aim at that, and we developed, together with Devon Ward, our Vapour Meat project. The idea was to grow animal cells and design a device to deliver them as vapour to the ‘user’, whereby they can inhale the essence of that animal. The exhibited prototype featured a clear visor with a vaporizer, mounted on a mannequin head. The vaporizer was connected via a tube to a flask containing cultured mouse cells in a solution. A proximity sensor would be triggered as an audience member passed by, and a pump would draw a minute amount of the cell solution into the vaporizer to generate visible vapour under the clear visor. Much of the public discourse around lab-grown meat largely has more to do with convincing investors to fund the growing number of startup companies than having any actual products developed or delivered. Even though there are substantial scientific and technological problems facing the large-scale production of lab-grown meat, many of the companies employ more marketing and public relations personnel than scientists and technologists, and are busy fabricating seductive narratives of abundance without consequence to lure investors. The public at large is collateral in this relationship. The attention given to this burgeoning field seems to generate two conflicting outcomes: on the one hand, it highlights the very real problems of contemporary modes of meat production and their negative impact on the environment, animal welfare and human health. On the other hand, it sends a message that we can continue with business as usual, as we will soon be able to consume as much meat as we desire without any negative consequences. After encountering Victimless Leather being used as the starting point for ‘the material revolution’, we had to re-evaluate our relationship to the ideas behind our technologically mediated victimless utopia. It seemed as if our attempts to call into attention the risk of using technology as a way to obscure the real costs of human existence and out-of-control consumption had been used as part of a narrative that promoted the very thing we were concerned about. When we started the Tissue Culture & Art Project in the mid-1990s, we asked what biomedical knowledge and technology could do when it escaped this specific epistemological realm, by engaging

15 The Free Dictionary. 2022. Vaporware [webpage]. https://encyclopedia2.thefreedi ctionary.com/Vapour-ware. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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hands on and producing contestable but actualized prototypes for cultural consideration. Our recognized position as pioneers in the fields of cellular agriculture and biofabrication has allowed us entry to our actualized nightmares. We have been invited to give talks to and interact and engage with the players who have co-opted our work for their own agendas. Many of them, we realize, are full of good intentions. They genuinely believe that the ‘technologically mediated victimless utopia’ is workable and will make the world a better place, and that they will be materially rewarded by doing so. The idea of separating our food systems from ‘nature’ in the name of sustainability is a seductive one. Yet, from our own work in the lab with the very same technologies, we have seen the large amount of resources that are used and the waste produced in order to keep cells and tissues alive outside the biological bodies of which they were once part. The outsourcing of the functions of the biological body (nourishment, immune response, homeostasis, hormone production, waste disposal, etc.) to a technological surrogate, in order to grow only the desired animal product (e.g. meat, leather), is not trivial nor resource free. Growing cells, tissues and other biological materials at scale is a mammoth task. These technologies claim to promise a sustainable alternative to factory farming. However, the mind-set of the factory farm is firmly at the heart of these ‘solutions’. Some of the core issues of factory farms are to do with concentrated monoculture of one type of organism removed from its ecological context, as seen with battery hens, cattle feedlots and corn acreages. This practice leads to waste stream pollution, disease, nutrient run-off and much more. Scaled-up cellular agriculture might not be that different, with concentrated monoculture of cells and tissues rather than animals or plants. Take, for example, the case of Eat Just Inc., which in December 2020 became the first company to receive regulatory approval for the commercial sale of cell-cultured meat products. It served the first lab-grown chicken to diners at a restaurant in Singapore. The company markets these products, branded GOOD Meat, as an ethical and sustainable answer to industrial farming. The slick website for GOOD Meat presents an intriguing narrative.16 As you scroll down the page, a series of images with short statements

16 GOOD Meat [website]. https://goodmeat.co/. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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are revealed. Under the heading of ‘Human Health’ is a false-coloured electron micrograph of cells with the text ‘There is nothing natural about the meat we’re putting into our bodies’. Further down, under ‘Animal Health’ is a close-up of a cow’s head and the statement: ‘How we manufacture animals and treat them as commodities is new – and unnatural.’ This is contrasted with images in different sections of shining stainless steel fermenters and tubes, placed in a white industrial room, and text that declares: ‘This is GOOD Meat. Engineering a natural and innovative process to grow meat for the world’ (emphasis added). Another section of the GOOD Meat website is titled ‘Reimagining Tradition’, emphasizing the importance of food as both the subject and the medium of storytelling. This section concludes with a story told by GOOD Meat and includes a testimonial from one of the first diners: ‘And the best part is no animal had to be harmed.’ This story is indeed a fiction. Even Eat Just admits that the approval they got for the meat they sell in Singapore uses a process that incorporates fetal calf serum (FCS) as part of the nutrients used to grow the cells. FCS is the plasma extracted directly from the fetus’s blood which has yet to develop antibodies. Cultured animal protein thus still relies on an ingredient whose production depends on the slaughter of animals. Other problematic aspects of Eat Just’s vision relate to its unrealistic projections regarding the cost and technical feasibility of upscaling tissue culture production as well as the environmental footprint. The take-home message from the GOOD Meat website is that growing fragments of complex biological bodies with an automated, surrogate technological life support system is more natural than the current mode of industrial farming and meat production. In this way, the rhetoric around lab-grown meat makes a false distinction between the industrial, which is outdated, bad and unnatural, and the technological, which is new, good and sustainable, while maintaining the same extractive mind-set. Another example is of a paper published in 2021 by MIT engineers at the Journal of Cleaner Production. Titled ‘Tunable plant-based materials via in-vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model’, it proposes a system of growing wood in the lab rather than using trees: Current systems for plant-based biomaterial production are inefficient and place unsustainable demands on environmental resources. This work proposes a novel solution to these shortcomings based on selective

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cultivation of tunable plant tissues using scalable, land-free techniques unconstrained by seasonality, climate, or local resource availability.17

Without discussing the source of the nutrients needed to grow the wood in the lab, it goes on to suggest the following: The proposed isolated plant tissue-like generation promises several key advantages over existing practices. For example, the production of only useful plant components (e.g., wood or secondary xylem) without unwanted or unusable plant anatomy (e.g., bark, small twigs, roots, leaves ) reduces waste associated with the biomaterial production process. (Emphasis added)

Here, the technological process seems to consume no resources and the very parts of the tree that produce and deliver nutrients for the growth of the wood (roots, leaves) are considered unwanted or unusable. This goes beyond seeing roots and leaves as unwanted or unusable parts of biological bodies. In a 2021 TED talk, Isha Datar, the CEO of New Harvest, said: To me, this chicken nugget, this hamburger, this sausage – all made from cells instead of animals – aren’t just fast-food products. They’re our ticket to a new food system. Here’s how it works. Rather than raise a whole chicken with beaks, feathers, sentience, we grow the meat directly from muscle cells.18 (Emphasis added)

Sentiency itself becomes an unwanted excess that we need to get rid of for the benefit of ‘a new food system’. One of the outcomes of the industrial revolution was to transfer labour from sentient biological agents – workers, slaves and working animals – to non-sentient machines. The so-called fourth industrial revolution promises to bring sentiency to the machine through artificial intelligence and to remove sentiency

17 Ashley L. Beckwith, Jeffrey T. Borenstein and Luis F. Velásquez-García. 2021. Tunable plant-based materials via in vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model. Journal of Cleaner Production 288: 125571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020. 125571. 18 I. Datar. 2021, October 19. How we could eat real meat without harming animals. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/isha_datar_how_we_could_eat_real_meat_wit hout_harming_animals/transcript?language=en. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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from biological entities through biotechnology and synthetic biology, in the name of increasing productivity and efficiency. Such are the dreams of the new techno class: a world ruled by sentient machines while biological labour is free of sentiency. The Marxist concept of the metabolic rift comes to mind: ‘Given its endless pursuit of accumulation, capitalism imposes its demands on nature, increasing pressures on ecological systems and the production of wastes. It generates distinct metabolic rifts (ruptures) in natural cycles and processes.’19 In the case of cellular agriculture and biofabrication, the concept might be updated to cover such claims that production of biologically based goods can somehow happen with no input from nature, where late-stage capitalist technologies can create fantastical (seductive but unrealistic) goods in total separation from nature and/or natural resources. We realized that these new technological approaches might be better named metabolic rifts technologies. In early 2022 we decided to explore metabolic rifts technologies through a contestable food futures art project that involved a durational performative experiment. Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle took place at PS Art Space in Fremantle, Western Australia: In the name of sustainability, many new food production and agricultural ventures, such as vertical farming and cellular agriculture, propose systems that remove natural elements from the process of production. The ideas of soilless farming techniques or animal products without animals are presented as having less (or no) impact on the environment. We call these ‘Metabolic Rift Technologies’. These approaches call for a separation from nature following a similar mind-set that has led tech companies to promote the metaverse as a nature-free site for human habitation, obscuring the environmental (and physiological and psychological?) costs of such existence. Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle was devised to explore Metabolic Rift Technologies. The installation has four main components:

. A compost incubator (Compostcubator) where a small amount of mouse muscle cells are cultured, as a stand-in for the growing area of cellular agriculture (where animal products are grown in the lab and 19 B. Clark, J.B. Foster and S.B. Longo. 2019. Metabolic rifts and the ecological crisis. In The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, eds. M. Vidal, T. Smith, T. Rotta and P. Prew. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.38.

