Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- If I may weigh in with a comment/question related to Johannes', and hopefully not overwhelm Oron (although we've spoken about this already Oron, so at least not new): is there an aesthetic connection to be made with the more abject features of performance/body art, i.e. its eliciting and even embracing of bodily limits, breakdown, failure? What Johannes describes as the cellular project may not be apparent I've referred to as the muteness of the semi-living tissue, and for me that muteness elicits an affective zone of the abject. - Nell On 2013-09-12, at 9:03 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Oron, could you please say a bit more about these years of testing the notion of 'semi-living', and placing it (cultures, cells, that which you thought of as semi or between, needing a link to technological care) into art context/installation context and thus linking it to aesthetics? (also the discourse of so-called bio art which is an art discourse and not a scientific one, would you say?). Perhaps this is also where the political and ethical question arise, or the question I tried to raise last time, about the banalization/trivialization of science - that was a question addressed to Adam Z and his comment on fascism, I find particularly interesting your statement that the semi-living project requires a removal of it [what is the it? the cell?] from a body or context, the latter now being assumed dead or excised, yes? And the caring now is addressing a biotechnological system and an interface that needs nurture (in exhibition, it also needs explanation, justification, and new contextualization as the cellular project may not be apparent - as art, as object, as science, as process -- and visible and intuitable to an audience. It may not be apparent nor justifiable? The design, then, to follow my comment on the fashion reference in Evolution Haute Couture, becomes the runway for the thing to live and display itself and justify itself. What are your thoughts on semi-living design, and the linkage you have made between lab and art gallery/museum, and between lab and the wider, philosophical or political thinking on systems/systems theory? Has the discourse, in your opinion, delved sufficiently into this important question of care, and what analogies to performance/body art, if you think of the work of Sarah Jane Pell, do you see? regards Johannes Birringer [Oron schreibt] So yes, if bioart would exist, as in if artists working with life and attempting to impose some kind of wants onto living systems - the ethics of care is undoubtedly, implicitly or explicitly embedded in the practice. At least temporarily until care is no longer needed - you can call it death... [Oron schreibt] ... for all intents and purposes we started with something which was dead meat (the half rabbit's heads) but the cells were alive, growing, proliferating and doing what cells do (in culture- outside the context of the original body of the rabbit). Are these cells living in the same way that the dead rabbit was 24 hours earlier? We realized the even though tissue culture was going on for more than a hundred years, we had no cultural language to deal with this experience. And if we do not have that, can we have any ethical reference point to deal with these fragments of life? If we name them semi-living would that change anything? We spend the last seventeen years trying to figure that out. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Oron, could you please say a bit more about these years of testing the notion of 'semi-living', and placing it (cultures, cells, that which you thought of as semi or between, needing a link to technological care) into art context/installation context and thus linking it to aesthetics? (also the discourse of so-called bio art which is an art discourse and not a scientific one, would you say?). Perhaps this is also where the political and ethical question arise, or the question I tried to raise last time, about the banalization/trivialization of science - that was a question addressed to Adam Z and his comment on fascism, I find particularly interesting your statement that the semi-living project requires a removal of it [what is the it? the cell?] from a body or context, the latter now being assumed dead or excised, yes? And the caring now is addressing a biotechnological system and an interface that needs nurture (in exhibition, it also needs explanation, justification, and new contextualization as the cellular project may not be apparent - as art, as object, as science, as process -- and visible and intuitable to an audience. It may not be apparent nor justifiable? The design, then, to follow my comment on the fashion reference in Evolution Haute Couture, becomes the runway for the thing to live and display itself and justify itself. What are your thoughts on semi-living design, and the linkage you have made between lab and art gallery/museum, and between lab and the wider, philosophical or political thinking on systems/systems theory? Has the discourse, in your opinion, delved sufficiently into this important question of care, and what analogies to performance/body art, if you think of the work of Sarah Jane Pell, do you see? regards Johannes Birringer [Oron schreibt] So yes, if bioart would exist, as in if artists working with life and attempting to impose some kind of wants onto living systems - the ethics of care is undoubtedly, implicitly or explicitly embedded in the practice. At least temporarily until care is no longer needed - you can call it death... [Oron schreibt] ... for all intents and purposes we started with something which was dead meat (the half rabbit's heads) but the cells were alive, growing, proliferating and doing what cells do (in culture- outside the context of the original body of the rabbit). Are these cells living in the same way that the dead rabbit was 24 hours earlier? We realized the even though tissue culture was going on for more than a hundred years, we had no cultural language to deal with this experience. And if we do not have that, can we have any ethical reference point to deal with these fragments of life? If we name them semi-living would that change anything? We spend the last seventeen years trying to figure that out. