“It is no longer clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine”. ([12], p. 177).
In the fields of biotechnology, synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, material laboratory-based practices frame the body as bio-matter—as material for manipulation, manufacture and fabrication. There is an instrumental technics at play; here, life itself is en-framed as something to be manipulated, often within an engineering paradigm. Might these narratives dismiss therefore the experiential, phenomenological body? This essay will discuss three works that originate in an artist residency, situated in a biomedical research laboratory, drawing attention to materials and media technologies used in both scientific and artistic practice.
Throughout this piece, I argue that the consideration of human bio-matter as an art medium opens up an intriguing cultural space to critically reflect upon relationships between biology and technology, materiality and ethics, as well as the production of new cultural meanings through metaphor. Artist research offers a means of revealing and articulating ways of engaging with technologies, negotiating the effects on bodies experienced “through socially inflected technologies of reproduction, communication and medical intervention” ([13], p. 41). As such, artistic practice as research contributes to modes of knowledge making, to epistemic enquiry. It is in this area, this vital and contemporary context, in which the methodology of artistic research can have real value.
My work asks therefore how we might start to consider bodies as becoming fabricated or synthetic within these scenarios as I look for slippages between a techno-scientific and sensorial approach. This is what artistic practice can reveal: the gaps, the unsaid, the unforeseen. As Henk Borgdorff reminds us, the value of artist research lies “in its ability to offer the very reflection on who we are and where we stand that is obscured from sight by the discursive and conceptual procedures of scientific rationality” ([14], p. 50).
Since early 2017, I have been artist in residence at BrisSynBio. This residency has enabled me to experience first-hand the laboratory practice of cell culture and in particular that of human red blood cells: erythropoiesis. Cell and tissue culture have become ubiquitous aspects of international biotechnological research practices, where cells are bathed in a culture medium containing essential nutrients and energy sources necessary for their survival and growth outside the body, in vitro.
At BrisSynBio, scientists are developing and manufacturing human red blood cells as product in vitro, testing novel applications of product through pharmaceutical delivery and conducting clinical trials in cultured red blood cells in vivo. My artist research, primarily experiential, explores social and cultural aspects of this biomedical practice and through making, explores new metaphors for how we might conceive of the body in these emerging scenarios. To date, I have instigated a number of activities, which include:
recording the performative approaches taken by staff, to working with fluids, in micro-controlled environments and wet labs
capturing images of the cultured red cells, grown in large flasks of iridescent liquid media, using technologies: photography and video, optical microscopes, fluorescent imaging and data visualisation (flow-cytometry)
visiting the Blood and Transplant Unit in Filton, the largest blood processing plant in Europe: one of only five centres in the UK for handling, testing and processing NHS donated blood products
initiating conversations with scientists, discussing their work with them and reflecting on practice
making art works that respond to the residency, laboratory culture and growth of “synthetic” blood cells: particularly in relation to their large-scale manufacture
Throughout my work, there is the constant recurrence of the body: figuratively, as a measure of scale, experientially as a sensory apparatus; and conceptually as media—as a material source for the work. The works discussed below consider the presence of these multiple bodies within the laboratory and the material translation of the corporeal through biomedical practices of computational microscopy, 3D print and large-scale cell manufacture.
One of the earliest contemporary artworks that opens this intriguing space between biology, materiality and ethics is Blood of a Poet Box (1965–1968) by Eleanor Antin. This work consists of a wooden case of glass slides, each one smeared with the blood of an artist, poet or writer. Its title is a reference to the film of Jean Cocteau, Blood of a Poet (1930). Over a period of three years, between 1965 and 1968, Antin attended art events and poetry readings in her native New York where she approached select artists to donate a pin-prick specimen of blood, one for each glass slide. Antin gathered samples from avant-garde poets including Allen Ginsberg, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer and Allan Kaprow [15]. In Blood of a Poet Box, the blood smeared onto each slide stands for the fleshy, human body as corporeal substance. Each has the implication of a scientific scrutiny: a smear is a sample of tissue or other material taken from the body and spread thinly on a microscope slide for examination, typical for medical diagnosis. These boxes are still used within laboratory practice today, as archives of biological samples: glass slides to be examined under the microscope, although they are now made of plastic rather than wood.
Here blood is both corpus and material: the oxygenating fluid circulating in the body contains a wealth of information, including blood type, genetic identity and the materials for DNA mapping and cloning. In the information age, blood can be read and processed as data: seen in terms of its availability, as information. But who owns this information? Blood of a Poet Box is Antin’s artwork, but each slide is labelled with the name of the individual who donated their blood to the project, and the work exists as a rich repository of artists, poets and writers. By contrast, in the laboratory, the flasks of blood and cultured specimens are labelled with the name of the scientists who are using them in their research. They become the property of the lab.