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Fig. 4.5 Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle, 2022, in collaboration with Steve Berrick

not in the animals themselves). A minute amount of tissue grown in the incubator will be added to the alkaline hydrolysis system (see below). . A number of hydroponic systems where we grow some edible plants using what is known as Soilless Farming Techniques. The plants will then be used as fodder for the compost that heats the Compostcubator. . An alkaline hydrolysis system that converts the lab-grown tissue and slaughterhouse refuse into fertilizer to feed the soilless plants in the hydroponic systems (Fig. 4.5). . A control room where information from the many sensors we use will be collected to generate a large amount of mostly useless data. Our technologically mediated victimless utopia artworks were always intended to be points of meditation and reflection on the ways our technologies are obscuring and fundamentally shifting our relations with the world around us. Our interest was in how technologies are changing our

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relationship with the idea of life. In hindsight we see that some of our cautionary tales became inspirations for the type of mind-set we were critiquing. The rise of metabolic rift technologies is a manifestation of Prometheanism – an environmental approach that considers Earth as a resource for human needs and wants where innovation and technology will solve environmental problems. Judging from the ways these solutionist approaches operate, their narrative rarely acknowledges the real costs of their endeavours – distancing humans ever further from the primary means of our existence and obscuring the externalities, while providing a false sense of hope that we can continue with business as usual, using the same mind-set that brought about the crisis we are in in the first place.

References Beckwith, Ashley L., Jeffrey T. Borenstein and Luis F. Velásquez-García. 2021. Tunable plant-based materials via in vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model. Journal of Cleaner Production 288: 125571. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.jclepro.2020.125571. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy [website]. https://genomicgastronomy. com/. Accessed 11 August 2022. Clark, B., J.B. Foster and S.B. Longo. 2019. Metabolic rifts and the ecological crisis. In The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, eds. M. Vidal, T. Smith, T. Rotta and P. Prew. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545. 013.38. Datar, I. 2021, October 19. How we could eat real meat without harming animals. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/isha_datar_how_we_could_eat_ real_meat_without_harming_animals?language=en. Accessed 11 August 2022. Edelman, P.D., D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov and J.G. Matheny. 2005. Commentary: in vitro-cultured meat production. Tissue Engineering 11(5–6). https://doi.org/10.1089/ten.2005.11.659. The Free Dictionary. 2022. Vaporware [webpage]. https://encyclopedia2.thefre edictionary.com/Vapour-ware. Accessed 11 August 2022. Ghosh, P. 2012, February 19. Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment16972761. Accessed 11 August 2022. GOOD Meat [website]. https://goodmeat.co/. Accessed 11 August 2022. Langelaan, M.L.P., K.J.M. Boonen, R.B. Polak, F.P.T. Baaijens, M.J. Post and D.W.J. van der Schaft. 2010. Meet the new meat: tissue engineered skeletal muscle. Trends in Food Science & Technology 21(2): 59–66. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.tifs.2009.11.001.

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Lynch, J. and R. Pierrehumbert. 2019. Climate impacts of cultured meat and beef cattle. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 3: 5. https://doi.org/10. 3389/fsufs.2019.00005. The Museum of Modern Art. 2022. Dressing the meat of tomorrow (model) [webpage]. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110244?art ist_id=33097&page=1&sov_referrer=artist. Accessed 11 August 2022. New Harvest [website]. https://new-harvest.org/. Accessed 11 August 2022. Newlab. 2018, December 13. Biofabricate 2018 [webpage]. https://newlab. com/event/biofabricate-2018/. Accessed 11 August 2022. Stoilas, H. 2008, May 1. MoMA stem cell exhibit dies five weeks into show. The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2008/05/ 01/moma-stem-cell-exhibit-dies-five-weeks-into-show. Accessed 11 August 2022. Tuomisto, H.L. and M. Joost Teixeira de Mattos. 2011. Environmental impacts of cultured meat production. Environmental Science & Technology 45(14): 6117–6123. https://doi.org/10.1021/es200130u. University of Oxford. 2011, June 21. Lab-grown meat would ‘cut emissions and save energy’. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2011-06-21-lab-grown-meatwould-cut-emissions-and-save-energy. Accessed 11 August 2022. V2. 2012, May 19. Evening of.. Symbiotica [webpage]. https://v2.nl/events/ evening-of..-symbiotica. Accessed 11 August 2022.

CHAPTER 5

Taxonomies, Categorizations and Queer Life

‘Nature’, like ‘life’, is an odd word. In the English language, bewilderingly, we use a word – life – to describe diverse phenomena that are either biological, conceptual or metaphysical (as a comparison, for example, to describe the simple phenomenon of the body’s excrement and its associated cultural interpolations, we have many nuanced words to choose from such as faeces, dung, manure, shit and so on). While the term ‘life’ reflects our poverty of language (as well as, ‘naturally’, our anthropocentric tendencies), the term ‘nature’ primarily functions as a human construction to reveal human exceptionalism. The word ‘nature’ is put as a dialectic to what is human or human made or constructed. Nature in a sense is pre-human or God given. Donna Haraway employs the word ‘natureculture’ in an attempt to question this Judeo-Christian inspired separation of the human from their environment.1 Timothy Morton goes further and writes that nature ‘is normative, which is a philosophical term for something that establishes differences between the normal and the abnormal, often with ethical overtones’.2

1 Donna J. Haraway. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2 Timothy Morton. 2016. Frankenstein and ecocriticism. In The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. Andrew Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 146.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_5

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Back in 2017, during the Synthetic Biology Conference (SB7.0), we suggested considering the omission of the word ‘nature’ from human (English) language. This provocation received fierce opposition from very different (and usually opposing) groups in the meeting: the technologyoriented SynBio scientists as well as the more reactionary conservationists. One might ask why humans are still attached to this word. Is it the fear of, or hope for, a classification, for want of a better word, without us? As Thacker muses, But if the existence of disasters, pandemics, and nonhuman networks tells us anything, it is that there is another world in addition to the world that is there ‘for us’. This is not simply a world in itself, and neither a world that is destined for us – rather it is a world that presents us with the very limits of our ability to comprehend it in terms that are neither simply that of the ‘in itself’ or the ‘for us’. It is a world ‘without us’ …3

This chapter explores our artistic projects concerned with life forms that are, adopting Morton’s words, ‘un-normative’ and seem to defy humanconstructed taxonomies and perceptions about self, gender, identity and individuality as well as liveness, artificiality and technology. These queer lives are tangible examples of the complexities and past and current ‘assaults’ on our cultural understandings of life. Placing these in an artistic framework allows for further imaginative fabulation which are molecular and cosmic and everything in between: the aesthetics of the messy, wet and amorphous, the aesthetic that puts into question what some may say is ‘natural’. Cells in culture can be categorized in two ways: the first is primary cells, which are taken directly from an organism. These normal somatic differentiated cells have a limited amount of divisions. In tissue culture, a population will divide between forty and sixty times before the cells will break down and die (apoptosis). Named after the person who discovered this phenomenon in 1961, this is called the Hayflick limit and sheds some light on the mechanisms behind cellular ageing. The second categorization is cell lines: cells which have lost the Hayflick limit and, when provided with the appropriate conditions, can keep on dividing forever. These immortalized cell lines can be created via naturally occurring or human-induced mutation. 3 Eugene Thacker. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. xv.

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The story of the first human cell line, the HeLa cell line, has received a lot of attention in recent years. On the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) website, HeLa cells are presented as a product with this description: Organism: Homo sapiens, human Cell type: epithelial cell Tissue: Uterus; Cervix Disease: Adenocarcinoma Product format: Frozen4 Yet these cells have a much more complex story to tell. These cervical cancer cells were taken from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks in 1951. Lacks was treated at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and the tissue taken from her cervix was used in science without her (or her family’s) knowledge or consent. Her aggressive tumour cells survived and reproduced, becoming the first successful human immortal cell line. These cells became the workhorse of biological research – from biomedicine to space research and most recently they have been used in research for vaccines against COVID-19. The story of the HeLa cell line reflects the biopolitics of race, class and gender that are embedded in the biomedical and health system, which are heightened especially when matters of profit are factored in. Situated knowledge requests us not to forget where and how these cells came about and the wrong that was done. These cells taken from Lack’s body continued (and will continue) to narrate fascinating stories about life, culture, race, species and much more. One of the more interesting interpretations, and definitely the most post-anthropocentric perspective of the HeLa cell line’s existence, comes from scientist, Leigh Van Valen and Virginia C. Maiorana, who suggested controversially to their peers that the HeLa cell line was an embodiment of a new taxonomical branch (a semi-living one). Due to its ability to replicate indefinitely, and its nonhuman chromosome number, Van Valen described HeLa as an example of the contemporary creation of a new species, Helacyton gartleri, named after Stanley M. Gartler, whom Van 4 American Type Culture Collection. 2022. HeLa CCL-2™. https://www.atcc.org/pro ducts/ccl-2. Accessed 22 July 2022.

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Valen credits with discovering ‘the remarkable success of this species’. His argument for speciation depends on three points: (1) the chromosomal incompatibility of HeLa cells with humans, which makes them nonhuman; (2) their ecological niche, which may be technologically dependent (but we can assert that many species, including humans to a large extent, are by now technologically dependent); and (3) their ability to persist and expand well beyond the intentions and imaginations of human cultivators.5 HeLa cell lines are considered by the scientific community as weeds, as they grow quickly and contaminate other niches (the sweet revenge of Henrietta Lacks?). HeLa cell lines have become a different species that does not adhere to our taxonomical system; they can be seen as a precursor of a new order, almost as the new liminal semi-living taxa. In our piece (for art is like a living organism)… Better Dead Than Dying (2014), HeLa cells are grown over a polymer structure shaped after Henrietta Lack’s silhouette from one of her best-known photographs – embodying her shadow. This semi-living shadow was placed in a specially designed closed artificial environment – a custom-made bioreactor – that initially acted to support the growth of the cells over the polymer structure. As the artwork progressed, the cells consumed their nutrients and produced waste which eventually transformed their environment into a death chamber. At an undetermined point in time during the exhibition, the semi-living shadow was living no longer. This piece presents the ‘unnatural’ liminal being not only in terms of its existence as a hybrid that does not fit easily within human taxa and it’s so-called natural environment (as opposed to the artificial laboratory environment), but also in terms of its place between life and death. If there is something that both humans and cultural institutions cannot stomach, it is ‘dying’. It may be that Samuel Butler’s provocative suggestion in 1872 needs a rethink: I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot

5 Leigh M. Van Valen and Virginia C. Maiorana. 1991. HeLa, a new microbial species. University of Chicago. https://www.mn.uio.no/cees/english/services/van-valen/evolut ionary-theory/volume-10/vol-10-no-2-pages-71-74-l-van-valen-and-v-c-mairorana-hela-anew-microbial-species.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2022.