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Rich, Tyler and Lynn First - Lynn asked: What are the degrees to which Semi-Living cells exist? And how did you come to that term? The cells are not semi-living, the cells are alive like cells are alive... it is the assembly which is the semi-living, in other words, it is the fact that these cells are now removed from the original body that they once occupied. The body that we tend to refer to as an individual entity that persist over time (in our case the rabbit), or as Rich refer to the removed cells as being out(side) of time.. The semi-living is more than just the cells, as in order for them to live_as_cells_live they now need a human intervention/technological assistance (or care as we will discuss later); remove the technology and these cells/tissue will return to the original state of the half rabbit heads- a piece of dead meat. So it is this combination of living fragments and technology is what is half alive, hance the semi-living. Tyler asked: Oron, you've written elsewhere the importance of care of the semi-living, which has come up in relation to _Victimless Leather_. I wonder if you might say more about this, especially in terms of ethics. Is there an ethics of care embedded in the practices of BioArt, even if death looms high? Like any life removed from context and put into a technological frame, there is a need to for it to be cared for (as in maintenance), for us, initially, the idea to forefront this maintenance/care was a way to assert the liveness of the semi-living in concert with its fragility. It was then developed into a more nuanced and layered approach that was dealing with complexity of other aspects of care, including the inherited violence of caring for living things. I know that Cary referred (and I'll paraphrase here) to Derrida's discussion of violence of existence as flattening and unhelpful. But I think that it is important to remember that in caring for life, life is taken and imposing care on life can be seen as violence by itself. Think about the practice of gardening- weeding and pruning ... So yes, if bioart would exists, as in if artists working with life and attempting to impose some kind of wants onto living systems - the ethics of care is undoubtedly, implicitly or explicitly embedded in the practice. At least temporarily until care is no longer needed - you can call it death... Oron -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Tyler Fox Sent: Tuesday, 10 September 2013 8:08 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living --empyre- soft-skinned space-- ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Oron, Good luck with the Finnish diggings. With any luck at all, you'll find that the traces of ammo bearing amino acids and Junker DNA ( sorry) are insignificant within the full monty of the biophilic splendor of the soil galaxy you explore. I dig how your rabbit head narrative places your art practice within the history of primate head scratching. The mismatch between a continuity of tissue culture and the culture of organismic beginnings, middles and ends can be modeled from a narrative point of view as the problem of being out of time. On the one hand, the semi-living cells are untimely - they depart from the year(s) of the rabbit, and are therefore now outside that story line and into another. They resist the story line of the rabbit, b/c, to quote a good song from a terrible band, the rabbit done died. The rabbit is out of time - no mas. But because our narrative framework for the cells is the timeline of the rabbit, they appear practically immortal: out(side) of time. Of course that feeling of immortality is itself a product of the former story line: the apparent individuality of the rabbit and its journey through time was always a manifestation of larger scale systems. Tissue culture, which some primates deploy to, er, ape those systems, brings this larger scale attribute of living systems into relief but makes the local scale story line of a journey through time implausible if not impossible. I wonder, though, if primates lack the cultural knowledge to properly revere and explore the untimely rabbit cells even as we might not narratively understand them. A reference to Tibetan Buddhist textual practice may help us experiment with this movement from the storyline of the rabbit to the story line of a distributed ecology of knowledge production ( tissue culture). Terma or treasure texts are esoteric writings buried by adepts for future discovery. They are, while buried, in limbo, and in some sense out(side) of time, preserved at least in the short term both from the effects of thermodynamics and ( what may be the same thing) the prying eyes of readers who are not, from the perspective of the adepts, ready for the teachings they contain. If the terma were released in the present, they would not, could be, be understood. Tertons are future adepts who discover