Chapter 4: Imaginative Incorporation: Art and Genomics

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chapter 4

Imaginative Incorporation: art and Genomics

human genomics is made through interfaces with internet technologies and broadcast telvision. These sites of incorporation create unexpected opportunities for a critical relationship to genomics. however, despite the uncertain provenance of personal genomics it can be difficult for artists engaged with the life sciences to be critical in this area. The broad sign of genomics evokes incredible authorising power and it can be daunting to be in a position of dissent. There are several structural conditions that contribute to this state of affairs for art and genomics. The arts, like the other media forms considered, open up genomics to new audiences whilst creating new spaces for it to be reformulated. however, some of the critical commentary in this area proposes that artwork, especially sciart, can operate as the public relations of genomic science (Stevens, 2008). There is also a significant literature in this area that warns against the potential for the arts to contribute to geneticisiation (Zurr and catts, 2005; anker and nelkin, 2004; Van dijck, 1998; nelkin and Lindee, 1995). In addition to this commentary that designates genomic related art as a pr vehicle for genomic science, there is also a body of work that proposes bioart as distinct from sciart, as an alternative, ethical or tactical impulse, which can offer a critique of genomics (Zylinska, 2009; da costa and philip, 2008). art, like reality television is both castigated for unacknowledged advertising and blamed for bringing genomics into disrepute.

In this chapter, rather than argue that these public relations functions are unredeemable, or that only bioart (as opposed to sciart) offers a potential intervention, I argue instead that, there are some conditions under which art projects do operate as a kind of interstice (a space of opening up within a dominant economy) and this can be linked to haraways’ concept of relationality, and mcLuhan’s conceptualisation of art as a kind of probe. an analysis of the work of artists helen chadwick and Kathy high suggests the conditions under which artwork might be interstitial in regards to genomics.

Structural conditions: Molecular gazes and genohype

Genomics has been incorporated through art galleries, theatres, catalogues, photography and a number of arts-related public engagement sites. These include both institutional settings such as the national portrait Gallery (UK), and sites of radical activism such as the arenas of tactical biopolitics identified by da Costa

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The Genome Incorporated72

and philip (2008). This chapter examines some of the dynamics at work in the relationships between art and human genomics. Firstly, I sketch the contours of this intersection in broad-brush terms, highlighting the contradictions of any attempt to classify genomic art specifically, and the problems of discussing art and science more generally. There follows a critical evaluation of the intersections between arts and biomedical sciences in debates about the public understanding of science, and about the role or significance of art in staging a new ethics of encounter. The chapter expands an understanding of bioart through a synthesis of interviews with artists and this evaluation, and finally by foregrounding two specific artworks, helen chadwick’s work with assisted conception embryos and Kathy high’s work with transgenic rats.

art and genomics intersect in many sites and to record all instances of art that has a genomic or genetic theme or reference would be beyond the scope of this chapter. However, a notable attempt to survey this diverse area is Suzanne anker and dorothy nelkin’s book The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age. (anker and nelkin, 2005). This book was a collaboration between an artist and art historian – anker and a (now deceased) sociologist – nelkin. The book built on nelkin’s earlier work on popular cultures of genomics (nelkin and Lindee, 1995), and derived from her concern about the relationships between the media industries and the commercialisation of science more generally (nelkin, 1995). The project was also informed by anker’s practice within genomic art.

In The Molecular Gaze, anker and nelkin argue that genohype, genetic essentialism and gene fetishism characterise the gaze or vision of recent artists and audiences. They contend that art can be a powerful site for enquiry into ‘the real ambiguities of a powerful science’ (anker and nelkin, 2005: 194) but they are also mindful of elitism and commodification within the arts. They highlight some of the fears around genomics, including those linked to eugenics, to the potential for creation of a genetic underclass, and to the possible standardisation and commercialisation of life. however, working through these themes about the dystopic imaginaries of genomics is only one aspect of their book. The most successful aspect of this publication is its provision of a catalogue of many sites of artistic production linked to human genomics.

There has been an ongoing debate within social studies of genomics and beyond about whether notions of genohype, genetic essentialism, or geneticisation accurately characterise the genomics field (Fliesing, 2001; Hedgecoe, 2001, 2002; Lippman, 1992; nelkin and Lindee, 1995; roof, 2007; Van dijck, 1998). moreover, questions have been raised about whether the art in anker and nelkin’s collection is actually genomic. oron catts of Symbiotica, for example, was critical of the inclusion of his work within this collection. Symbiotica is the australian centre for excellence in the Biological arts, directed by catts.1 In fact catts’, and co-

1 Catts is fiercely critical of the actualisation of ‘genohype’ a term he takes from Neil Holtzman (1999), (who directed Genetics and Public Policy at the USA’s Johns Hopkins University), to mean the overstating of promises about genomics.

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Imaginative Incorporation: Art and Genomics 73

author and collaborator Ionar Zurr, take anker and nelkin to task for contributing to genohype. They protested against the inclusion of Symbiotica’s work in The Molecular Gaze because their ‘pig Wings project’, which was included in the collection under the subtitle ‘Transgenic art’, is not linked directly to genomics (Zurr and catts, 2005). It is certainly true that the ‘pig Wings project’ has no detectable connection to transgenic art and in this sense it does seem to have been inappropriately catalogued, as it is placed with eduado Kac’s genetically engineered alba the ‘GFp Bunny’ on one side and Joe davis’ synthetic dna molecule ‘micro Venus’ on the other.

Zurr and Catts dispute with Anker and Nelkin’s classification brings into focus some of the contradictions around attempts to diagnose or to critique ‘a genetic age’. despite their critical orientation, anker and nelkin’s collection does in some ways contribute to the geneticisation of life insofar as it makes claims about the pervasive influence of genomics in the late twentieth and early tweny-first centuries. however, Zurr and catts also engage in the same discourse. In fact many projects in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities that critique the geneticisation of the life and information sciences, of heath and medicine, of popular culture and of art, often themselves reinforce the thesis of genetics’ influence. Hence, Anker and Nelkin’s attempt to catalogue the art of the genetic age itself contributes to a totalising narrative that signals that biology has become genetics, and that genetics has become informatics, and that life itself is now to be understood through a genetic imaginary (Franklin, 2000). It could be argued that any attempt to critique the power of genomics in fact reiterates its power through those gestures of deconstruction. This contradiction is as much a feature of the arts, and other sites of cultural work, as it is of critical commentary. as Aylish Wood illustrates in her discussion of films that might be read as dystopic fearful, and cautionary about technosciences (including genomics), their very appearance on the cinematic screen provides a form of affirmation and publicity for the technosciences concerned (Wood, 2002).

