Bioart Now
Sebuah artikel mengenai praktik Bioart internasional yang ditulis oleh Stephen Fortune di situs online Dazed and Confused. Artikel ini disadur oleh Andreas Siagian pada tanggal 24 Januari 2014. Artikel versi online dapat dilihat di link ini, atau versi .pdf bagian 1 dan bagian 2. Berikut salinan dari artikel tersebut:
Observing Jalia Essaidi's work “2.6g 329m/s,” one witnesses a skein of human flesh stop a speeding bullet in its tracks. The sheer force of the ballistic send ripples coursing through the gelatinous dreamcatcher, the improbable act captured in mesmerising slow motion footage. Jaw dropping yes, but is it art? That tired adage can be levelled at many forms of contemporary art but it holds a particular resonance for the field of bioart which, notable exceptions aside, has been in the public eye for barely 20 years.
Bioart today is undoubtedly indebted to the trails blazed by the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TCA) founders Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. Together they established a lab-cum-studio alongside the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and created internationally exhibited projects which ignited imaginations: a leather jacket grown in a test tube, a frogs leg steak served up fresh from the petri dish. The duo translated the established lab technique of tissue culturing into artworks that opened a public window into biotechnologies.
Four years later, the pair helped established Symbiotica at the University of Western Australia, a research lab aimed at fuelling international collaborations between artists and the university’s science labs. A canon of bioart began to emerge, and techniques which had previously been exclusive stalwarts of science labs began trickling down to curious artists. Catts and Zurr continue to make provocative “semi-living” artworks and hold international workshops with other artists keen to learn the ropes of biomedia.
ESSAÏDI GENETICALLY ENGINEERED HUMAN-SKIN CELLS TO EXPRESS A PROTEIN USUALLY FOUND IN SPIDER SILK, WHICH, WHEN WOVEN, POSSESSES A STRENGTH THAT SURPASSES STEEL:“I WANTED TO INSPIRE A SENSE OF AWE FOR THIS HUGE MACHINE THAT WE CALL NATURE, AND THE MECHANICS BY WHICH IT PRODUCED ALL THESE INGENIOUS CONSTRUCTS”, SHE SAID
“2.6g 329m/s” was made possible by tissue-culturing techniques – Essaïdi created her bullet-stopping skin by genetically engineering human-skin cells to express a protein usually found in spider silk, which, when woven, possesses a strength that surpasses steel.
Today's genetic technologies are sufficiently advanced that the spiders genome can be sequenced, the sequence of DNA that creates the strong silk protein isolated, and that same sequence of DNA instructions transplanted into other living creatures to 'manufacture' the silk in bulk. The most infamous case of this was Nexia Biotechnologies’ BioSteel fibre, created from the milk of transgenics goats. Essadi states that “I wanted to inspire a sense of awe for this huge machine that we call nature, and the mechanics by which it produced all these ingenious constructs that have been fine-tuned and enhanced over millions of years”
Essadi created her artwork 17 years after the silk protein was patented by Dr. Randy Lewis of Utah State University, and she was the first experimenter to combine it with a full thickness skin model. This contrasts starkly to the lag between tissue culturings invention (1907), and TCA's uptake of the method (1996). in 2013 BioArt is hot on the heels of the most exciting biotechnological advances. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are manufactured by synthetic biology research labs in the hopes of optimising photosynthesis, coaxing diesel from ponds of genetically engineered algae and devising new cures for ailments by reprogramming bacteria into medicinal nanomachines. Synthetic biology is a scientific discipline that treats organisms as living machines awaiting genetic reprogramming. CohenVanBalen, the design partnership of Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen, produce work against a backdrop of such scientific advances. Tuur Van Balen's Pigeon D'or devised a way to transform urban pigeons shit into soap by reprogramming the pigeons gut bacteria. “Pigeon D'or developed from approaching the city as an organism, and the bacteria is the material we use to rewrite urban metabolic pathways” Tuur says The bacteria that performs the faecal alchemy is not present in any living pigeons, but the shit-to-soap gene is available on the Biobrick Standard registry of Biological Parts. “Anyone can access the design and create the bacteria using the biobrick” (the name applied to genes intended to be used in modular fashion, like building a genome from lego bricks).