It is this subtle distinction in approach—the ability to name, to acquire, to possess—that is of key significance in considering the way in which bodily materials are appropriated and used in the fields of biotechnology, as distinct from art and life. Here the body can be understood as multiple: both as lived experiential being and as bio-matter—material used in practices of biotechnological research and the pharmaceutical industries in their pursuit of biological patents and profit. Artist research like Blood of a Poet Box can draw attention to the ethics of such practices. In the UK, permission is still required from each donor before a scientist can use such biological material in their research: ethical consent is thus sought and approved. However, in the USA, this no longer applies. In 1990, the Supreme Court in the US State of California decreed that humans have no claim to their biomaterials as property once they leave the body. This legal precedent prevents all patients and living relatives from sharing in any profits earned from commercial products or research derived from their cells [16]. In a fluctuating political and capitalist climate, therefore, the material biology of the body becomes a potent and potential economic resource—open to industrial specialisations in bioinformatics, synthetic biology and pharmaceutical research.
The practice of cell culture was first developed using cancerous cells taken from Henrietta Lacks in the early 1950s. Named HE-LA after an abbreviation of their donor’s name, they were cultured in vitro to become the first “immortal” cell line. However, the circumstances of her donation and her family’s subsequent treatment, neglect and abuse by the medical establishment have only recently been documented [17]. Such practices reveal a critical power dynamic at the heart of biomedical technologies; the right to ownership, particularly in regard to the body’s materials once they leave the confines of the human, the envelope of the skin.
Christine Borland’s installation HeLa (2000) is one of the earliest artworks to consider HeLa cells as pervasive, yet undocumented materials in practices of biotechnological research. While resident artist in a biomedical laboratory in Dundee, Borland realised that many of the scientists simply had no knowledge of their material lineage or history, and she draws attention to this analytical distance in the work: the cells can be observed only via a microscope, connected to a television monitor that displays their magnified images onscreen. The audience see the HeLa cells through multiple layers of mediation.
In 2017, just prior to initiating my residency, Bristol University published research demonstrating a new “immortal” cell line [9]. Named BEL-A (Bristol Ethyroid Line Adult), this now provides a continuous supply of red blood cells for experimental laboratory practice, including gene-editing using CRISPR cas-9 to remove key antigens, thus making blood more “bio-compatible” [18]. Other practices include the “scaling-up” of blood manufacture: producing vast quantities of red blood cells through the culture of haemopoeitic stem cells derived from adult donated blood, in order to conduct human clinical trials timetabled to start in 2020.Footnote 4
During my residency, I spent time in the biomedical laboratory, standing, sensing and observing the tiny movements of these cultivated red blood cells in their large glass flasks of iridescent liquid: scarlet, claret, carmine, crimson and cardinal hues, all infused with a golden shimmer. Prior to developing my art practice, I worked in media and film production, and this experience continues to inform my artist research. Here, I was struck by the similarities and interferences between the two forms of media cultures: those of the biological and those of the televisual. My emerging body of work in this field draws a parallel therefore between the growth medium in which blood cells are cultured in the laboratory and the media of broadcast technologies: between RPMI medium and contemporary televisual culture: between the transmission of data and the transmission of disease. This position resonates with anthropologist Hannah Landecker, for whom cell cultures have become “technologies of living substance” [19].
Technologies within the laboratory are designed by scientists to enable them to see particular microscopic features of the cells, their behaviour, their movements. Phase contrast microscopes specifically probe beyond the glossy, red reflective surfaces to image the cells in high contrast, black and white. In this instance, the phenomenon of colour is discarded, perceived as too distracting, too elusive for the study. The scientists are trained to look at the cells, their behaviour, conduct and equipment reinforces this technologised view of the world: their techné.
In Nature of Transmission (2017) (Fig. 2), these monochromatic video loops are played into old Black and White television sets. Here the cells become reconstituted, embodied in new host bodies or vessels. Under glass, these lively microscopic movements become televised events, the TVs providing a further technologised body for the cells, as they play out their remote adventures, outside the human.
In 1963, the artist Nam June Paik described the emergent spectacle of Television as contemporary nature “not because it changes beautifully—but that it simply changes” [20]. This overlap between biological life and the technologically “live” was a continual theme throughout Paik’s work, where he articulates the viewer’s corporeal involvement in an ever-present flow of signals. My sculptures allude to the simultaneous arrival of televisual culture and biological cell culture in the mid-20th century and their subsequent simultaneous proliferation throughout domestic space. These Bakelite boxes, wrapped around alien movements on-screen, are objects belonging to a different time frame: reminders of a past era of 1950s science fiction: once seen on TV, now a reality.
The colour photographs in Fig. 3 draw parallels between the slippery media of digital video production and the phenol red medium of tissue culture, making media apparent: visible to the naked eye. Through capturing moiré patterns, the photographs capture synthetic interferences, blurring any distinction between the natural and technological. In this project, biomedia is both complex and hybrid, fluid and process, simultaneously biological, social, cultural, economic and technical.
The work is a starting point for thinking about material confluences between biomedia, transmissions of data/disease and emergent technological practices. After Eugene Thacker, the biological and the digital domains “are seen to inhere in each other [...] biomedia establishes more complex, more ambivalent relations than those enframed by technological-determinist views” ([21], p. 7). Both works initiate links between the shifting luminous membrane that slips easily between the screens of electronic devices, with the iridescent media of the wet lab. The hypnotic, pulsatile beat of the televisual with the microscopic movements of the cultured cell: mediatic atmospheres increasingly absorbed into the body’s rhythm and pulses.