It seems clear that Zurr and catts wish to distance themselves from genohype and they criticise anker and nelkin for including their pig Wings project in The Molecular Gaze. however, Zurr and catts’s argument is not straightforward because although the material practices of their project are not genomic – this was a tissue culture project – other work at Symbiotica is genomic, and Zurr and catts also link the ‘pig Wings project’ to genomics though their own critique of genohype. a survey of genomic work at Symbiotica would include the work of paul Vanouse, for example, who was a research fellow there in 2005. his work examines the relationships between eugenics and genomics through the staging of a variety of novel encounters including the works, ‘The relative Velocity Inscription device’ (2002) and ‘Latent Figure protocol’ (2007). moreover, Zurr and catts explicitly document the non-genomic pig Wings project as having a critical relationship to genomics. Zurr and Catts first submitted the piece to the Wellcome Trust who were commissioning for an exhibition on 50 years of dna. This was to celebrate the new genetics, the foundations for which were attributed to James Watson, Francis

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crick and maurice Wilkins’ discovery of the double helixed structure of dna in 1953. The ‘pig Wings project’ was subsequently rejected by the Wellcome Trust and Zurr and catts claim that this was because the Wellcome curators considered it to be an inappropriate representation of genomics. Zurr and catts document their critical encounter with the Wellcome Trust, offering the following comment: (2005):

In this paper, Genohype will be examined in relation to the somewhat conflicting views with regard to the role of artists dealing with the application of newly acquired knowledge, using our very own pig Wings project as the case study. (Zurr and catts, 2005)

In this article Zurr and catts engage with and reiterate the term genohype as they express anxiety about it. They also situate the pig Wings project as central to a debate about genohype at the same time that they illustrate that it is a non-genomic project.

Symbiotica’s exchanges with The Wellcome Trust and their dispute over Anker and Nelkin’s classification suggest some of the concerns of this chapter. At the centre of these concerns is a question about what happens when genomics and the arts are put together. although this is a broad question I will try and address it by examining some sites in bioart (e.g. the work of Symbiotica and others), and some science and art projects. These latter projects – in the UK context referred to as sciart – have been connected to genomics from inception and have been characterised by a strong funding stream in this area. Throughout 2003–2005 I conducted a series of interviews with artists (and some scientists) who had worked in UK genomic sciart collaborations. These interviews provided both the details of individual projects, and a more general sense of the conditions of the relationships between genomics and artists in this area. Although the fine arts and the sciences are both elite cultural forms, art and science collaborations often involve uneven power relationships. In sciart projects artists sometimes have less professional status than the scientists with whom they are required to engage, or they chose to draw from. They are also often expected to do the work of collaboration with scientists and to go into the laboratories or clinical contexts. The aims of funded art and science programmes are often high. They entail an expectation that artistic activity could contribute to scientific output, or help scientists see their work in new ways that can inspire creativity. Such expectations are rarely realised in practice, and are difficult to document. In some cases the role of the artist can be limited to that of an illustrator, interpreter or teacher, showing science to audiences, generating different publics for it, or communicating science. Sometimes an artist has an opportunity to ask questions, re-contextualise or even challenge scientific ideas, theories or conventions. In all of these activities artists have to work at understanding the science and at establishing a kind of credibility with scientists that is not entirely reciprocal. In other words scientists are not often expected to demonstrate a reciprocal understanding of artistic practices or knowledges in the

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same way. This concern about credibility, where the artists felt that it fell upon them to demonstrate knowledge of the science, came up in most of the interviews and in some cases this concern shaped the projects that resulted.

Repertoires of credibility: The genomic portrait and other icons

Issues of scientific and technical expertise, and thus credibility, were central concerns for artists in sciart programmes. however, anxiety about these issues also characterises debates in bioart. one of the ways in which these anxieties seem to appear is in the shape the available repertoires of genomic visualisation and in the formation of genres of genomic art. For example, a central motif of genomic art in the late 1990s, and one that seemed to define the area, was that of the genomic portrait.

The Molecular Gaze starts with a discussion of the UK artist, marc Quinn’s portrait of Sir John Sulston. This piece, called A Genomic Portrait: John Sulston, was made from dna extracted from Sulston’s semen and grown in agar, and the resulting bacteria forms the picture that hangs in the national portrait Gallery in London. This portrait has become a familiar reference point for discussions about genomics and art and this kind of ‘portraiture’ has become a feature of genomic art. Sir John Sulston is a lauded UK scientist and he was one of the key players in the Human Genome Project of the 1990s. He is often identified as the benign scientist in the race to map the genome. he is represented as ensconced in the UK tradition of public research institutions, as a figure who advocated public ownership of genomic knowledge (in contrast with the USa’s craig Ventnor’s commercial interests). mark Quinn is a British artist whose work has focused on the human body and who often incorporates bodily materials, such as blood, semen and dna into his artistic productions. There has been some debate, (for example in The Molecular Gaze) about whether or not Quinn’s portrait constitutes a form of genetic essentialism or genetic reductionism, and such discussion is often linked to Quinn’s claim that the Sulston portrait is ‘the most realistic work’ in the national portrait Gallery.

however, what interests me here is not the question of essentialism but rather questions about the kind of relationships that are materialised through the production of this portrait, and about the kind of aesthetic repertoire that it instantiates. ‘The Genomic portrait’ celebrates both The human Genome project, and the British art scenes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It effectively integrates art and science institutions, since it involved a collaboration between the Wellcome Trust, the national portrait Gallery, the human Genome project and the Sanger Institute. The two men who embody and represent these worlds are Sulston and Quinn. Their meeting and working together was initiated through an ‘experimental dinner’. Quinn made several subsequent visits to Sulston’s work places and examined the techniques used in genomics. his artistic interpretation of the scientist’s work entails the intersection of several powerful institutions. This

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intersection can be characterised as a mutual exchange of power, a consolidation of both cultural and economic capital across arts and science institutions. during a joint interview between this artist and the scientist, Sir John Sulston presented the background to the art piece in the following comment:

The Wellcome Trust was both interested in the sci-art aspect and in having something of me, and the national portrait Gallery was interested in acquiring a Quinn. It seemed there might be a match, so there was an experimental dinner to see. They took us out and they said: ‘Talk.’ (palmer, 2001)

The talk resulted in a special commission for Quinn in 2002, initiated by The Wellcome Trust and the national portrait Gallery for a payment of £40,000 (Webster, 2006).

Genomic portraits have become a generic feature of genomic art. during an interview with a biologist working in the arts, conducted in 2007, I asked about the most distinctive features and most established practices in genomic art. In response, adam, the interviewee highlighted dna portraiture as something ‘that’s been done a gazillion times too now’. Adam went on to refer to the work of Inigo manglano-ovalle as someone who is still doing interesting work in this area, but he stressed that this form of genomic art had been overused. he referred to its use in relation to famous subjects as having an element of essentialism and preservation: ‘you know, the stuff with Watson and Sulston, it makes me feel like it’s some sort of weird, sperm-banky kind of thing, like here’s a really famous person, this is their essence…’. however, adam did admire manglano-ovalle’s work ‘Heavenly Bodies’ (2005), firstly as using ‘just people’ and because ‘he is asking questions’. adam was more sanguine about using ‘just people’ in genetic portraiture, i.e. non-celebrities.2 he also stressed the capacity of some forms of portraiture to ask questions about genomics. Manglano-Ovalle first used DNA portraiture in 1995, after the o.J. Simpson trial. his observation of the use of dna evidence in that trial had led him to question both the ‘truth’ and the cultural significance of DNA evidence (Barliant, 2007). Thus, whilst the Quinn portrait may reinforce the idea that dna can represent a person, manglano-ovalle’s work challenges the assumption that dna evidence tells truths about bodies.