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be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism – better dead than dying.6

Parts of Henrietta Lacks (the cells which eventually led to her premature death) are still growing and filling laboratories around the world. The HeLa cells’ biomass (or biomess?) much exceeds that of Lacks while she was alive. How much of these cells are part of Lacks, if at all? The question whether to be dead is better than to be dying is not confined to the ‘perfection’ of an art piece. Facing mass extinctions, humans are looking at different conservation approaches to resurrect the dead or dying (endangered species). Relevant for this chapter is the deextinction movement, which not only suggests resurrecting the dead and dying, but also further attempts to naturalize the human taxonomical construction of a species. De-extinction, also called resurrection biology or species revivalism, is the promise of revival of species that have gone extinct, using DNA. The DNA or genes are implanted in an ova or womb of a living animal from a ‘relative’ species. The animal carrying the organism which has fragments of genes from the extinct animal lives, breathes, eats and exists in a completely different atmosphere to that of the extinct animal with different flora and fauna. Complex organisms are holobiont systems of interplay of genetic material among different species (to illustrate, it is estimated the human body consists of only 1% of human genes and 99% of genes shared with nonhuman animals). Whether this process is a resurrection of an original species, rather than the creation of a new hybrid, is to be examined. When does a species diverge? Is it a question of DNA, genes, morphology, ability to procreate, adaptability to an environment, microbiome, similarities in behaviours and so on? Our cultural aversion to ‘dying’ is also reflected through our society’s transhumanist aspirations of eternal youth and immortality. This human lust is reflected in our cultural institutions, where humans’ artefacts and artworks are frozen in space and time, devoid of their original context. Museums and galleries are places of decontextualization from the living environment. As the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material states, ‘Conservators aim to minimise change to collection material, to protect items from the adverse effects of climate and chemical deterioration, and to safeguard our heritage not only for here and now

6 Samuel Butler. 1872. Erewhon. London: Trübner & Co.

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but for generations to come.’7 In short, museums are set up to keep dead things as dead as possible for as long as possible.

NoArk, 2007 The concept of species, similarly to the word nature, has strong roots in biblical thinking and its constructed narrative, which add to the persisting rift between humans as a species and the rest of ecology. In most depictions of Noah’s Ark, an anthropocentric scene of a taxonomy is presented with distinct species consisting of a male and a female walking side by side towards the entrance of Noah’s vessel, completely omitting the vast majority of organisms which do not fit into this human-heterogeneric formula: bacteria, fungi, some reptiles, to name only a few. The concept of species is put under strain again through development and applications in the life sciences. NoArk explored the taxonomical crisis that is presented by life forms created through biotechnology. It references the biblical and anthropocentric roots of human taxonomy, which still linger today. NoArk took the form of an experimental vessel designed to maintain and grow a mass of living cells and tissues that originated from a number of different organisms. This vessel served as a surrogate body to the collection of living fragments and was a tangible as well as symbolic ‘craft’ for observing and understanding a biology that combines the familiar with the other. Alongside the vessel we positioned specimens preserved in the traditional Eurocentric colonial way, either as taxidermy or immersed in preservation liquid such as formaldehyde. We wanted to present an evolving Noah’s Ark with a new cabinet of curiosities – the ones created in life sciences laboratories, its populations collected and classified in frozen libraries and collections all around the world – the population of a global technological niche on this earth. As opposed to classical methodologies of collection, categorization and display that are seen in natural history museums, contemporary biological research is focused on manipulation and hybridization, and rarely takes a public form. While the scientifically chaotic but meticulous use of aesthetics in cabinets of curiosity preceded the natural history museum’s refined taxonomy, so we hoped that NoArk would be a symbolic 7 Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material. Conservation [webpage]. https://aiccm.org.au/conservation/. Accessed 25 July 2022.

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Fig. 5.1 OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia

precursor to a new way of approaching the construction of ‘nature’ (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).

Neolife Neolife, life out of context, is the fetishization of technological approaches to life, to the end that it may overshadow the context in which life operates (we refer to such approaches as ‘neolifism’). Life becomes a

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Fig. 5.2 OddNeolifism, 2010, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia

commodity of its technological surrogates, to the point that, as shown in Chapter 3, the technological apparatus is cared for and nourished (usually through a feminized labour) whether biological life is there or not. In the eighteenth century, cabinets of curiosities (Wunderkammer) presented oddities found (mainly in the colonies) that were perceived to be examples of ‘where God got things wrong’. In 1735 Carl Linnaeus undertook the task of looking systematically at ideas about life and how life could be categorized/classified, with the underlying aim to understand God’s handiwork better. Linnaeus used the metaphor of the biblical ark and ordered life forms according to their specific sexual compatibility (oblivious to the possibility of nonsexual reproduction in the living world). This systematic view of life led Darwin to publish The Origin of Species in 1859, showing a diagrammatic tree of life and how species

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originated. Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection altered understandings of life to such an extent that soon after, H.G. Wells wrote: ‘We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, as something that may be shaped and altered.’8 It is well established that Darwin was influenced by Adam Smith’s economic theory, which argues in general terms that individuals’ competitive self-interests will lead to the common good. Darwin in the fifth edition of the book used the term ‘survival of the fittest’ to refer to the ability of the organism/species that best adapts to its environment and reproduces. Darwin adopted this phrase from the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who initiated a philosophy called ‘social Darwinism’. As a result, the theory of evolution was interpreted according to the social ideology of the time, to the point that the idea of what is ‘nature’ or what is, in Morton’s words, ‘normative’, was based on competition between individuals over resources. Economic principles (and other social aspects of human society) should, therefore, follow this ‘natural rule’ for best performance. Ironically, here, humans and their societies are nature. This invisible hand moved by so-called nature became, in more contemporary times, ‘the market’ – capitalism as a free market system. Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The Great Transformation discusses how the concept of the market was never a natural thing, nor did it emerge naturally.9 Yet once it was artificially constructed, it began to work as a self-regulated automaton separated from social and political life: ‘Market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices.’10 And, as described earlier in the book, this automaton – the market – is ‘fed’ by and cared for and maintained by living organisms and other natural resources through feminized labour. This is to the point that humans and the environment serve and perform for the automated system.

8 H.G. Wells. 1975. The limits of individual plasticity. In H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, eds. R.M. Philmus and D.Y. Hughes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 36. 9 Karl Polanyi. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 154. 10 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 45.

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Polanyi was one of the first to introduce the danger of commodifying humans and ecology, saying that ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment … would result in the demolition of society.’11 For the alleged commodity, ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power, the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of ‘man’ attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed12

Today, there are more and more calls from diverse fields to, if not rethink, at least expand the theory of evolution beyond the gene-centric view and away from what we refer to as DNA chauvinism: Now mainstream evolutionary theory has come to focus almost exclusively on genetic inheritance and processes that change gene frequencies. Yet new data pouring out of adjacent fields are starting to undermine this narrow stance … We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems.13

The authors give examples such as developmental bias, plasticity, niche construction and epigenetics to challenge the idea of evolution based solely on DNA inheritance.14 The piece Odd Neolifism (2010) was commissioned by the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia, for the exhibition twenty-first century: 11 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 76. 12 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 76. 13 Kevin Laland, Tobias Uller, Marc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller et al.

2014. Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature 514: 161–164, pp. 161–162. 14 Laland et al., Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?, pp. 161–162.

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Art in the First Decade. It was an updated cabinet of curiosities, in which the ‘exotic’ was not found in the colonies or through unintentional (natural) mutation, but in human laboratories, intentionally made. On one side of the work we placed a taxidermied two-headed bird, recalling the fascination with oddities and their significance in the seventeenth century. At the far end of the display was an automated system – a Wave bioreactor consisting of a soft bag filled with nutrient media, antibiotics and living hybridoma cells, slowly rocking from side to side on a heated metal plate. Tubes were connected to the cell bag which supplied nutrients and an appropriate gas mix for growth of life. Hybridomas are hybrid cells produced by the fusion of two or three cells from different organisms, mainly for the production of antibodies for research and therapeutic ends. The hybridomas were ordered and mailed to our lab from a tissue bank (in this case the ATCC). In the tissue banks that provide scientists and artists like ourselves with cell lines, one can find all sorts of oddities: the hybridomas we used, for example, are cells with human and mouse origins. These cells are classified only by catalogue numbers or very peculiar names narrating the emerging stories and mythologies of the neolife category in our evolving novel ecologies. Our fascination with the natural history museums’ articulations of life through their collections and displays means that in our travels we often visit the local one. Nothing prepared us for the experience of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Nantes, which we visited during the installation of Disembodied Cuisine back in 2003. Typical of natural history displays, the Nantes museum had a large room with a display along all its four walls showing the ‘progression’ in evolution from early life to the ‘pinnacle’ – the human species. All specimens were as dead as they could be; preserved or taxidermied animals’ skins were all kept behind a large glass panel. While all organisms from the early prokaryotes to the ape followed natural history conventions, the last section about the human was startling, and evidence of France’s colonialist past. How do we present the dead (sacred) animal, the human? In this specific case, alongside early humans’ cultural relics and tools, the display featured the skin of an anonymous soldier and the shrunken head of a Maori person. In different museums (mainly medical museums) but also, for example, in the human body exhibit at the Melbourne Museum in Australia, dead and preserved body parts are put on display (with the appropriate warning signage). However, these are not identified, whether personally or culturally; these are body organs rather than humans.