said terma when they are ready to be shared and grokked, and their teachings often focus on the illusion of time as an artifact of narrative logic required by the I. Maybe it is time to bury some rabbit cells in tissue culture for future tertons? Well, out of time. Enjoy your diggings! best wishes from the pumpkin patch, rich On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Oron Catts oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all Thanks Adam for inviting me to take part in this discussion and greetings from the very far north of Finland, where I'm doing research and preparing for the Finnish Society of Bioart's Field_Notes/Deep_Time week long lab. Continuing with the line of being slippery and hard to define, my research here involves taking soil samples from two very unlikely sites- a crashed 1942 German Junker 88 bomber and a 1916 exploded Russian ammunition depot. We will see how this week's develop and I might be able to string these stories into the narrative of the discussion as they deal with some unintended consequences of instrumentalizing living processes. But as Adam asked me to deal with the Ethics of the Semi-Living, I thought I should tell you the story of how Ionat Zurr and I came across for the first time with what we started to call the Semi-living. Back in 1996, Ionat and I started to question the possibility of using tissue engineering or tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. The first lab that we worked in was an eye research lab. The scientist that we worked with was trying to develop an artificial cornea. The first thing we saw when we entered the lab were half rabbit heads. The heads were delivered to the lab around lunchtime in a cardboard box, about twice a week. The rabbits were killed for food, and their heads would be sent to a brain research institute, the brain would be taken out, and we at the eye-research institute would get those half rabbit heads, from which we would then take the eyes out. The eyes were put inside vials, in an antibiotic solution, and into the fridge overnight. After 24 hours we would take a layer of skin form the eyes and culture the cells. Obviously, something was quite strange; for all intents and purposes we started with something which was dead meat (the half rabbit's heads) but the cells were alive, growing, proliferating and doing what cells do (in culture- outside the context of the original body of the rabbit). Are these cells living in the same way that the dead rabbit was 24 hours earlier? We realized the even though tissue culture
Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think language is critical and the term Semi-Living curious. When is something fully living? How does this differ from Undead? What are the degrees to which Semi-Living cells exist? And how did you come to that term? l - Original Message - From: Oron Catts oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 09:46:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all Thanks Adam for inviting me to take part in this discussion and greetings from the very far north of Finland, where I'm doing research and preparing for the Finnish Society of Bioart's Field_Notes/Deep_Time week long lab. Continuing with the line of being slippery and hard to define, my research here involves taking soil samples from two very unlikely sites- a crashed 1942 German Junker 88 bomber and a 1916 exploded Russian ammunition depot. We will see how this week's develop and I might be able to string these stories into the narrative of the discussion as they deal with some unintended consequences of instrumentalizing living processes. But as Adam asked me to deal with the Ethics of the Semi-Living, I thought I should tell you the story of how Ionat Zurr and I came across for the first time with what we started to call the Semi-living. Back in 1996, Ionat and I started to question the possibility of using tissue engineering or tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. The first lab that we worked in was an eye research lab. The scientist that we worked with was trying to develop an artificial cornea. The first thing we saw when we entered the lab were half rabbit heads. The heads were delivered to the lab around lunchtime in a cardboard box, about twice a week. The rabbits were killed for food, and their heads would be sent to a brain research institute, the brain would be taken out, and we at the eye-research institute would get those half rabbit heads, from which we would then take the eyes out. The eyes were put inside vials, in an antibiotic solution, and into the fridge overnight. After 24 hours we would take a layer of skin form the eyes and culture the cells. Obviously, something was quite strange; for all intents and purposes we started with something which was dead meat (the half rabbit's heads) but the cells were alive, growing, proliferating and doing what cells do (in culture- outside the context of the original body of the rabbit). Are these cells living in the same way that the dead rabbit was 24 hours earlier? We realized the even though tissue culture was going on for more than a hundred years, we had no cultural language to deal with this experience. And if we do not have that, can we have any ethical reference point to deal with these fragments of life? If we name them semi-living would that change anything? We spend the last seventeen years trying to figure that out. Oron Oron Catts Director SymbioticA| The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts | School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology | The University of Western Australia www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au | www.tcaproject.org SymbioticA School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology Mailbag M309 The University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Highway Crawley. 6009 Western Australia Australia. Phone: + 61 8 6488 7116 Fax: + 61 8 6488 1051 Australia mobile number +61 411 686 121 Subscribe here for regular information on art, science, culture and lots of stuff in-between: http://maillists.uwa.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/symbiotica CRICOS Provider No. 00126 Winner of the 2007 inaugural Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] the ethics of the semi-living