The identification of DNA with the notion of the truth of the person, both through the use of forensic genomics, and through the circulation of dna portraits as commodities, has become widespread and there are now a number of commercial services providing such ‘personalised’ portraiture services. This technological imaginary has similarities to that of early photography, which was also promoted as representing the essence of a person by early commercial portrait photographers. These services operate through the submission of dna samples via an online interface in modes that are similar to those operating in

2 There is an increased visibility of ‘just people’ in art – for example in richard Billingham’s photographic portraits, as well as those of paul Graham and Larry Sultan.

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health and ancestry testing. consumers can send in their samples to have personal dna portraits created. This visual effect is derived from gel electrophoresis in which molecules are moved through a gel via an electric force and then dyed or fluoresced to provide a visual image. The resulting image of DNA bands or ladders across a surface resembling something like a photographic negative has become a distinctive and frequently used genomic icon. hence, this kind of image is employed as a visual aid in television crime drama, for example, to indicate genetic testing or dna analysis.

The aesthetic repertoire associated with this proliferating image has broad cultural intelligibility. ‘The Genomic portrait’ of John Sulston differs from the gel ladders, it was derived from the growth of bacteria containing Sulston’s dna fragments spread out on agar jelly. Like the bands that appear in gel electrophoresis the bacteria indicates the pattern of the dna contained in the jelly. however, although the portrait differs from the more common gel ladders, it also highlights the capacity of dna to act as a ‘portrait’ and provides a high-culture example of this. Two of the other artists that I interviewed highlighted this ‘portrait’ feature of genomic art as problematic in their negotiation of what genomics means. The fact that this kind of portraiture was established as generic convention generated expectations for the artists, the scientists, and the audiences that the artists worked with, about what genomic arts should do or look like.

Other icons in the visual cultures of genomics include green fluorescent proteins, used as markers in genetic engineering, but which also appear in sites ranging from Eduardo Kac’s bioart to the filmic remakes of the ‘Incredible Hulk’ in 2003 and 2008. The proliferation of the double helix as a visual signifier is too widespread to track here but Jose Van dijck’s Imagenation (1998), nelkin and Lindee’s The DNA Mystique (1996), donna haraway’s ‘portraits of life itself’ (1997, 1998), Judith roof’s The Poetics of DNA (2007) and Jackie Stacey’s The Cinematic Life of the Gene (2010) offer trackings of that image. The visual motif of clone-as-twin also figures in this repertoire, and there are other less distinct images such as cell lines, chromosomes, and polymorphous mutations that populate these visual cultures. music may also be drawn on for the representation for genomics. The links between music and science are often exploited in sciart projects, and the idea that the genome could be rendered as music has been explored in popular film (Mission to Mars, 2007).3 In drawing attention to this imagery, I am not trying to list exhaustively the icons of genomics but rather to make the argument that artists engaged in genomic projects deal with established generic conventions and repertoires. at stake in some of these conventions are the issues of credibility and intelligibility.

credibility, was of great concern to all the artists I interviewed in the research for this book. They all mentioned credibility as something that artists needed to

3 a good sciart type music example is The Score, 2005, made first as a play by electric company Theatre in canada with funding from Genome canada and later made into a musical film by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC).

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establish with scientists, in order to secure their positions. It was rarely mentioned as an issue for scientists in such collaborations. This imbalance points to the structural and institutional power relations at play in the UK context at least, which mean that scientists are likely to be more confident about their credibility. This can be explained in terms of them possessing in pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) terms, higher levels of cultural and social capital. Scientists’ work relations are structured through membership of groups, resourcing and support, materialised through durable institutions, peer reviewed journals, national governments and global institutions. Whilst artists also work within similar frameworks the durability and stability of their groups are generally more contingent, and the relationship between artistic cultural capital and economic capital is far less stable than that which sustains scientists in biomedicine.

Investment in genomic aesthetics: Two cultures and third spaces

The ‘sci-art aspect’ that John Sulston refers to in the interview about his meeting with marc Quinn, quoted above, is the Wellcome Trust’s long running sciart programme. This was an influential investment that took different forms and which sparked more than one moment of controversy. In 1996 the sciart funding programme was launched to provide grants for collaborative projects between artists and scientists. The programme was initially a consortially funded scheme that brought together the arts council; the British council; the calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; the national endowment for Science, Technology and the arts (neSTa); and the Wellcome Trust. From 2002 the Trust became the sole administrator. In 2003 the sciart programme was terminated as a distinct initiative and became subsumed under the Wellcome’s arts awards, which themselves constituted a subsection of the engaging Science programme which includes the:

people awardsSociety awardsarts awardsBroadcast development awardsScience media StudentshipsInternational engagement awards

In 2008 the Wellcome Trust reported spending £17 million on these public engagement activities. This amounts to only a fraction of the Trust’s direct expenditure on biomedical research, which is in excess of £600 million. however, globally the Wellcome is the largest charitable trust providing funding for engagement with science activities. Its expenditure exceeded the overall UK government expenditure (£13 million in the same year) on such initiatives via the Science and Society programme. although, it should also be noted that whilst the UK government’s Science and Society programme funds engagement activity

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across the range of all the sciences, the Wellcome Trust provides funding only for the biomedical sciences. By 2006 the Trust estimated that they had spent £100 million to support public engagement with biomedical science over the previous decade (Walport, 2006).

art and science collaborations are not restricted to the Wellcome funding stream (as we can see from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings). art and science histories intersect in multiple ways, especially in practices around visualisation and imaging techniques (from engravings and illustration to digital imaging), and in questions about ways of seeing and knowing about the body. however, in the twentieth century there have also been several variations on the tradition of the ‘artist-in-residence’ in technical, scientific and medical institutions in the UK and the USa. There was a new wave of these in the mid-twentieth century, and some 1960s schemes were linked to emerging computing technologies (e.g. Bell Laboratories (harris, 1999)). a further revitalisation of these initiatives occurred in the 1990s and these were orientated around developments in biotechnology.