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Museums have conventions in displaying preserved life forms following the so-called tree of life, while in an Odd Neolifism display, ideas about a progressive complexity of species are questioned and put into disarray, creating both a fascinating and horrifying biomess made via human intentions but not completely under human control. The crumbling of the concept of nature is disseminating into all our institutions, whether they are biological laboratories or cultural institutions. For example, in the context of cultural displays, there is an interesting shift in the relationship between, and fusion of, natural histories and cultural history narratives. As a result of the shift in biology from a scientific research to an engineering pursuit, life and living systems are becoming raw materials for human ends, and as such cross over from a natural context to technological and cultural objects. Take the case of Dolly, the first cloned mammal from an adult animal. Dolly, not many people are aware, is named after the country singer Dolly Parton, not because of Parton’s artistic talents and achievements, but rather because Dolly’s DNA came from a mammary gland cell.15 This is another infamous example of misogyny and gendered culture in scientific laboratories. But back to the point, on the outside Dolly looks like any other sheep, yet she has become the poster girl for human technological advancement. If her taxidermied body will be displayed in the Natural History Museum, she will look no different to any other once-living specimen. Instead, a stuffed Dolly has been put in the cultural section of the museum. ‘Scottish’ Dolly in the National Museum of Scotland stands on a revolving circular stage looking straight at the viewer, with some scattered hay under her legs. The stuffed animal does not represent its species, but is rather a unique, historical, techno-scientific wonder. It is not positioned in the natural history wing of the museum; rather, it stands near steam engines and a selection of computers in the science and technology (or ‘innovation’) section. Dolly the sheep, the mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, is put on a circular rotating ‘petri dish’ surrounded by other technological kinds. An interactive digital display nearby asks: ‘Why is Dolly important?’ and answers:

15 University of Edinburgh. The life of Dolly [webpage]. https://dolly.roslin.ed.ac.uk/ facts/the-life-of-dolly/index.html. Accessed 11 August 2022.

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Dolly was important because she captured the public imagination. The idea that there might be an exact copy of oneself somewhere in the world is a theme that has been often pursued in science fiction and the prospect that it might be possible to clone a human being has excited a lot of speculation and interest. Likewise, plans to clone extinct species such as mammoths have attracted a lot of publicity, but at present such ideas must remain, like Jurassic Park, firmly in the realm of fiction.16

How does a museum display Dolly’s techno-scientific hype and wonder if she looks just like any other sheep? Is it merely by moving her from the context of the living world to the realm of human-constructed machines? Is it by fetishizing the technological approach to life rather than emphasizing Dolly as simply a sheep with her own agency and umwelt ?17 This is a prime example of what we call neolife. The Wellcome Trust collection has gone one step further in terms of reducing Dolly from a whole sentient animal to a fetishistic artefact – no, it is not a vial of Dolly’s DNA … but her ‘real’ faeces, preserved and on display. Even further abstracted, merely the image of the droppings can be purchased from Alamy, for an appropriate price. While Dolly’s exhibit follows the contestable ethos of the museum as a ‘safe place for unsafe ideas’18 by positioning a ‘normal’ looking sheep among the machines, there are isolated, anecdotal examples of more contestable displays of neolife. One of these can be found at the Paul Stradins Museum of the History of Medicine at Riga in Latvia. This is a taxidermy of a ‘two-headed dog’ – more accurately, a dog’s head transplanted onto the neck of another dog. The display is a relic from the experiments in transplantation of the Russian scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov. Demikhov started these experiments in 1954 as part of a continuing series of experiments in surgical techniques, his ultimate goal being to learn how to perform a human heart and lung transplant (which was successfully performed by Dr Christiaan Barnard in 1967). On the 16 National Museums Scotland. Dolly the sheep [webpage]. https://www.nms.ac. uk/explore-our-collections/stories/natural-sciences/dolly-the-sheep/. Accessed 11 August 2022. 17 Umwelt, from the German, meaning ‘environment’ or ‘surroundings’, first used by Jakob von Uexküll. 1909. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. 18 F. Cameron. 2008. Safe places for unsafe ideas? History and science museums, hot topics and moral predicaments. In Social History in Museums, ed. M. Terwey. London: Social History Curators Group, pp. 5–16.

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label next to the artefact in the museum, it is written that, ‘The exhibit at the museum was produced in 1966 especially for the Paul Stradins Museum of the History of Medicine. The dogs lived for four days after the operation.’ The procedure of transplanting a puppy’s head on another dog was done with the sole intent of creating a museum object. Following a correspondence with the curator of the museum, we obtained a photocopy of two documents from the Archives of Pauls Stradins Museum. The documents written in Russian say ‘Acceptance certificate’ issued on 07.07.1966 regarding the acceptance of the taxidermied dog(s) made by Demikhov in the Sklifosovsky institute. It certifies the dog(s) a suitable exhibit for the museum and is signed by the taxidermist (Danilov), by Demikhov himself and by museum workers. The other document (in Latvian) mentions that the dog(s) were received for free, they were sent to Riga by train and the museum had to pay the taxidermist for his work (135.30 rubles, which, as we were told by the curator, was equivalent to a one-month salary of a worker or a lab assistant). In the following excerpt from the correspondence, when we asked whether the dog(s) specimen was created purposely for a museum display, the curator responded: As I learned – it is actually unknown, there are no documents preserved that the museum commissioned the creation of the dogs. It’s folklore. I gathered the information from the 3 older colleagues, if they remember anything. Two of them think that the dogs were created, because museum wanted to have them for the exhibition purposes. But one of the colleagues is very convinced that this was not so – he told me that former museum director Karlis Arons (back then he wasn’t director yet) went to Sklifosovsky and saw the dogs that were already created for experimental purposes. He was a dog lover and [was] in horror because of the experiment. According to my colleague – Arons told him that the small dog was chewing the ear of the larger one (and one ear of the large dog is actually damaged). And then Arons talked with Demikhov and the dog must be given to a taxidermist and then sent to Riga. The other two are very skeptical about this story – they have never heard that before, despite one of them was in a close relationship with Arons.

In other words, the new cabinet of curiosities has expanded from found objects to assembled ones. While the former are presented as examples of when things go wrong, the latter are presented as humans’ innovations – when humans make nature better.

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Another, more recent example, is the creation of an ear-mouse assembled and grown by Chinese plastic surgeon and scientist Yilin Cao, specifically for the opening of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. According to the curator, the mouse was alive and present for the opening and was then preserved by plastination for permanent display. Professor Cao was part of the original team that created the first ear-mouse to be presented to the public during a 1995 episode of the popular BBC science television show, Tomorrow’s World, dedicated to new breakthroughs in tissue engineering (as discussed in Chapter 1). In this TV documentary, the presenter pauses to address the viewer, warning us that: ‘You might find this next piece of film a bit disturbing, but we think it is such a significant medical advance that you really ought to see it.’ With this caveat, the BBC unveiled footage of the ear-mouse: a hairless mouse with a human-shaped ear growing from its back, alive and displayed within a glass petri dish. The public and media response to this image was overwhelming, with the mouse and the scientists behind it receiving overnight notoriety. This led to one of the scientists, Charles Vacanti – the same one who decided to present the ear-mouse to the BBC against the advice of his colleagues – to cut the ear off the back of that mouse and cast it in a clear resin block as a museum-ready object. He then approached the Smithsonian Museum and offered to sell it to them, but they refused. The infamous ear is still sitting on his office shelf waiting for a museum to purchase it.19 The story does not end there; the scientist then registered the copyright to the image of a mouse with a human ear and its extended artistic representation in the mediums of sculpture, drawing and photography.20 Does this position techno-scientists as the new avant-garde? In the spirit of the artist Duchamp, are these the new Readymades? The institutional critique is getting a new form of life. The practice of science since the late nineteenth century has shifted from observation of the living world to its manipulation through engineering (following Jacques Loeb’s view of science as engineering

19 Based on recorded interviews and email exchange between Oron Catts and Prof. Charles Vacanti from 2014. 20 Available at United States Copyright Office. http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwe brecon.cgi. (Search for ‘mouse with human ear’.)

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pursuit).21 Museums seem to be following these trends by moving and showing biological specimens in the context of science and engineering sections of their displays – following the ethos of progress, innovation and public imagination. Aesthetic decisions are employed to make these living animals into artefacts that seem to represent human mastery over ‘nature’. The museum’s relationship to a colonialist agenda has shifted but not ceased; ‘mother nature’ and her nonhuman inhabitants are being colonized, manipulated and put on display. While natural history museums are sometimes viewed as ‘dead zoos’, they at least have some experience with working with biological specimens and even have a type of pest uniquely suited to this environment – the Museum beetle, Anthrenus museorum.22 The art museum, however, can be seen as the ultimate necropolis (as art is better dead than dying). The notion that the art object is eternal, never changing and commodified is still rooted within the art museum ethos. Biological artworks embody the complete opposite. In this light, the reluctance of art museums to present biological artwork is hardly surprising. Yet in recent years a growing number of art institutes have opened up to presenting such art, starting with festivals such as Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, then art and technology institutes such as ZKM in Germany, contemporary art galleries and finally more traditional art museums. This shift also corresponds to the emerging potential of biological technologies to be exploited, and the increased visibility of these new technological promises in the public sphere. Both artists and art institutes are engaged in a paradoxical dance of critique and celebration of the newfound powers over life, driven by and responding largely to the neoliberal innovation paradigm. Biological art artefacts are used to present manipulated life forms as signs of both hope and anxiety. Biological arts have moved manipulated life from the realm of the biological laboratory into the art gallery, liberating these life forms and 21 Jacques Loeb to Ernst Mach, 28 December 1899. Quoted in Scott F. Gilbert. 2000. Developmental Biology. New York: University Press, pp. 93–117. For more, see Philip J. Pauly. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb & the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press; or O. Catts and I. Zurr. 2014. Countering the engineering mindset: the conflict of art and synthetic biology. In Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature, eds. A.D. Ginsberg, J. Calvert, P. Schyfter, A. Elfick and D. Endy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27–38. 22 William H. Robinson. 2005. Urban Insects and Arachnids: A Handbook of Urban Entomology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–97.