Visual culture is often used instrumentally by science, both as a tool to visualise and illustrate scientific practice and for imaginative means of engaging the public. What are not so commonly discussed, however, are the metaphors that surround emerging techno-scientific models of practice. Using nanotech as a specific example, Katherine Hayles states that “science fiction remains essential to nanotechnology precisely because it is not yet clear when and how the technology will become actualized”, and yet “the choice of metaphor is consequential, for it lays down a linguistic track that thought tends to follow and suggests connections that bind new ideas into networks of existing conceptual structures” ([22], pp. 13–14).
The cultural imaginary fulfils a need for the emerging product: to provide possibilities and expand their market reach, relevance and economic viability to potential recipients and beneficiaries. Employing imaginative scenarios and often fantastical hype: “imagination is a social practice deployed in the production of science and technology. Creating future imaginaries is a major part of scientists’ work in the new biotechnologies” ([23], p. 176).
The role of both linguistic and visual metaphors in the slippery spaces between culture, science and technology is of paramount importance therefore, particularly for art science collaborations. Here, metaphors operate both to concretise thinking and to open it up: to contest dominant ideologies by bringing together other approaches, stories and associations and reveal the complex issues at the heart of life manipulation.
Art Science pioneers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr argue that the role of experiential knowledge for artists is significant. Time spent in the laboratory, understanding and practicing cell culture can enable the artist to perceive and critique the dominant metaphors and ways of conceptualising life that science promotes: “the ethical, cultural and political importance of experiential engagement with life manipulation ... can be an effective methodology to confront the complexities and to contest dominant ideologies regarding the life sciences” ([24], p. 126).
In my experience gained from the residency, the cultured red blood cells are often described using anthropomorphic terms. The scientists I spoke with used terms such as happy and lively to describe how these cells are living in their flask cultures. In vitro flasks of media and bioreactors, billions of these cells are meticulously grown, studied and analysed. This tendency to anthropomorphise cell culture has been noted by Catts and Zurr, who state that “what is unique to the dominant metaphors developing in cell biology is that they ... tend to become anthropomorphic in their individual and communal ‘behaviour’” ([24], p. 138).
One of the laboratory practices I observed includes growing stem cells within a series of three dimensional scaffold structures that serve as an analogue of bone marrow [25]. Produced from a polymer foam, these tiny synthetic specimens each measure 5 mm cubed. Within these cubes, millions of stem cells are cultured in rich growth media. According to the scientists, these cells are happiest when they can live inside these replicant structures; here they can differentiate freely. At this scale, the spectre of the full size human figure becomes enormous, architectural in scale.
Spending time in the laboratory studying these cells, I found myself intrigued by how it might feel to live inside these synthetic marrow structures, as micro-dwelling places. What might these spaces look and feel like? What might we learn from the cells themselves?
To open up and reveal these, tiny spaces required the use of microscopic methods of computed tomography or CT scanning (see Fig. 4). Through scanning a tiny sample of the scaffold, I was able to create a virtual matrix, a three-dimensional mesh.
Rendered in sintered nylon, this sculptural object is a tiny fraction of the original cube. Yet magnified from the nano-scale, it gives a real sense of the intricate dwelling spaces within (Fig. 5). My future plans include building this scaffold at a scale where we, as humans, can climb inside; where we can experience, kinaesthetically, the chambers of synthetic bone marrow. These works “do not simply conceptualise the volatility of existence under conditions of extreme modernity, but harness it in order to better understand it” (David Roden; from email correspondence).
By 3D printing the scaffold at this scale, it enables us to imagine the genesis of red blood cells within our own bodies alongside those vessels in the lab. It gives us the ability to see out from within the micro-dimension of our bodies, to imagine an interior geography where these circulating forms of red blood cells are born, develop and grow.
What does it means to dwell, to inhabit a body experientially? Is there a continual re-negotiation; an articulation of recurrence? In contrast to the “immortal” BEL-A cell line, unconsciously, inside our bodies, red blood cells develop, enucleate and circulate for just 120 days in their arc of life. Their unique, biconcave shape enables their continual movement through vessels and arteries, carrying oxygen in a pulsating rhythm [26].
My artist research explores these sensorial spaces: the thresholds between blood experienced as vital, living, bodily substance and blood as biotechnological product of scientific manufacture. When clinical trials start later this year, employing these laboratory-cultured or manufactured red blood cells—how might we start to consider these spaces within the sensorial biotechnological body? Are these cells fabricated? Engineered? How do we see and experience the body through the lens of synthetic fabrication?
Here in this intimate distance, our bodies delicately negotiate this borderline between the biological, cultural, material and technological, as “political, theoretical and technological changes intersect to produce new knowledges and understandings” ([27], p. 9). Artist research becomes a vital space therefore, in which to negotiate this ethical relation, between the human and posthuman.