With the renewed investment in art and science collaborations in both the 1960s, and in the 1990s c.p. Snow’s famous 1959 rede lecture at the University of cambridge, which pronounced on the separation of the ‘two cultures’ of literature and science, became a rhetorical reference point. although Snow pronounced on the separation of the arts and sciences in the foundational lecture of 1959 he revisited this four years later and proposed a ‘third culture’ of mediation and popularisation (1963).4 however, despite Snow’s own proposals about a ‘third culture’, and the widespread use of terms like sciart and bioart, the ‘two cultures’ phrase is used to argue that there is still a gulf today between the institutions and individuals in the sciences and those located in the arts and humanities. For example, the following press release appeared in Nature to advertise a recent London event called the ‘Two cultures: art and Science Today?’, hosted by the London Science museum, in partnership with the Tate modern gallery in London:

In 1959 c.p. Snow warned of a growing gap between the two cultures of science and the arts. Join leading scholars from the worlds of art, science, philosophy and history to discuss whether contemporary culture is still divided in this way. (nature network, 2009)

despite this recent invocation of Snow, the arguments in his ‘Two cultures’ lecture were developed with very specific reference to the 1940s and 1950s culture of literary intellectuals (including F.r. Leavis) in the UK, and to the relationship between science and politics of that era, which he largely articulates through a discussion of education. Snow’s perspective was that understandings of science

4 a book project invested in the third culture mission in the 1990s was The Third Culture edited by Brockman (1991), which collected ‘intellectual’ contributions from 23 scientists and philosophers. It mobilises Brockman’s argument that science is the intellectual centre of society.

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were unnecessarily narrow, literary cultures were elitist, and that education was the means to arrive at more modern and a more well rounded culture of global citizenry. The lecture did not provide any empirical evidence of the emergence of such cultures and it is preoccupied with the elite literary education that had remained the basis of a ‘gentleman’s’ education from the late nineteenth century. It is also important to register that the lecture, and his work more generally, as both a novelist as well as a physicist, sustained Snow’s role as an advocate of a kind of popularisation of science (hultberg, 1997).

The ‘two cultures’ controversy has its own life as a debate (hultberg, 1997), and reference to it continues to be deployed rhetorically in arguments for resourcing science education and projects around public engagement with science. In addition the ‘Two cultures’ lecture and the related book – The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution are frequently cited in discussions of the relationship between the arts and sciences. nevertheless, there is good reason to see the ‘two cultures’ model as one which has limited relevance in the contemporary world. organisations and initiatives such as Leonardo, ars electronica, ZKm, Siggraph, arts catalyst, various artist-in-resident programmes, the societies organised around arts and science, or science and humanities of different kinds, and the numerous exhibitions and publications spanning these two fields (e.g. Art and Science by Sian ede (2008)) point to the links that have been forged between artistic and scientific production since Snow delivered his famous lecture.

In making my claim that Snow’s arguments are no longer directly relevant to the contemporary situation, I am not trying to deny the differences between such cultures or point to some easy collapse of categories. however, one of the reasons that references to the ‘two cultures lecture’ persist is that its scope has been extended to encompass science and technology on the one hand and the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts on the other. This is despite the fact that, as Sandra harding (2009) notes, Snow’s arguments did not anticipate the development of the social sciences that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, and it was only really articulated with reference to science and literature. Thus, over time, Snow’s contentions have been decontextualised and transferred without reference to the intellectual and political debates in which they were embedded, and the specificity of his appeal for more rounded modes of education is often ignored.

recent rhetorical strategies of using references to the two cultures to stage an opposition between art and science have had three distinctive patterns. Firstly, it is frequently used to empower an actor to bridge this divide (e.g. Wellcome Trust), through activities that are sometimes articulated as a ‘third culture’ (Brockman, 1991). Secondly, it is almost always used in ways that imply that science (not the arts) is the unknown culture. Thirdly, it is used to obscure the conditions of engagement between the arts and the sciences rather than to illuminate them. Thus, just as the two cultures lecture originally rhetorically operated as a call to affirm the cultural significance of the natural sciences and to bolster resourcing of them, recent re-circulations of its rhetoric have a similar effect. They reiterate

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the importance of these sciences, suggesting that they have been culturally undervalued, and/or advocating allocation of resources to them. They also obscure the history of art-science initiatives, and recent activities such as those illustrated in Tactical Biopolitics (da costa and philip, 2008) and Human Futures (miah, 2008).

The many cultures of art and genomics

extending the life of the two cultures debate, through a discussion of the ‘two cultures as multiple’, Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie (2008) draw on the work of the historian and philosopher of science Isabelle Stenger. They pay particular attention to her book, The Invention of Modern Science (Stenger, 2007) which, according to their reading, argues for a way of thinking about the singularity of science, whilst at the same time characterising that singularity as thoroughly contaminated and entangled through everyday life. The direction that their argument takes implies that it is more productive to think about the life sciences in terms of everyday entanglement. at the same time they provide an exegesis of Stenger’s thesis on holding entanglement and singularity together. They argue against bioart’s claim to criticality by implying that it fails to engage with the everyday life entanglement of the life sciences and instead reiterates its singularity, or reinforces the practices and values of the science. They suggest that bioart goes further in reinforcing this singularity of the life sciences than other disciplines and practices. In this argument they link the specificity of the life sciences to laboratory practices and techniques. It is thus their contention that bioart replicates the singularity of the life sciences by entering into its laboratory spaces and adopting its techniques:

apart from the laboratory case studies done in the social studies of science, non-scientist researchers hardly ever go into laboratories. even bioethicists rarely go beyond the meeting room in the clinic. By contrast, much bioart bases itself on tissue culture techniques, and occasionally on standard techniques of molecular biology such as pcr (polymerase chain reaction, a method of rapidly ‘amplifying’ a specific DNA sequence). (Mackenzie and Murphie, 2008)

In the last 50 years the information sciences and the life sciences have developed practices of exchange with artists. This has included: since the 1960s, artists’ engagement in computer science; and in the early twenty-first century, as Mackenzie and Murphie indicate their entry into laboratory spaces and their use of materials of the biosciences. hence, in the context of these activities and of much sciart and bioart, art and science become integrated, each of these fields being thereby implicated in the other. This integration seems to limit the capacity of the arts to open up spaces of investigation in relation to the life sciences and indicates that the arts are sometimes compelled to reinforce the singularity of the

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life sciences. However, while it may be more difficult to open up the life sciences to question within the structure of sciart funding, bioart has made claims for its capacity for criticality, intervention and activism and Mackenzie and Murphie’s (2008) argument that bioart also reinforces the singularity of the life sciences suggests that there is a broader debate.

Two of the cultures of bioart

Bioart is not specifically genomic. The term refers to the coming together of the arts and the life sciences more generally. The term ‘bioart’ is attributed to eduardo Kac’s 1997 use of it to refer to his own practices. although some of these practices have been used at earlier times, an intensification in bioart practices have lead to it being thought of as a twenty-first-century art. Bioart uses both biological materials or ‘wetware’ (such as tissue, bacteria and organisms), and bioscience techniques as its media. It is the use of these materials and practices that are generally regarded as the main features of bioart. It emerges in part from the sciart funding structures indicated earlier. however, it also has other genealogies including tactical activism (de certeau, 1984; da costa and philip, 2008).