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the know-how associated with their creation and modification from the biomedical realm into a much broader cultural context, in so doing opening up other spaces for engineered life. Not surprisingly, in the context of the neoliberal innovation paradigm, engineered life today seems like a great resource to be exploited as part of the world of consumer products – not always in accord with, and sometimes against, the artists’ intentions.

Biomess, 2018 The shift of life towards a commodity (using in some cases our own critical artworks, as this book illustrates) prompted us to stage the exhibition Biomess in 2018. Biomess celebrated and challenged the strangeness of life by using luxury retail aesthetics to make non-charismatic, queer life forms (modified or found) into objects of desire. It examined the attitudes, implications and procedural aspects of presenting critical and reflexive biological art in a hybrid of different cultural settings and their values. First shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Biomess was a collaboration with the Western Australian Museum and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The exhibition also featured a contribution from a design manufacturer for luxury retail shops. The intention was to aesthetically, conceptually and practically cross, fuse and contrast different institutional and curatorial conventions: the art gallery, the natural history museum and a high-end retail shop. The exhibition combined living organisms, natural history specimens and lab-grown semi-livings, arranged in a ‘bio-Gucci’ style environment. Within the installation, two rooms mirrored each other. One presented organisms that evolve and adapt to our shared environment, devoid of purpose and intentionality.23 The other room exhibited organisms designed by humans – hybridomas – products of intentional manipulation: organisms who are dependent on human technology for their survival. The hybridomas were placed in a custom-designed bioreactor within a deconstructed and decommissioned laboratory incubator: a ‘technical object’ torn apart to reveal the unstable, messy life. Both living and semi-living entities are mysterious and not under full human control and comprehension. The design of the installation, however, brought into question 23 See Stephen J. Gould. 1980. The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

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human forays into a new era of exploration and exploitation of biological life as a new commodity to satisfy human consumption desires (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4). From early-twentieth-century calls by Jacques Loeb to make biology into an engineering pursuit to contemporary synthetic biology and biofabrication, constructed and engineered forms of life continually escape science labs to become a medium for artistic expression and consumer products. Biomess celebrated the messiness, subversiveness and rule-defying nature of life in human institutions: the natural history and/or science museum (the Enlightenment cathedral), the art gallery and the high-end retail store (the cathedral of the neoliberal). In the research towards Biomess we spent time with the WA Museum’s curators to locate and discuss the ‘strangest’ of organisms in their collection. The curators had no problem identifying their favourite examples of such organisms and the associated stories and biological and cultural questions they raised. For us (and hopefully for the curators) this was an enjoyable time of discovering the richness and diversity of life on

Fig. 5.3 Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia

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Fig. 5.4 Biomess, 2018, Art Gallery of Western Australia

earth. Here, we indulge in some of our own favourites and constructively challenging examples, which question the hubristic notion of the human organism as the most innovative one.

Sea Star Comets Sea stars question human notions of identity being confined to a body; they can intentionally lose parts of their bodies (this is achieved by the quick softening of the arm’s tissue in response to nerve signals). Sea stars are then able to grow a new limb. Furthermore, a few species can also regenerate an entirely new sea star from an arm on the condition that a portion of the central disc remains attached to the limb. The species that belong to the genus Linckia are able to regrow a completely new disc and an entire sea star from a single arm; several small arms regrow on the

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isolated limb, giving the regenerating sea stars an appearance of a shooting star or comet. In some species the body divides to produce two sea stars, the two halves pulling away from each other. These two parts will then regenerate the portions of their bodies that are missing.24 In addition, the sea star Luidia sarsii larva is quite unique in that a juvenile sea star develops inside it. During metamorphosis it migrates to the outside and detaches from the swimming larval bipinnaria stage. The larva continues to live separately for several months, which means that two very different ‘individual’ animals that originated from the same egg exist simultaneously.25 This led Donald I. Williamson, a planktologist and carcinologist, to speculate that it might be a result of hybridization of two different organisms.26

Sponges Porifera (the scientific name for sponges) are literally ‘bodies without organs’. They are the most ancient group of multicellular animals living on Earth. The structure of adult sponges is quite simple. They lack internal organs, digestive tracts, and nervous and muscular systems. High tissue plasticity is a defining characteristic that enables the sponge to reconstruct its body and provides adaptation to the changing environment. Sponges are interesting as this plasticity allows them to reaggregate after their tissues have been disassociated. As an example, researchers forced a sponge through a fine sieve and the sponge fragments came back together to rebuild its body.27 Sponges are sessile animals; they live permanently affixed at the base and do not move around as adults. As a result, they are unable to move to escape predators, but discourage attack with strong chemicals and an exterior of spiky textures. 24 Western Australian Museum. 2013. Echinodermata (echinoderms) [webpage]. http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/collections/aquatic-zoology/marine-invertebrates-sec tion/echinodermata-echinoderms. Accessed 13 June 2018. 25 Donald I. Williamson. 2006. Hybridization in the evolution of animal form and life-cycle. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 148(4): 585–602. https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1096-3642.2006.00236.x. 26 Donald I. Williamson. 2003. The Origins of Larvae. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 27 Lomonosov Moscow State University. 2016, March 1. Researchers study the reaggregation of artificially separated marine sponge cells. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/ 2016-03-reaggregation-artificially-marine-sponge-cells.html. Accessed 13 June 2018.

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Hard Corals Hard corals defy the human perception of individual bodies. They are holobionts, a ‘compound of recognizable bionts’ (the host plus all its microbial symbionts, including transient and stable members), a term originally defined in 1991 by Lynn Margulis in the book Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation.28 Hard corals are both animal and plant functioning in symbiosis. They feed by extending tentacles out of their hard covering to capture food. Many hard corals contain microscopic algae (zooxanthellae) which, through photosynthesis, provide the corals with nutrients. In turn, the corals provide the algae with a suitable habitat to live. Corals also have male and female sex organs … just like the humble, non-charismatic snail.

Leopard Slugs When they mate, Leopard Slugs become tangled and lower themselves from their branch on a thread of mucus to exchange sperm. Humans are also holobionts; we are an ecology of human cells, bacterial cells and fungi cells (a microbiome), living together to make what we consider as human or even as ‘I’. I, or me, is actually ‘us’ (and the Others?).

Seahorse The Western Australian Seahorse, Hippocampus subelongatus, can be brown, white, red, orange or purple and can change colour. They can grow up to 25 centimetres in length. Seahorses break some of our anthropocentric, constructed gender roles; females deposit eggs into a pouch on the male’s tail. The female has nothing more to do with the development of the young. Males fertilize them and carry the developing eggs inside a fully enclosed pouch. It is essentially a male pregnancy because the pouch has a pseudo-placenta whereby gases and wastes are exchanged between father and young. After a few weeks, the male goes through a hard labour (initiated by a flush of hormones) and gives birth to hundreds of tiny fully developed seahorse babies. No further parental care is needed. Seahorses are monogamous. 28 L. Margulis and R. Fester (eds.). 1991. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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West Australian Jewel Beetle In the 1980s Australian male jewel beetles (Julidomorpha bakewelli) were often encountered trying to mate with beer bottles. In an unfortunate coincidence, local bottle manufacturers produced ‘stubby’ bottles that mimicked the colour and texture of a female beetle. This formed the basis of an ‘evolutionary trap’, where males couldn’t help but respond to what they thought were the sexual cues of a fertile female.

Ruffs Part of this bird’s scientific name, Calidris pugnax, already gives away something about its behaviour. The Latin pugnax means ‘combative’ and that is what the males perform as part of their mating rituals. Males and females gather in mating arenas for a mating ritual. The males display their large, colourful collar of feathers (a ruff) during battles with other males in the arena. Females observe the fighting and at some point will select a male of their choosing to mate with. This appears to be a very simple system of ‘may the best man win’. Yet among the females are a few males without a collar who are virtually indistinguishable from the females. As soon as a female is ready to mate with one of the victors, the collarless male ruff will try to grab the opportunity to mate before the victor can. The natural history specimens featured in one room. The other room exhibited organisms designed by humans – cells from two different organisms fused together, through human chemical intervention, to create hybridomas. About cell fusion, Lewis Thomas said: ‘it is the most unbiologic of all phenomena, violating the most fundamental myths of the last century, for it denies the importance of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things.’29 In other words, these living, multiplying cells are an affront to commonly held beliefs about living things as well as systems of classification, existing across species, time and ideas of self. In addition, by being viewed as immortal they confront ideas about age and death.

29 Quoted in H. Harris. 1985. Roots: cell fusion. BioEssays 2(4): 176–179. https:// doi.org/10.1002/bies.950020409.

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Crossing Kingdoms, 2018 In 2018, supported by funding from our university, we decided to attempt fusing cells from different kingdoms – mammal and yeast. Crossing Kingdoms began with a dragon. Several of us (a team of scientists and social scientists and artists) attended the SB7.0 conference in Singapore in 2017, at which Alina Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, introduced human artificial chromosomes (HACs) for large DNA delivery via yeast cells, suggesting that she was ultimately interested in making dragons. Dragons, the mythic chimeric species, but also the word used for high-value startups (which is an even bigger behemoth than the unicorn …) intrigued us. Are our society’s de-extinction endeavours now extending to resurrecting imaginary mythological species? Cross-kingdom fusion raises ontological, ethical and poetic questions: How do multi-kingdom cell fusions challenge our categories and understandings of life? Where do they belong within both biological and cultural realms? How does their existence impact the environment and society? We were attempting to engineer these fusion hybrids and observe their formation as they became a new cell type. Our humble attempts included engineering fusion between Saccharomyces Cerevisiae (yeast) and human embryonic kidney cells (HEK293 cells). Rather than using chemical methods for fusion, we purposely employed synthetic biology methods. The method is explained in the paper we co-published with our collaborators.30 What is interesting is that our experiments were inconclusive as our time and budget constraints did not allow us to develop the appropriate protocols to be able to see what was happening at the cellular level. In other words, the ability to be able to image/see fusion is as important as the ability to create it. Are cells from different biological kingdoms fused through direct human intervention natural dragons? Whether the answer is yes or no, these so-called dragons already exist within our ecology in many instances (e.g. parasitic relations). In our so-called nature there are so many queer entities which are limited only through humans’ ability to perceive, comprehend and catalogue.