TUUR VAN BALEN'S PIGEON D'OR DEVISED A WAY TO TRANSFORM URBAN PIGEONS SHIT INTO SOAP BY REPROGRAMMING THE PIGEONS GUT BACTERIA
Tuur Van Balen and Essaidi, like the Symbiotica residents before them, have been fortunate to work in collaboration with institutional laboratories. Jennifer Willet, a former Symbiotica resident herself, uses the lab environment as inspiration for her artistic interventions: establishing pop-up labs deep in the woods or amidst civic environments (as in the forthcoming Eco Nuit Parade). Her BioARTCAMP of 2011 (the subject of a recent documentary) saw collaborators recreate genetic lab technology using log fires and tin buckets. Willet states that “I'm interested in producing works that consider the laboratory itself as an ecology. I see ecological metaphors as allowing us to engage more directly in the complex bioethics of the biological sciences”. Willet's unconventional labs occur in parallel with a kindred trend, that of biohackers learning genetic engineering the “do it with others” (DIWO) way. Amateur scientists and enthusiasts gather in community run hacklabs, and reverse engineer the scientific techniques used in genetic engineering. These so-called DIYBio spaces have spread across the globe, from New York to Manchester, Slovenia to Indonesia. Nurit Bar-Shai, bioartist and co-founder of Genspace NYC, sheds some light on what made DIYbio spaces possible. “During the years after the dot com bust major advances in technology and bio-tech made it cheaper to tinker with science and work with biology. Then the recession of 2008 brought a wave of social changes and heightened awareness of ecological precarity and scarcity of resources around the world. During that time many labs and biotech startups bankrupted. Most of Genspace's equipment was donated to us by a lab that closed down after the recession”.
On the global stage biohacking collective Hackteria has lead the way on demystifing bioart and providing people with easy practical ways to engage with it. Formed in 2009 and featuring chapters in Europe, India and Indonesia the Hackteria Wikipedia has become the de-facto resource for all budding biohackers. The interplay between biohacking and bioart is particularly fluid among Hackteria affiliated practitioners. “Hackteria is not, generally speaking, about finished products or finished works. The bioart just happens, but is not the primary goal” said Hackteria co-founder Marc Dusseiller. Some of that 'incidental bioart' has been quite sublime. Hackteria co-founder Yashas Shetty lead the Art Science bangalore collective in producing 'Teenage Gene Poems'. Together the team isolated the enzyme (Geosmin) responsible for that 'just after rain' smell, and engineered a bacteria to produce that smell on demand, thus creating a bioart poem about the monsoon. Just as the lab finds itself transplanted outside it's usual environs so too does BioArt find itself exhibited in unexpected locales: Teenage Gene Poems has not only toured notable art festivals but has also won accolades at the iGEM (international genetically engineered machine) competition. iGEM is the science fair of synthetic biology, with college students from across the globe competing to engineer living machines.
The Hackteria flavour of bioart and biotech education is particularly visible in Indonesia, where sister organisation Lifepatch complements the bioart residencies hosted by media-art lab the House of Natural Fiber (HONF), helping underfunded school students with such ingenious hacks as converting a webcam into a functioning microscope. At HONF in 2010, Julian Abraham and others initiated a project aimed at creating a safe form of fermentation based on tropical fruit, after the Indonesian government raised prohibitively high duties on alcohol. After leaving HONF, Abraham continued the theme, creating sound-based bioart pieces under the name Kapitän Biopunk. He provided workshops in homebrewing alcohol to accompany his Fermentation Madness, a sound-art piece that converts the processes of fermentation into an interactive soundscape
A focus on fermentation broadens the definition of bioart to include cultural practices of biomanipulation. Abraham mischieviously notes that “it gives you direct feedback: you can taste the product of your artistic experiment”. Bioart theorist George Gessert points to the artificial selection inherent to decorative plant species as an early instance of bioart practice. Indeed many bioartists are fond of referring back to Edward Steichen's 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms in the MOMA as the 'first' BioArt exhibition. Ornamental plant breeding and fermentation could perhaps be better designated as bioartisinal. In a similar vein, the work of Michiko Nitta and Michael Burton unearths the artistic potential of contemporary horticultural technology. Working in collaboration with an opera singer they crossbred operatic vocals with the sustainability focusedtechnology of aquaponics rigs. The exhaled breath of an opera singer feeds algae, which was later prepared as snacks for the audience. Differing songs produced varying amounts of exhaled CO2, which resulted in a different flavour for each snack.
Appreciating this cultural ancestry is a reminder that bioartists need not be obsessively preoccupied with the latest biotechnological advances. Looked at from one angle the processes underpinning genetically modifying organisms are souped up husbandry and artificial selection (which may explain why the Golden Nica in Hybrid Art has been awarded to a genius piece of conceptual art exploring arts mediating role in those very processes, entitled the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project). But insidious elements differentiate GM products from 'pure' bioartisinal activities. Intellectual property problems blight GM foods, seeds and plants. We can expect the patent disputes played out between Apple and Samsung, such as the tit for tat lawsuits over user experience intellectual property (IP) (which even saw Samsung invoke Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 as a legal defense) to be restaged ad nauseum between biotechnological corporations in coming years, albeit with far weightier consequences. Such conflict is fertile territory for bioart provocateurs, as illustrated by Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara's “Common Flowers / Flower Commons” project. “We felt that the discussion regarding genetically-modified crops and plants was not getting the attention it should in Japan” Shiho Fukuhara informs me. Together they used DIYbio techniques to reverse engineer the first commercially available genetically modified flower, the blue petalled “Moondust” carnation: an ornamental plant engineered by the Suntory Corporation. They later released their cloned flowers into the wild with an accompanying 'how-to clone' guide. Their work pitted the forces of nature against the intellectual property imperatives of the Suntory Corporation.