In the interview already cited, adam, who works at an institution producing and teaching bioart, discussed the specificity of the terms bioart and sciart. He pointed out that ‘people who claim to be in those communities I guess are you know, definitely trying to crystallize around, well, I think one conception of it’ (Research interview). Two distinct conceptions of the ‘it’ of bioart come from eduardo Kac who is based at the Chicago Art Institute, but who is also very influential in the UK context, on the one hand, and the australian based Symbiotica on the other. Kac’s take on bioart has a less specifically material emphasis than that of SymbioticA, and he has always insisted that his infamous ‘GFp Bunny’ (2000), was more important as a concept and as engendering debate than it was as a material entity. his ‘green bunny’ was a genetically engineered rabbit that expressed green florescent proteins. These materials are commonly used in genetic engineering to register the extent of mutation that has occurred in animal experimentation. Thus, green florescence can be thought of another trope marking the visual cultures of genomics.

In contrast with Kac’s emphasis on concept, Symbiotica’s ethos is very materialist. Since its inception in 2000, the Symbiotica research Lab has been a key player in defining, organising and developing bioart worldwide. Housed in the School of anatomy and human Biology in the University of Western australia, it offers a masters of Science programme in Biological arts, and it has also supported over 40 resident artists (as of 2008). other institutions in europe and the USa have modelled themselves on SymbioticA. Its bioart initiatives have flourished, with Symbiotica winning the highly prestigious Golden nica award of the ars electronica festival in 2007. The artists at the core of Symbiotica and individuals associated with them have been highly influential in shaping this emerging field. Jens Hauser who has been a leading figure since his curation of L’ Art Biotech in

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Nantes, France in 2003, produced a striking review of the field in an article called ‘Bioart: taxonomy of an etymological monster’ (hauser, 2005). oran catts, who is the director of Symbiotica has also discussed the role of the bioartist in several controversial articles, one of which argues against the conflation of bioart with genomics and mounts a critique of the kind of ‘genohype’ with which he sees both sciart and bioart being associated (Zurr and catts, 2005).

In hauser’s ‘taxonomy’ (2005) of bioart the emphasis is very much on the material practices and techniques of the biological sciences. although hauser and catts frame bioart as tactical (hauser, 2007; catts and Zurr, 2007; catts and cass, 2007), bioart for hauser seems to be mainly about the acquisition of technical skills, and Symbiotica trains its students in the requisite techniques for a masters of Science (mSc) degree. hauser implies that an artist cannot ask informed questions about biotechnology without knowing how to do biotechnological work. The ethos of Symbiotica espoused by hauser and others seems to revolve around material engagement with the biosciences which, in turn is seen as enabling the development of critical relations to bioscience.

mark Quinn’s ‘The Genomic portrait’, the artwork discussed at the beginning of this chapter can be thought of as bioart, in the mode of Jens hauser’s very specific taxonomy of this ‘etymological monster’ (2005). Hauser emphasises technological expertise as integral to the practice of bioart and Quinn’s entry into laboratory spaces and his use of biological materials place his practices within those of bioart. however, ‘The Genomic portrait’ was also a sciart production funded by the Wellcome Trust, of whom Symbiotica are heavily critical (Zurr and catts, 2005). mark Quinn’s piece, like those associated with other sciart collaborations provides an aesthetic dimension for genomics, which engages a general gallery going public, and a wider media audience in the circulation of photographs of the portrait and press releases pertaining to it. It thereby generates a specific mode of attention to human genomics. The mode of attention that this piece invites is celebratory and ostensibly depoliticised. In the context of its being commissioned for the national portrait gallery, the piece invites admiration for the human Genome project, as well as the work of Sir John Sulston and marc Quinn. Thus, the human Genome project becomes aestheticised and linked to the cultural capital of fine art, whilst the portrait simultaneously attains the status of a technoscientific artifact. In this instance, insider knowledge of laboratory practices in the life sciences, particularly the manipulation of wetware, which have become part of a hierarchy privileging bioscientific competency in bioart, do not result in a critical relationship with genomics.

In hauser’s taxonomy of bioart, technical knowledge of the biosciences is established as a pre-condition for being able to ask interesting questions. hauser stresses this technical expertise and Symbiotica instructs artists (at workshops and exhibitions world wide) and candidates entering into its programme in techniques in the life sciences. Thus, the emphasis on this training and knowledge of laboratory practices in the life sciences, particularly the manipulation of wetware, confirms the privileging of bioscientific competence in bioart.

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however, laboratory techniques are not limited to manipulating wetware. Life science experimentation and knowledge production extends to a range of diverse practices, including documentation and image making. Indeed the processes and artifacts of bioart also involve images, including photographs and videos of exhibitions, which extend the availability of their practices. another way of conceptualising bioart would be to extend the taxonomy of the ‘monster’ employing a more open view of art and science practices. This would throw those versions of bioart, which reinforce the life sciences with versions which open scientific ideas and practices to a wider range of publics, and to more public scrutiny. I would suggest that bioart in the Symbiotica/hauser form, with its emphasis on technical expertise, which bolsters the capital, hierarchies and singularity associated with life science laboratory practices, impedes its own ability to go beyond the aestheticisation of science.

There has been an intensification of investment in and activity around bioart in the early twenty-first century through the work of organisations such as Symbiotica, the assembling of many exhibitions and collections in various locations across the globe, and the growth of a critical literature pertaining to this movement. however, it has a long genealogy extending back beyond these recent initiatives. hence, I will argue that forms of public art, representational art, and more traditional artist-in-residence’s work have addressed some of the ethical and aesthetic concerns of bioart. These concerns espoused by bioart include challenging genohype, democratising science, and having an accountable relationship to the process of doing art and to the object produced. I argue that the life sciences and arts orientated towards biology are better served when they do not reinforce each other, but when they come together to open up new conditions of possibility. It may be worthwhile to explore experimental encounters between art and genomics which do not either focus exclusively on the artistic production process, or on the materiality of art projects in ways that replicate the practices of genomic science, simply moving these practices from scientific institutions to art gallery or vice versa.

I am not arguing that bioart always or only serves to illustrate or reify genomic or other life sciences, but I am contending that when it comes to human genomics it may be more useful to think about other art interventions associated with the practices of the biosciences. In its many forms bioart does provide new conditions of possibility, new tactics (Da Costa and Philip, 2008) when scientific materials are moved out of institutional settings, and into the studios, homes, and galleries of artists. Indeed on some occasions, it has been linked to bioterrorism and biohacking. Its proximity to and policing (by US government agencies) as a form of bioterrorism, has been explored in some detail in Lynn hershman-Leeson’s film Strange Culture (2007). however, bioart can also reinforce, or lack a critical distance from, the practices with which it engages.

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Bioart expanded: Assisted conception embryos and transgenic rats

I am using the term ‘bioart expanded’ in an attempt to move beyond a re-instantiation of genohype, a reinforcement of science, or a borrowing of technology. expanding bioart in this way involves forgrounding its potential for both extending conversations about the biosciences, and creating new conditions of possibility for engagements with technoscience. In this project I am drawing on recent feminist and queer interventions in this area, and the remainder of this chapter provides an account of some of this work.