30 E. Szymanski, T. Bates, E. Cachat, J. Calvert, O. Catts, L.J. Nelson, S.J. Rosser, R.D.J. Smith and I. Zurr. 2020. Crossing kingdoms: how can art open up new ways of thinking about science? Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 8: 715. https://doi. org/10.3389/fbioe.2020.00715.

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References American Type Culture Collection. 2022. HeLa CCL-2TM . https://www.atcc. org/products/ccl-2. Accessed 22 July 2022. Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material. Conservation [webpage]. https://aiccm.org.au/conservation/. Accessed 25 July 2022. Butler, Samuel. 1872. Erewhon. London: Trübner & Co. Cameron, F. 2008. Safe places for unsafe ideas? History and science museums, hot topics and moral predicaments. In Social History in Museums, ed. M. Terwey. London: Social History Curators Group, pp. 5–16. Catts, O. and I. Zurr. 2014. Countering the engineering mindset: the conflict of art and synthetic biology. In Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature, eds. A.D. Ginsberg, J. Calvert, P. Schyfter, A. Elfick and D. Endy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 27–38. Gilbert, Scott F. 2000. Developmental Biology. New York: University Press. Gould, Stephen J. 1980. The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Harris, H. 1985. Roots: cell fusion. BioEssays 2(4): 176–179. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/bies.950020409. Laland, Kevin, Tobias Uller, Marc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller et al. 2014. Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature 514: 161–164. Lomonosov Moscow State University. 2016, March 1. Researchers study the reaggregation of artificially separated marine sponge cells. Phys.org. https:// phys.org/news/2016-03-reaggregation-artificially-marine-sponge-cells.html. Accessed 13 June 2018. Margulis, L. and R. Fester (eds.). 1991. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Frankenstein and ecocriticism. In The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, ed. Andrew Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Museums Scotland. Dolly the sheep [webpage]. https://www.nms. ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/natural-sciences/dolly-the-sheep/. Accessed 11 August 2022. Pauly, Philip J. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb & the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Polanyi, Karl. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Robinson, William H. 2005. Urban Insects and Arachnids: A Handbook of Urban Entomology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szymanski, E., T. Bates, E. Cachat, J. Calvert, O. Catts, L.J. Nelson, S.J. Rosser, R.D.J. Smith and I. Zurr. 2020. Crossing kingdoms: how can art open up new

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ways of thinking about science? Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 8: 715. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2020.00715. Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uexküll, J. von. 1909. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: J. Springer. United States Copyright Office. http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebre con.cgi [website]. Accessed 11 August 2022. University of Edinburgh. The life of Dolly [webpage]. https://dolly.roslin.ed.ac. uk/facts/the-life-of-dolly/index.html. Accessed 11 August 2022. Van Valen, Leigh M. and Virginia C. Maiorana. 1991. HeLa, a new microbial species. University of Chicago. https://www.mn.uio.no/cees/english/ser vices/van-valen/evolutionary-theory/volume-10/vol-10-no-2-pages-71-74l-van-valen-and-v-c-mairorana-hela-a-new-microbial-species.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2022. Wells, H.G. 1975. The limits of individual plasticity. In H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, eds. R.M. Philmus and D.Y. Hughes. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Western Australian Museum. 2013. Echinodermata (echinoderms) [webpage]. http://museum.wa.gov.au/research/collections/aquatic-zoology/marine-inv ertebrates-section/echinodermata-echinoderms. Accessed 13 June 2018. Williamson, Donald I. 2003. The Origins of Larvae. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Williamson, Donald I. 2006. Hybridization in the evolution of animal form and life-cycle. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 148(4): 585–602. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.2006.00236.x.

CHAPTER 6

Concluding Notes: Secular Vitalism

Our hope with this book is to show the need and importance of developing a new language to (re)articulate ideas about life, through the experiences we have accumulated as artists working with fragments of life (Fig. 6.1). Our experiences with the different gradients of living systems have led us to conflicting relations with (re/de)contextualized life. The complex relationships humans form and impose on the continuum of phenomena for which we have only one word to describe – life – leads to a range of dissonances, discords and hypocrisies that are amplified as our ability to observe, manipulate and consume life increases. We have viscerally realized the vital need for a more nuanced vocabulary when talking about the realm of living beings. This more nuanced language, in turn, may enable us to deal with and comprehend the radical changes that are happening to different sentient systems in existence or being developed to populate our future physical and virtual ecologies – both biological and machinic. Hopefully, through hands-on immersion in the messiness of life, new meanings lead to new language which may lead to further articulations and understandings. Here, we would like to propose the concept of Secular Vitalism. This should be seen as a provocation or a creative intervention rather than an established philosophical thesis (we are far from being trained as, or wishing to become, philosophers). From the moment we extracted living © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9_6

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Fig. 6.1 ‘Untitled’ From the Monsters Series 1998

cells from a lifeless body, our flesh-based, embodied and visceral explorations were but humble attempts to find ways to describe and express our musing. Our research, experimentation and development of our artistic project have been carried out from an experiential embedded position that, we believe, is a valid and necessary approach to deal with our problematic relations with the living world. As we have tried to demonstrate in this book, our relationships with life and living systems are in the eye of a perfect ontological storm; life is increasingly seen as a raw material for engineering ends and monetary value extraction. Removing sentiency (and any form of agency) from complex biological organisms is proposed in earnest under the guise of ethical concerns, so value extraction can continue unhindered. This is happening just as technologically generated systems are expressing life-like behaviours and qualities, to the extent

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that we need to consider extending ethical consideration to human-made machinic and technological entities. Our artistic investigations into what life is are deliberately carbonbiased; we admit to being ‘carbonists’. We are asking, like many before us, whether there is something unique to life that sets it apart from nonliving or inert materials/systems. The challenge is how we can argue for the exceptionalism of carbon-based life without resorting to vitalist metaphysical explanations. This kind of question is self-serving as we are carbon-based life forms. If life is yet another raw material for human use, exploitation and extraction of value; if there is nothing special about carbon-based life and we can and do treat life like any other nonliving system, are we running the risk of eventually turning on our own kind and even, willingly or not, ourselves? Can we, as a society, show and practise care for life (whatever shape, complexity or constitution it may evolve into) that does not resort to a ‘higher’ or purpose-driven force? Or do we need to develop new language to break down the continuum of life to more nuanced and discrete units that will allow us to delineate levels of control and power? Is it a question of biopolitics or new ontologies?

Historical Ponderings Back in the eighteenth century, the French philosopher La Mettrie, who is retrospectively considered to be one of the earliest mechanists (as opposed to vitalists), wrote a book with the evocative title Man a Machine and Man a Plant (1748). In the book he challenged René Descartes’s view of nonhuman animals as living automatons, equivalent to machines. He discusses his opposition to the Cartesian idea by ironically ‘reducing’ the human to any other animal and, therefore, to a living automaton: To be a machine, to feel, think, know how to tell good from evil like blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality, and yet to be only an animal, are things no more contradictory than to be an ape or parrot and to know how to find sexual pleasure.1

1 Julien Offroy de La Mettrie. 1994 [1747]. Man a Machine and Man a Plant. Trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, p. 12.

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In the introduction to the English translation of La Mettrie’s 1745 Historie naturellede l’ame (The Natural History of the Soul), Justin Leiber writes: Rather than the ‘blank tablet’ mind, which suggests both the perfectibility of human beings and their complete malleability, La Mettrie finds, both in individuals and in species, a range of inherited and inborn anatomical and neurological features, compulsions and limitations. On these bases, disordered and criminal individuals deserve treatment and cure more than punishment.2

La Mettrie’s mechanistic view, in which human and other animals are born with mental and behavioural predispositions, can be interpreted in two ways: it can be used to explain the suffering of all living organisms, whether human or otherwise, and promote a more posthumanistic view of the world; on the other hand, it can be used as a eugenic tool, suggesting human behaviour is entirely based on biological mechanisms, with little if any free will. In one of the earliest, wittiest and predictive science fiction stories, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (mentioned in Chapter 5), the protagonist finds himself in a fictitious country where illness is considered a crime. Sick people are thrown in jail as their physical or mental illness and sadness is brought on them due to their own fault, and therefore, it is their responsibility, while grief is a sign of misfortune and people are held responsible for actions that made them unfortunate. By contrast, those who commit robbery or murder are treated with compassion and taken to the hospital to recover and heal. The ongoing debate of nature versus culture is played to suit certain ideologies. How much are we responsible for our own health and behaviour, and how much is our context – biological, societal and cultural – responsible for who we are and how we perceive and construct our values? Furthermore, what is the difference between treatment, correction or punishment in an institution, whether it is a hospital or a prison? Beyond contesting fundamental biopolitical issues via his satirical view of Victorian society and its norms, Butler also challenges ideas concerning the tension between human (biological) agency and that of the machine. 2 Ibid., p. 4.