Tremmel and Fukuhara can consider themselves lucky that retribution hasn't hit them harder. Among bioart circles the cautionary tale is forever the terror that was visited upon Steve Kurtz. In the wake of 9/11, an FBI emboldened by the Patriot Act targeted Steve in the wake of his wifes death. Steve was and is a prominent member of tactical media provocateurs Critical Art Ensemble, and at the time of his wifes passing she and Steve were working on a GM agriculture project for Massachuesets Museum of Contempoary Art, The FBI initially held Gurtz on suspicion of bioterrorism before later prosecuting him for mail and wire fraud (the former carrying an increased maximum sentence of 20 years, post patriot act). The one silver lining in this horrific episode was that the international art community rallied around Steve and ensured that the bogus case brought against him could be fought.
Bioart, bioartisinal practices and DIYBio share one prerequisite: patience. Nurit Bar-Shai considers this a strength: “since it is a very elaborate practice, which requires dedication and patience, most of the work that comes out are thoughtful and significant!”. That is certainly true of the remarkable work of Calgary based poet Christian Bök. His Xenotext Project, ongoing for the past 10 years, explores how to write poetry in the language of DNA by encoding poetic stanzas into the genome of a bacteria: a poem written within a living organism. The work is close to completion, as Bök works on the final hurdle of encoding it into a marine bacteria capable of surviving extreme temperature. Bök encoded a 14 line stanza into a gene, using a cipher that maps the Roman alphabet to the GATC alphabet of DNA. The bacterias cellular machinery read this DNA sequence and, in response, generates a protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers an accompanying 14 line poem whose opening couplet reads: "the faery is rosy / of glow". When the poetic protein is completely produced in the cell it emits a fluorescent light, underscoring the call and response poetry between DNA and protein, and referencing lines of verse enciphered in amino acids.
One mans poetry can be anothers graffiti, and scrawling graffiti into genomes is not just the domain of artists. Craig Venter, a giant of the genetic biotechnologies field, famously stored watermark messages in the 'Mycoplasma Laboratorium' bacteria: the first organism whose entire genetic code was artificially composed . Venter and his colleagues programmed a genome using software, and uploaded the genetic software (the DNA) to a genetically vacant cell, whereupon “synthetic life” booted up into existence. The messages nestled away in the code included “what I cannot build, I cannot understand”, a misappropriation of physician Richard Feynman’s famous “what I cannot create, I do not understand”. (Venter has since corrected the genetic code to reflect the original phrasing.) Electron micrograph photography of Mycoplasma Laboratorium was recently exhibited at CUT PASTE GROW, a collaboration between curator William Myers, NYC gallery The Observatory Room and Genspace co-founders Daniel Grushkin and Nurit Bar-Shai. Scientific milestones are exhibited alongside open sourced MoonDust Carnations and selectively bred space faring flies. One such crossover figure is Simon park, a microbiologist turned artist whose artworks involve painted compositions with the bacteria as pigments. “Many of my collegues think that I've turned to the 'dark side'”, before adding that “I find the micobrial world sublime, and through my art I strive to communicate its complexity sophistication and impact!
CUT PASTE GROW encapsulated the cross talk of science, biohacking communities and artworks that todays BioArt encompasses. Such collaborations could become the norm, with the first Dutch Wetlab opening its doors in the Waag last weekend just in time to host the annual European DIYbio meetup. Shiho Fukuhara thinks that “getting access to a fully functioning lab and being able to utilize all it’s tools can be quite a barrier and ‘amateur biohacking’ can help surmount this barrier.” Jalia Essadi believes that “for an artist to truly reflect she needs to engage with the actual materials. These days the knowledge and tools are becoming more accessible. DIYbio labs offer a different approach to the professional environment and a lot of pioneering work in this field will be done in community run biohacking spaces.” However Simon Park is a little more circumspect in his appraisal: “DIYBio and Citizen Science are great, but often it just mimics the work of scientist to allow public access to the process. I think art should offer something more than this, so I don't see DIYBio as art. The diversity of approaches means that the definition of bioart remains accordingly fluid. Andy Gracie, another co-founder of Hackteria, feels that “bioart now includes artists who use biological material as maybe one element of a wider piece of work, not using the manipulation or reappropriation of that material as the sole focus”. Works like Revital Cohen's 'The Immortal' go a step further – all biological matter is deliberately abstracted. A series of life-support machines connect to each other, circulating air and liquids in an attempt to mimic a biological structure. It's a reflection on the dominant, mechanistic, view of life enshrined in todays bioscience, with synthetic biology the most explicit exponent. But where is the art amidst this commentary? Jennifer Willet feels that “bioart is an exploration of life as media through contemporary art”, echoing the additional qualities that an artistic disposition can bring to the life science. Marc Dusseiler and Andy Gracie offered that “art has always been particularly good at confronting complex multiple narratives. Society lags behind the modernized perception of nature which is in place in the life sciences. Bioarts and Biohacking can induce a paradigm shift of how nature is perceived by the public.”