The two projects that I now discuss are helen chadwick’s ‘Unnatural Selection’ (1996) Kathy high’s ‘embracing animal’ (2007). These pieces share a commitment to the materiality of the objects involved in the artwork, assisted

Figure 4.1 Image of one of the rats in Embracing Animal, courtesy of the artist Kathy High (Photo by Olivia Robinson)

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conception embryos and transgenic rats. The artists also engineer subjectivities for these objects by the way they work with them. These pieces also focus on the relationships constituted by the artist, subject, object, process and audience. The pieces also share a commitment to exploring some of the power relationships at work in the creation of new scientific objects in the life sciences, and to the power relationships at work between the artist, the art object and the audience. The audiences of these exhibitions and artifacts are made in and through their circulation but also in and through their production, in that all the pieces collect together people and process in their making. For example, clinicians and patients at Kings college hospital, and the members of an hFea panel, as well as the trustees and staff of arts catalyst, were involved during the construction of chadwick’s ‘Unnatural Selection’. Likewise the ‘embracing animal’ project entailed negotiations with the researchers who were using the rats before they were moved to the art project, and with the gallery staff who were implicated in their care and who later adopted the rats. These people were engaged as audience-producers in works that were authored by chadwick and high, but which incorporated many contributors. Those engaged in this way were both enlisted in their making, and made into the publics of these works before the artworks had been fully materialised as exhibition objects. These people became the intimate publics of these works, with highly subjective relationships to them, they were first order audiences, producing and reading the many texts in production – including grant applications, licenses, consent forms, reports, and reviews. These practices can be thought of as porous processes of audience making in which production, consumption, intimacy and subjectification are intertwined in the publicness of the undertakings.

Embryos: Unnatural Selections and Stilled Lives

helen chadwick’s feminist informed art work engaged with the body, and new technologies, incorporating bodily materials and/as biomedical materials. This work anticipated and connected with the British art and body work of the 1990s. Shortly before her death in 1996, chadwick was an artist-in-residence at the assisted conception Unit at Kings college hospital, London. She produced a series of pieces deriving from her own manipulation and photography of human ‘pre-embryos’ (this term designates entities generated by fertilisation 14 days or less after this process, that have not been implanted into a woman’s womb but are maintained in vitro). chadwick worked with fetal and embryonic material in a clinical context, and was subject to the same regulatory oversight by the human Fertilisation and embryo authority (hFea) as other researchers in the UK. In addition, chadwick’s photos were taken with the permission of the women undergoing assisted reproduction. hence, chadwick’s work, and the production of the artifacts in her ‘Unnatural Selection’ series, and the ‘Stilled Lives’ exhibition were realised through her attention to the technical and ethical conventions of the assisted reproduction clinic.

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arts catalyst commissioned Unnatural Selection, as part of the Body Visual exhibition 1996–1998.5 arts catalyst is a UK charity, funded by a number of organisations and trusts, which aims to engage science critically, and to ‘bring together people across the art/science divide’ (arts catalyst). Sian ede, the arts commissioner at the Caloueste Gulbenkian Foundation reflected that Nicola Triscott’s commissioning of the chadwick piece for the arts catalyst’s exhibition influenced her thinking about the creation of The Arts and Science grants programme at the Gulbenkian. ede asserts that The Gulbenkian’s arts Science programme was the ‘mirror’ (ede, 2000), of the Wellcome Trust’s sciart programme detailed above.

Unnatural Selection was the direct product of the collaboration between arts catalyst, the hFea, Kings college hospital’s assisted conception Unit and chadwick herself. But as suggested above it connects the British art scene of the 1990s, sciart, and bioart, with a longer trajectory of feminist orientated art work. The material practices which were crucial for the production of Unnatural Selection included bringing an artist into the assisted reproduction clinic and laboratory. helen chadwick worked with the clinical staff, as well as with the women undergoing IVF in selecting, manipulating and photographing the embryos that became her subjects. This project also drew on medical imaging and imaging technologies, thereby resonating with feminist research on the medical imaging of female bodies (and their parts) (doyle and o’riordan, 2002; Van dijck, 2005) and on the emergence of the embryo as subject through the employment of imaging technologies (petchetsky, 1987; duden, 1993; morgan and michaels, 1999).

The embryos that helen chadwick manipulated, photographed and placed in the art gallery, having re-worked the images into jewellery pieces, did not have an in vivo trajectory. Like other discarded and so called ‘spare’ embryos and eggs deriving from the assisted reproduction procedures, these embryos were not returned to women’s bodies but instead, they had a visual life beyond the clinic. although the photographs that make up the pieces in ‘Unnatural Selection’ are not biomaterials, chadwick’s practices did involve processes of selection, and micromanipulation during her residency. Through their external trajectory these embryo images became incorporated in chadwick’s work and traveled into a variety of gallery spaces, both during the original touring exhibition, and subsequently. They also appeared in magazines, newspapers, catalogues, and books. So, for example, I saw some of the surviving pieces ‘nebula’ (1996) and ‘monstrance’, (1996), (parts of Unnatural Selection were destroyed in a fire in 2003), at the Manchester art Gallery in the exhibition ‘helen chadwick: a retrospective’ in 2004.

Unnatural Selection has also been the subject of many reviews and the focus of essays written by art historians and anthropologists, including the Stilled Lives book collection, which includes contributions by chadwick herself (1997). The highly regarded UK art historian, david mellor, wrote an entry in Stilled Lives

5 nicola Triscott, the founding director of arts catalyst commissioned this piece. (ede, 2000).

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called ‘The cameos’. he also wrote ‘a posy and an apotheosis: helen chadwick’s Unnatural Selection’ for the photography journal Portfolio in 1996. The esteemed anthropologist, Sarah Franklin, also discusses chadwick’s work within her numerous publications on reproductive and biotechnologies. In one piece, evocatively titled ‘Dead Embryo’s: Feminism in Suspension’ (1999), she identifies chadwick’s work as at the intersection of debates about the human Fertilisation and embryo Bill of 1990, and the work of the newly formed human Fertilisation and embryo authority (hFea). Franklin juxtaposes news stories about the disposal of hundreds of embryos from assisted reproduction, which caught the attention of the UK press in 1996, with chadwick’s ‘alternative feminist vision of the embryo’ (1999: 73). drawing on the views of journalist and art critic Louisa Buck (1996), and those of cultural critic marina Warner (1997) Franklin stresses that ‘above all, it is the manifestly relational character of her engagement with embryos that stands out as a feature of these photopieces.’ (1999: 77).