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In the story, Erewhonian society has put a halt to technological development/evolution due to their concerns that machines are destined to ‘supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animals to vegetable life’.3 As described by Leiber, to maintain the categorization of living material as distinct from the nonliving La Mettrie ‘appropriates the wellestablished Aristotelian and Scholasticism of “substantial forms” to argue that organic matter has not only the “passive” and “mechanical” properties that Descartes attributes to it, but also “active” and “formal” properties that include feeling and thought’.4 A century later, in 1899, Jacob Loeb made a major contribution to a mechanistic view of living matter and advocated for an engineering mind-set in our relations to life when he developed what he called ‘artificial parthenogenesis … the artificial production of normal larvae (plutei) from the unfertilized eggs of the sea urchin’. In other words, Loeb demonstrated humans’ ability to induce ‘virgin birth’ – the capacity for fertilization (in a sea urchin) without the use of sperm but through chemical manipulation. Loeb advocated for biology to shift focus from mere observation to manipulation. He also, as a thought experiment, suggested making a living system from nonliving matter as a way to debunk vitalist ideas and claimed to have demonstrated ‘abiogenesis’ – the creation of life from inert matter.5 Loeb’s ‘engineering standpoint’6 led him to argue that ‘instinct’ and ‘will’ were ‘metaphysical concepts … upon the same plane as the supernatural powers of theologians’.7 Today Loeb’s mindset and aspirations can be seen in the endeavour of the field of synthetic biology (SynBio), ‘the application of engineering principles to biology’.8

3 Butler, Samuel. 1872. Erewhon. London: Trübner & Co. Original emphasis. 4 La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, p. 2. 5 Jacques Loeb. 1906. The Dynamics of Living Matter. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 223. Abiogenesis is also known as autogenesis or spontaneous generation of living organisms from nonliving matter. 6 Philip J. Pauly. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb & the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 47. 7 Ibid. 8 CSIRO. 2022. Synthetic biology future science platform. https://www.csiro.au/en/res

earch/production/biotechnology/synthetic-biology.

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Like Loeb in the late nineteenth century, the growing field of synthetic biology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reinforces the pervasive influence of the engineering mind-set within life science laboratories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the very same historical moment, artistic interventions, such as our own, have entered these spaces to critique and question the desire for human control at the core of the engineering (mechanistic) worldview. Georges Canguilhem’s collection of essays A Vital Rationalist and French analytical philosopher Henri Bergson’s élan vital both employed western scientific thought to grapple with the conundrum of a secularbased vitalist perspective.9 Bergson (1859–1941), one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced many philosophers from Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Lévinas to the more contemporary thinker Gilles Deleuze. Relevant here is the concept proposed in his 1907 book titled Creative Evolution. The book discussed a different approach to Darwin’s mechanistic explanation of natural selection, suggesting that evolution was motivated by the élan vital, a ‘vital impetus’ or a creative impulse. However, responding to Canguilhem’s Vital Rationalism, in this book we have questioned the notion of the human as a rational being; the idea of ‘rational vitalism’ is problematic for us. The Enlightenment patriarchal and colonialist construction of the rational white man has been successfully deneutralized by feminist, postcolonialist, critical race and posthumanities scholarly thought. As for élan vital, Ansell-Pearson argues that Bergson understood the philosopher is not after a mathematical deduction of reality or out to discover a decisive fact that would clinch the matter and dissolve all problems. Rather, as philosophers we need to acknowledge that there are different regions of experience and in them there is to be found different groups of facts.10

As artists who explore life, we purposely entangle material, experiential, hands-on, verbal and nonverbal explorations to tease out and provoke rather than provide answers or resolutions, which allows for diversion 9 F. Delaporte (ed.). 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. New York: Zone Books. 10 Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2018. Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 3.

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from both scientific and philosophical methodologies. For the philosophers and scientists, we may seem too ambiguous and eclectic, while for the artists, our exhibitions may not be sensorial enough and too demanding of intellectual labour from the audience. We hope that through this hybrid-messy methodology we can explore the concept of life outside the poles of mechanism and metaphysics. Our somewhat futile, non-utilitarian approach is a humble attempt to break through the anthropocentric gaze on life itself. Ansell-Pearson hesitantly considers Bergson’s thought as a precursor to today’s posthumanism: ‘This consists in the attempt to think from the perspective of life itself and to do so in a way that challenges anthropocentrism and necessitates what Rosi Braidotti has called an “eco philosophy of becoming”.’11 Our posthumanist perspective, like that of Haraway, Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, follows a feminist trajectory valuing ‘feminine’ concerns of duty of care, collaboration, embodiment and situated knowledge. Can we apply complex civil/feminist/animal rights concepts of autonomy, agency and freedom to life itself? As Grosz explains in regard to feminism, but which we suggest can be extended to life itself, ‘the challenge facing feminism today is no longer only to give women a more equal place within existing social networks and relations but to enable women to partake in the creation of a future unlike the present.’12 We began thinking beyond our human condition, as Bergson and then Deleuze articulated, because we found ‘ourselves born or thrown into a world that is ready-made and that we have not made our own’.13 This is further articulated by a more recent philosopher, Eugene Thacker: But if the existence of disasters, pandemics, and nonhuman networks tells us anything, it is that there is another world in addition to the world that is there ‘for us’. This is not simply a world in itself, and neither a world that is destined for us – rather it is a world that presents us with the very limits of our ability to comprehend it in terms that are neither simply that of the ‘in itself’ or the ‘for us’. It is a world ‘without us’.14

11 Ibid., p. 6. 12 Elizabeth Grosz. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics,

and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 73. 13 Ansell-Pearson, Bergson, p. 4. 14 Eugene Thacker. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. xv.

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NASA defines life ‘as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’.15 This stands in opposition to the idea of engineered life, as engineering requires standardization, predictability and known outcomes, while Darwin defined evolution as ‘descent with modification’.16 What led us, humans, to start thinking about life as an engineered, data-producing thing? Bergson wrote, ‘We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living.’17 In Mechanization Takes Command (1948), historian and critic of architecture Sigfried Giedion illustrates through different case studies the historical shift ‘from the miraculous to the utilitarian’.18 An interesting example is the device that became instrumental to the industrial revolution – the steam engine. It is important to note that the steam engine, in its earliest incarnation, was invented by Hero of Alexandria, the ancient Greek geometer and engineer of the first century AD. The device moving by itself was associated with a self-agency – as if it was alive. This wondrous phenomenon, assembled by humans, was used by the ancient Greeks as a novelty, an aesthetic object to ignite spiritual and cultural meanings and ponderings about the nature of life. It was only centuries later, in the late 1600s, when Thomas Savery proposed commercial uses for the steam engine, that it became instrumentalized for locomotion and production of goods and profits. Giedion extrapolates how ‘our present-day point of view tends to identify the inventive impulse with the mechanizing of production – an identity that cannot be taken for granted’.19 He continues: ‘Belief in progress is replaced by faith in production … With the waning of faith in progress, floating as a metaphysical banner over the factories there entered that faith in production as an end in itself.’20 15 NASA. About life detection. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/research/life-detection/ about/. 16 Charles Darwin. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. Available at: http://darwin-online.org.uk/. Emphasis added. 17 Henri Bergson. 1912. Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan & Co., p. 165. 18 Sigfried Giedion. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anony-

mous History. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 34. 19 Ibid., p. 32. 20 Ibid., p. 31.

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Already in 1948, probably influenced by the repercussions of World Word II, Giedion was concerned when this mechanistic view, which is based on instrumentalization for the purpose of production, was applied to living systems, whether soil (agriculture), growth (egg hatcheries) or the production of bread and meat (the mechanization of slaughterhouses): The questions involved are but narrow sectors of a far broader complex: man’s relation today to those organic forces that act upon and within him. The catastrophes that threaten to destroy civilization and existence are but outward signs that our organism has lost its balance … Our contract with the organic forces within us and outside of us has been interrupted – a paralysed, torn, chaotic condition. This contact is increasingly menaced as the tie with the basic human values becomes frayed. Here, if anywhere, overturn has become inevitable.21

Secular Vitalism treads uneasily among the wonders of life’s complexities and the impossibility of, through reductionism and decontextualization, breaking it down into clear mechanisms – especially by us, the living, irrational, sentient agents that we are. Thacker eloquently writes: One of these challenges is to refuse a dichotomous concept of life, as caught between the poles of reductionism and mysticism, scientifically and religiosity, the empirical and romantic notions of life. Caught between these poles, life appears at once as the exclusive domain of technoscience, and as the privileged domain of an eschatological religious extremism. This opens onto a second challenge, and this is the pervasive anthropomorphism of the concept ‘life’.22

Artistic engagement with the materiality of life is a constant realization of the trap of our anthropocentric perceptions and meaning making, which lingers in the machines we create to assist us in the journey of making sense of life. In the mid-nineties, watching the reels of the earmouse, we were both in awe and horror. For years afterwards, when showing this image in our lectures, some students would leave the auditorium in shock and disgust.

21 Ibid. 22 Thacker, After Life, p. xv.

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Today we get almost no reaction – as if mice born with human ears attached to their backs is the natural way of the world. Engineering is the attempt to standardize, remove noise and eliminate everything that cannot be controlled and predicted. An industrial-scale handling of life is more often than not a desert of monoculture at the expense and destruction of any other life form. Is it part of us, as living beings, to show affinity with life which is drastically different to nonliving matter? You may argue that stepping on a cockroach is less unsettling than breaking your laptop. But still, let us insist, beyond the consequences the incident has for you, that there may be a fundamental difference between taking life away and a mechanical shutdown.