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Lively soft_skinned friends, Much obliged for the invitation to swap pixels concerning the semi living. I haven't seen Oron for a while, maybe since Atlanta when I was a walking talking BioArt exhibit consisting of the effects of driving non stop from Pennsylvania, or in Hong Kong were I was engaged in first person research concerning the texture of congee. So it is good to semi-dwell in this common soft_skinned space. Warm regards to my wetware friends. Ever since my grad school days in the late 80s spent watching the Human Genome Project unfold in unlikely ways, my research has sprouted almost entirely out of a substrate of amazement. I'll admit that I am still amazed that demographics exist where humans think life can be comprehended by the mind - defined, categorized, ruled on in terms of propriety or impropriety, rather than explored from the only space available: subjectivity and the space of all possible lives lived within it. It would be cheap, easy, and economically philosophical to notice that to expect mind to grok life is to commit a category error. It is vastly more interesting and frequently illuminating to investigate the persistence of this notion that life is grokable rather than liveable. Some of my writings and talks and teachings these days explore this space between the thinkable and the liveable, pointing to the first person investigation of the I through psychonautics and meditation as a research protocol for eyeballing the vast ecologies out of which the teeny egoic mind manifests with great self importance, claiming distinctions left and right, and for dissolving into the vast space of consciousness out of which the much vaunted material realm can be observed to manifest. But by whom?! This means that my amazement extends to the continued grip of materialism on the academy, where material and real are frequently used as synonyms by organisms who continually experience the subjective realm of consciousness, and nothing but. I find the work of Franklin Merrell Wolff, a mathematician from the early 20th century, to be intensely salutatory in this regard, as he writes with the lucidity of a mathematician about what he calls consciousness-without-an-object. Much akin to FMW and of likely interest to bioartistes is the Indian sage and philosopher Aurobindo, whose encyclopedic investigations of the evolution of consciousness in *The Life Divine* render a monistic and self aware cosmos wherein semi becomes a non sequitur for living. 'life, too, becomes a category error. In short, as I wrote from my very first book in the idiom of Dr. Seuss,let us get *on beyond living*, as life may no longer be either necessary or sufficient for denoting what it is remotely like to manifest as, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, a way for cosmos to know itself. More pixels, and soon. Tomorrow am I have an appointment with a pumpkin blossom. Will send report. mobius On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Oron Catts oron.ca...@uwa.edu.au wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi all Thanks Adam for inviting me to take part in this discussion and greetings from the very far north of Finland, where I'm doing research and preparing for the Finnish Society of Bioart's Field_Notes/Deep_Time week long lab. Continuing with the line of being slippery and hard to define, my research here involves taking soil samples from two very unlikely sites- a crashed 1942 German Junker 88 bomber and a 1916 exploded Russian ammunition depot. We will see how this week's develop and I might be able to string these stories into the narrative of the discussion as they deal with some unintended consequences of instrumentalizing living processes. But as Adam asked me to deal with the Ethics of the Semi-Living, I thought I should tell you the story of how Ionat Zurr and I came across for the first time with what we started to call the Semi-living. Back in 1996, Ionat and I started to question the possibility of using tissue engineering or tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. The first lab that we worked in was an eye research lab. The scientist that we worked with was trying to develop an artificial cornea. The first thing we saw when we entered the lab were half rabbit heads. The heads were delivered to the lab around lunchtime in a cardboard box, about twice a week. The rabbits were killed for food, and their heads would be sent to a brain research institute, the brain would be taken out, and we at the eye-research institute would get those half rabbit heads, from which we would then take the eyes out. The eyes were put inside vials, in an antibiotic solution, and into the fridge overnight. After 24 hours we would take a layer of skin form the eyes and culture the cells. Obviously, something was quite strange; for all intents and purposes we started with something which was dead meat (the half