It is this relationality, and what it means over time that I want to explore briefly, and before considering Kathy High’s work with transgenic rats. Franklin argues that ‘the embryo is a relation’ (1999: 77) because it is a material of kinship, and the power of this kind of isomorphic claim is compelling. another way of putting this might be to say that embryos are nodes of relationality pointing to the bodies from which they arise and to the bodies that they might become, as well as being the entities they are. hence, embryos point to genetics, generation, gestation, parenting, life, biomedical research, waste. Sarah Franklin (notably Franklin, 2000, 2006) is one of the many contributors to an extensive feminist literature on the embryo. assisted reproduction techniques have created countless embryos which will never be used in reproduction. The removal of eggs, sperm and embryos from bodies and their relocation into the laboratories and clinics of assisted reproduction has created new embryo relations. embryos now have relations with stem cell researchers and stem cell lines (Franklin, 2006), and are created specifically for cloning research (O’Riordan and Haran, 2009), as well as being circulated through the global assemblages of assisted reproduction and surrogacy.

chadwick’s work is relational in lots of ways, because of the relationships that she created in the process of the work, because of her attention to her own connection to the embryos, and also because it signals these kinds of new biomedical relations, and the relationships of new publics with the embryos. In many ways chadwick emphasised the new embryo relations (for example with biomedical research) of the 1990s by conversely perhaps, introducing a form of distance that could enable audiences to stand back and look at embryos in decorative forms and contemplate their own relationships with them. chadwick’s move of putting embryos (as images) in the gallery, and her work in creating a mode of circulation through which audiences and publics are produced, creates new affective, optical and material relations through the embryos that she used in her photopieces. These are relations that operate, and change over time, almost indefinitely with gallery-going audiences who make up part of the publics of these pieces, and the embryos

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that they re-situate. They are also relations with an indefinite public of readers though whom an ongoing attention and commentary is elicited through press releases, catalogues, publicity, essays and academic research.

The 2004 retrospective on chadwick’s work, opened at the Barbican (London, UK), and according to curator mark Sladen helped to ‘dispel the mist of invisibility’ (Sladen quoted in Sarafianos, 2005) that seemed to have settled around her work since the late 1990s. If there has been such a mist of invisibility anywhere it is perhaps most acute in connection with the contemporary debates about bioart in which Symbiotica, eduardo Kac, and the critical art ensemble (CAE) are identified as the key biological artists or artistic groups. So for example, Jens hauser’s (2005) ‘Bio art: taxonomy of an etymological monster’ makes no reference to chadwick or to the focus on embodied relations in feminist art more generally. he describes bioart as emerging from digital art, a move from de-materialisation to materiality, explaining that. ‘Bio art is increasingly re-materializing itself. The former fascination with the “code of life” is receding and making way for a phenomenological confrontation with wetwork.’ (hauser, 2005).

engagements with genomics have not only been conducted across the terrain of the digital arts, they are not only digital media become materialised. hauser argues that bioart follows from an earlier phase of artistic engagement with technology, which begin by focusing on hardware and eventually move on to software. he argues that bioart, by contrast, started off with the genetic paradigm as software and then moved on to the ‘now rematerialized hardware’ (2005). Including Helen chadwick’s work in the story about bioart helps to recontextualise the embryo as part of genomics, and this helps to resituate the software story of bioart. helen chadwick’s piece, which was commissioned by arts catalyst at the beginning of the UK sciart funding programme is not tied into the same economies of later genomic sciart funded through the institutions invested in genomic research and commodification, nor is it often associated with genohype or geneticisation.6 however, as Franklin documents there was a public understanding of science component to chadwick’s embryo project (Franklin, 1999: 76). Like much of chadwick’s body of work Unnatural Selection is highly ambivalent (Betterton, 1996: 142), and particularly so in its service to biomedical science. discarded embryos mounted as jewellery and displayed in an art gallery commodifies and aestheticises assisted reproduction. This could be seen as connoting the ‘new eugenics’ as anker and nelkin (2004: 113) suggest, and the use of ‘genetic

6 Unusually, Jaqueline Stevens (2008) links chadwick’s work on embryos to the public relations of genetics in her essay in Tactical Biopolitics. Stevens’s critical commentary is based on the posthumous inclusion of chadwick’s work in celebratory exhibitions. I concur with Stevens suggestion that exhibitions, their curation and cataloguing can appropriate artwork in the service of an agenda that is beyond the control of individual artists. however, I contend that a situated reading of chadwick’s work also provides opportunities for alternative framings.

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material’ – eggs and embryos – make it genomic art. moreover, its evocative title, ‘Unnatural Selection’ highlights the ambiguity inherent in the entities themselves – both the artworks and the embryos – as well as conjuring the darwinian concept of ‘natural selection’.

Transgenic Rats: Embracing Animal

In may 2005 Kathy high moved three transgenic albino female rats into the massachusetts museum of contemporary arts (maSS moca). The rats were part of her multi-media/inter-species installation entitled ‘embracing animal’, which exhibited in the maSS moca’s Becoming animal exhibition. The maSS moca’s catalogue described high’s piece as follows:

Kathy high’s multimedia/inter-species installation embracing animal consists of four “tube-scope” video sculptures that present images and situations of “trans-animals.” Videos of animal/human interchanges, transformations, werewolves, and vampires play on four mini-Lcd monitors that are situated in the bottom of 40” high test tubes. Alongside this display is an elongated cage that houses rescued transgenic lab rats who have been micro-injected with human dna. Sculpted heads of the vermin who have been terminated are also on display, accentuating the clinically morbid atmosphere that embracing animal creates.

I am interested here in the role of the transgenic rats, their genomic incorporation, and the way that high used them. The rats had been ‘rescued’ or retired from their role as laboratory test subjects. They had been genetically engineered, with human dna, as disease models for autoimmune diseases. They were described by high as: ‘retired breeders who were tested and guaranteed to have a stable transgenic heritage.’ They could be described as retired breeders with a stable heritage because each of the rats in the exhibition had already had between 1–3 litters of transgenic rats and the litters had been sold to other laboratories for further experimentation (embracing animal). The transgenic rats were hLa-B27 rats, patented in 1996, as disease models for biomedical research (patentStorm). They featured in many experimental contexts oriented to study autoimmune conditions, and the USa’s biomedical citation index pubmed, lists 180 instances of their use since 1993.

Like chadwick, high worked in a biomedical setting, but she situated herself in a laboratory research space rather than in a clinical environment. hence, high’s engagement is with the scientists who produce the rats, the rats themselves, and with creating new rat publics. High identifies herself as a sufferer of autoimmune problems ‘in the form of crohn’s disease and Sarcoidosis’ (embracing animal). one of her proposals was to treat the rats with homeopathic treatments such as those she had tried herself. In addition to placing herself in the installation ‘as a kind of mirror’ of the rats, she also invited audiences into the piece through the way it was spatially organised. Because the rats were housed in a large scale

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tubular environment people could walk around the space that the rats inhabited. In addition to the museum space with the rats and a multimedia display, a website was attached to the installation, with a blog that also invited interaction. high solicited public engagement with the rats, and with transgenics more generally, through inviting both interaction with their habitat, and by inviting suggestions for their treatment on the blog.