The Poverty of Language Artists chart terrains for which there is no language to articulate, so back in 1996 we coined the term ‘semi-living’. We chose the name semiliving for this new class of object/being that populates our environment in their different and varied forms and utilities for descriptive as well as poetic reasons: ‘descriptive’ as the cell constructs have living aspects but are dependent on technological support and are not ‘fully’ living; and ‘poetic’ as they are liminal beings that are part of us – but different to us, controlled by us in some respects but which can (and do) ‘escape’ our intentions. Their agency is always in question. As artists, we ought to provoke, question and reveal hypocrisies, using different tactics: whether aesthetic, absurd/ironic or subtle confrontation. Making our audience uneasy is an outcome of our own uneasiness, examining the very things that make us uncomfortable. Rather than proposing hypothetical contestable scenarios using representation methods (such as in the case of Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Design or Critical Design),23 we are making actual, evocative, tangible, contestable, frail semi-living prototypes. There are many diverse knowledge acquisition systems as well as knowledge production systems; more than that, there are many ways in which knowledge can be translated, applied and deployed. Western scientific and technological systems are under scrutiny here. These are systems we 23 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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grew up with and learned to both love and contest, rooted as they are in Judeo-Christian Enlightenment ideology which is not only based on human exceptionalism, but is also patriarchal, racist, extractivist and colonialist. These systems are in need of a major shakeup. Furthermore, they must open up to accommodate their own problematics and allow for more diverse ontologies and epistemologies coming from different cultures and their corresponding social constructions about the world we are part of. The life sciences are increasingly shifting towards manipulation at the expense of observation, from a humble attempt for understanding to bold acts of asserting control. In the ‘post-truth’ age, companies are selling the public future scenarios and future promises which are mostly based on seductive speculations (such as the ‘fake it till you make it’ ethos of Silicon Valley) rather than scientific research and the actuality of living materials and processes. Ironically, it is companies, businesspeople and politicians that are ‘making art’ – using aesthetic devices to make strange, to lure, to trick and to seduce. This book is written with disillusion. Our own critical practice – working with living materials to explore the uneasiness of working with life, ongoing discussion and demonstration of the failure to control or upscale living materials for human wants and desires; our irony – has been mostly misunderstood. Furthermore, some of these projects have been seized upon as precursors for the biofabrication and cellular agriculture industries and their speculative futures. The irony is that we, the artists, are trying to be genuine with our art, while the scientists (mostly technologists and engineers) are asked to deliver fantasies. How is it that we keep ‘failing’ to have our artworks understood as a critique of the innovative paradigm? As we write this chapter, an article about our 2022 work, 3SDC, has been published. Though we tried within the artwork to be explicit about it being a satire, the journalist says: ‘the work titled Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle is motivated by the ecological crisis and the need for innovation, with the aim of introducing artificial substitutes for the namesake 3S’s within agriculture production.’24 Taking our work at face value is not that surprising as we have seen startup company executives at industry conferences using even more ridiculous lines than we have in our satire, extremely seriously, in order to raise funding from venture capitalists. 24 Sound of Life. 2022, August 11. Bioart: the discipline of straddling art and science. https://www.soundoflife.com/blogs/design/bioart-art-science-bioartists.

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Like many other artists, we see ourselves as producers of cautionary tales, and we are increasingly amazed by the number of times those cautionary tales have become a kind of instruction manual for the very mind-set we are critiquing. Biotechnology is violent. Manipulation of life is a violent act. Any attempt to assert our will, to deliberately force a living being into a state of being that we impose on it – whether this is keeping it alive or killing it – should be considered an act of violence. This is not a call to treat all violence as the same, but a recognition of degrees of harm and violence that are built into the biotechnological project. The more life is engineered and instrumentalized in laboratories for human-centred purposes, and the more life is referred to (and used as) an engineering tool, machine or a ‘wet’ automata, the greater the blurring of our perceptual and technological boundaries between what we consider living, semi-living and nonliving. This book is a call for more nuanced ways and languages to describe, discuss and ponder life, with the hope that such nuanced language will create a change in mind-set and relations with life, be it human, nonhuman and everything in between. If we are to continue business as usual, we may as well resign ourselves to becoming technologically controlled semi-livings.

References Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2018. Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bergson, Henri. 1912. Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan & Co. Butler, Samuel. 1872. Erewhon. London: Trübner & Co. CSIRO. 2022. Synthetic biology future science platform. https://www.csiro.au/ en/research/production/biotechnology/synthetic-biology. Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. Delaporte, F. (ed.). 1994. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. New York: Zone Books. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Giedion, S. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Oxford University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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CONCLUDING NOTES: SECULAR VITALISM

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La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de. 1994 [1747]. Man a Machine and Man a Plant. Trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Loeb, Jacques. 1906. The Dynamics of Living Matter. New York: Columbia University Press. NASA. About life detection. https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/research/life-detect ion/about/. Pauly, Philip J. 1987. Controlling Life: Jacques Loeb & the Engineering Ideal in Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Sound of Life. 2022, August 11. Bioart: the discipline of straddling art and science. https://www.soundoflife.com/blogs/design/bioart-art-sciencebioartists. Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Index

A Aesthetic of care, 72 aesthetics of disappointment , 43 alkaline hydrolysis, 100 Antonelli, Paula, 86, 88 Ars Electronica, 59, 62, 65, 66, 118 Art Gallery of Western Australia, 119–121 Artificial meat, 91 Artificial womb, ix, 56, 66–68 ArtMeatFlesh, 91, 92 Atwood, Margaret, 22 Automation, vi, 44

B Bakke, Monika, 91 Bergson, Henri, 50, 134–136 BioArt/biological arts, 22 Biodesign, 74 Biofabrication, x, 7, 35, 74, 77, 96, 99, 120, 139 Biomaterials, 47, 97, 98 Biomess, 114, 119–121

Bioreactor, ix, 28, 31, 34, 57, 61–63, 72, 78, 81, 90, 93, 113, 119 Braidotti, Rosi, vi, 135 Butler, Samuel, 106, 107, 132, 133 B(w)omb, 3

C Canguilhem, Georges, 9, 134 Carrel, Alexis, 12–19, 21–23, 27, 28, 57, 61, 80 cell line, 104, 105, 113 cellular agriculture, x, 35, 61, 74, 77, 83, 94, 96, 99, 139 cellular meat, 92, 93 Chirila, Traian, 1, 2, 32 Compostcubator, 69–71, 99, 100 Contestable, 60, 96, 99, 115, 138 Couney, Martin A., 57–59 Crossing Kingdoms , 125 Crude Matter, 47, 49

D Denfeld, Zack, 91

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Zurr and O. Catts, Tissues, Cultures, Art, Palgrave BioArt, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25887-9

143

144

INDEX

Disembodied Cuisine, 80, 83, 89, 113 DIY De-victimizer Kit Mark One (DVK m1), 89 DNA Chauvinism, 43, 112 Dolly, 114, 115 Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF), 91, 92

E earmouse, 28, 137 engineering mind-set, 133, 134 ethics, 5, 28, 30 Extra Ear – ¼ Scale, 29, 30

F Fell, Honor, 17, 19–21, 28, 61 Fiction, 21, 97, 115, 132 Food, x, 27, 70, 80, 92, 97, 99, 112, 123 (for art is like a living organism)… Better Dead Than Dying , 106 Foster, Robert, 93

G Genohype, ix, 43, 49 Giedion, Sigfried, 136, 137

H Haraway, Donna, ix, 68, 103, 135 Harrison, Ross, 10–13, 22 HeLa cell line, 105, 106 Human Genome Project (HGP), ix, 40, 43, 45 Huxley, Julian, 9, 10, 21, 23–25, 35, 61, 62 hybridoma, 34, 113, 119, 124

I incubator, ix, 1, 53, 55–60, 63, 66–70, 72–74, 78, 84, 87, 99, 100 in-vitro, 4, 11, 12 in vitro meat, 35

J John Curtin Gallery, 84

K Kay, Lily, 44

L Leduc, Stéphane, 50, 51 life, v–vii, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11–18, 20, 21, 23–25, 28, 31, 34–36, 40, 43–47, 49–51, 53, 55, 56, 58–61, 68, 72, 73, 78, 87, 89, 97, 101, 103–106, 108–110, 113–115, 117–120, 129–131, 133–140 life as a raw material, v, 53, 114, 130 Lindbergh, Charles, 13, 14 Loeb, Jacques, 117, 120

M McCoy cells, 62, 63 Mechanism of Life, 50–53 metabolic rift technologies, x, 99, 101 Morton, Timothy, 103, 104, 111 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 86–89

N National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), 30 Neolife, 109, 113, 115

INDEX

New Harvest, 83, 93, 98 NoArk, 108

O OddNeolifism, 109, 110 onto-epistemological, 7, 8, 61

P Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), 32 Pig Wings , 41, 42 post-anthropocentric, vi, 35, 105 posthumanities, 134 Post, Mark, 91–93 poverty of language, viii, 103, 138 PS Art Space, 99

R regenerative biology, 49 Reverse Ontology of Sentience, 77 Ritual of Killing, 31

S Science Gallery, 70, 93 Secular Vitalism, viii, x, 137 semi-life/semi-living, v, vi, ix, 2, 5, 15, 17, 18, 28–31, 35, 36, 40, 47, 50, 60–62, 65, 73, 84, 87–89, 105, 106, 119, 138, 140 Semi-living Worry Dolls (originally the Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs ), 58, 61 Speculative, 21, 22, 86, 88, 139 Squier, Susan, 19–21 startups, 61, 77, 125 Stelarc, 28–31 Stir Fly, 93

145

Sunlight, Soil & Shit (De)Cycle/3SDC, 139 surrogate body, 28, 56, 60, 68, 84, 108 SymbioticA, vii, 20, 83, 91 synthetic biology (SynBio), 40, 42, 46, 50, 74, 99, 104, 120, 125, 133, 134 T Taxonomy, 108 technologically mediated victimless utopia, 96 techno-scientific, ix, 13, 15, 47, 55, 60, 72, 73, 84, 88, 114, 115 textile, 84, 85 Thacker, Eugene, 26, 27, 104, 135, 137 The Stone Age of Biology, 5, 6 Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project, vii, 17, 78, 95 tissue engineering (TE), 3, 7, 12, 25–27, 31, 34, 35, 40, 47, 78, 80, 83, 117 V Vacanti, Charles, 25, 26, 28, 117 Vacanti, Joseph P., 25–28, 61 Vapour Meat, 95 Venter, Craig, 44–47 Vessels of Care and Control series, 68 Victimless Leather, 77, 84–89, 95 W Ward, Devon, 95 Wellcome Trust, 40, 42, 43, 115 Wells, H.G., 9, 21, 28, 111 Western Australia Museum, 6 Worry Dolls, 62, 63, 80