High wrote an essay ‘Playing With Rats’ reflecting on this installation, as well as some of her other work with experimental rats and their living conditions. This appeared in the recent collection Tactical Biopolitics (da costa and philip, 2008) in a section called ‘Interspecies co-production’. This section is framed by the editors as follows:

a feminist science studies scholar, a media artist, and a philosopher–veterinarian approach the question of cross-species work with assumptions refreshingly free from the binary frames of human-animal domination and/or consumption. (da costa and philip, 2008: xxi)

high is referred to as a media artist in this introduction (donna haraway and Larry carbone are the other two contributors to the section). In addition to

Figure 4.2 People in the exhibition space of Embracing Animal (courtesy of the artist Kathy High)

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contributing to conversations in interspecies work, high’s installation and essay provide examples of bioart that provide a space of everyday connection to the life sciences at the same time as questioning their practices. resituating the transgenic rats as playmates, observers, and subjects in everyday interactions with people, high very thoroughly mixes up arts galleries, laboratory spaces, the creatures of technoscience (humans and rats) and media technologies. This mixing up provides a space of relation, through touch, testimony, seeing, hearing, living and dying.

Relationality, distance and process

In pursuing an examination of what relationality means in these contexts, nicholas Borriuad’s notion of ‘relational aesthetics’ (1998), provides a useful reference point. Bourriud’s work provides a wide-reaching theorisation of exhibition art in the USa in the 1990s but it also helps to crystallise several intersecting debates about relationality. a contested and vague term, relational nevertheless signifies the impulse to realise or facilitate encounters between entities, and/or forms that might not otherwise be possible. The attempts to bring about encounters between transgenic laboratory rats and gallery going publics in high’s work would be an example of new relational possibilities. Bourriad’s work points to several different impulses in postcolonial and feminist debates about encounters between science and art. These impulses towards realising specific new forms of relation could be labelled as feminist relationality in science studies (haraway, 1997, 2007a), the turn to Levinas and the face of the other in socio-political and philosophical accounts of the subject (Butler, 2006; Silverstone, 2006; Zylinska, 2009), and the turn to interspecies encounter (Tsing, 2009; haraway, 2007b; Bird rose, 2004). These developments within recent critical theory revolve around relationality and they loom in the background to haraway’s pronouncement that: ‘The terms pass into each other; they are shifting sedimentations of the one fundamental thing about the world – relationality.’ (1997: 37)

Bourriad is interested in ‘relational aesthetics’ as an emphasis on process and encounter within contemporary art. This is not a new development in the history of art (at least not since the 1960s). Indeed, to some degree, any art that reaches an audience, in an exhibition or other form of distribution stages a scene of encounter and much installation art is process orientated or ephemeral. however, feminist art movements since the 1970s, and developments around bioart in the 1990s, have been particularly preoccupied with encounter and process, as has the critical and tactical art of the 1990s, as well as some less conventional sciart projects such as the Wellcome’s 2007 sci:dentity project on trans identity (mcnamara and rooke, 2006).

Bourriad’s thesis refers to a different range of art projects than those under discussion here. nevertheless I think that his proposition does crystallise some of the issues raised in debates about technoscientific relationality and ethics, since the mid-1990s in philosophy, cultural studies and the social sciences, as well as

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those in art and art history. In fact Bourriad’s thesis is so wide-reaching that it glosses over much of the detail that emerges in those debates, and I want to return to some of those details. however, Bourriad’s work is useful because many of the contemporary debates about technoscientific ethics have also found art to be a node in materialising a sense of what encounter, entanglement and ethics might mean.

The influential media theorist, Marshall McLuhan also located art as crucial resource for generating a critical awareness of social systems and their environments. mcLuhan designates art as ‘a probe that makes the environment visible’ (mcLuhan, 1967: 340) and he views the arts and sciences as comng together in this function. he proposed that ‘as information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art’ (mcLuhan, 1967: 340). although he is referring here to information technologies rather than biotechnologies the impulse to ‘program the environment itself as a work of art’ is a part of the tactics of bioart. In an essay called ‘The emperor’s new clothes’ he writes, ‘It is however, important to consider the role of the arts and sciences as early Warning Systems in the social environment. The models of perception that they provide can provide indispensable orientation to future problems well before they become troublesome’ (mcLuhan, 1967: 344). This modelling of perception is also integral to bioart in which artists have created the artefacts of technoscience such as transgenic animals or tissue engineering products in order to present them to a wider public. It is my contention that such probes cannot see into an unknown future, and these artefacts usually signal issues in the present. There is little that bioartists have produced that has not already been in the practice of the life sciences. however, putting these artefacts in front of new audiences can facilitate a more public probing of the futures imaginaries embedded in the present and past. art and science are embedded in the institutional, economic and discursive structures in which they are practised, but within these structures an interstitial space is possible, and art and science in critical conjunction, may help to illuminate the conditions of the lived environment, to see them anew.

These senses of art making a difference in the world have an affinity with haraway’s notion of diffraction (1997). In the 1990s haraway drew on the work of artist Lynn randolf and her piece called ‘diffraction’ in explicating her critical appropriation of the term. In haraway’s writing diffraction is an ‘optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world’ (haraway, 1997: 16). hence, randolf’s piece serves both as the as the inspiration for and illustration of haraway’s political concept.

Haraway also finds a space of interspecies encounter and a sense of responsibility towards the creatures created through technoscience in patricia piccini’s sculptures and visual artwork (haraway, 2007). Likewise Joanna Zylinska in advocating a ‘nonnormative ethics of responsibility’ (2009: 163) in her book, Bioethics in the Age of New Media, labels bioart as ‘bioethics in action’ (2009:162). Zylinska suggests that in the work of Stellarc, Symbiotica, critical art ensemble, eduardo

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Kac and adam Zaretsky, bioart can enact a new ethics if the following conditions are met:

It is only in the never receding obligation to address the question of the (other) human and nonhuman, and to come to terms with the human’s ‘originary technicity’, that these different projects will be truly ethical. (2009: 160)

Zylinksa draws on Bernard Steigler’s work here by accepting Steigler’s (1998) distinctly Heideggerian inflected argument that technology is ‘originary’ or is what makes the human.7 This is one of the conditions of ethical possibility for Zylinska. a new bioethics for Zylinska requires an acknowledgement of the already (always) technical nature of the human, and an acceptance of relationality that is close to the kinds of responsibility and accountability that both donna haraway and Karen Barad argue for in very different ways. Zylinska never references Karen Barad’s philosophical work directly. however, her own formulations seem to echoe Barad’s conceptualisation of the ‘agential cut’ (Barad, 2007: 140) in her imaginative and striking figuration of bioethics as: ‘a way of cutting through the flow of life with a double-edged sword of productive power and infinite responsibility’ (Zylinska, 2009: 179).

In his emphasis on relationality Bourriad’s theory resonates with the critical work considered above. Bourriad also draws on marx’s notion of the ‘interstice’. he employs this concept to designate a space inside, but also beyond, the ruling economy of capitalist exchange. This interstice can be productive in changing or at least affecting a ruling economy, whilst remaining inside of the system. This concept enables Bourriad to argue that although art is caught in the established economic or market logics, it may also generate a productive space to disturb such logics. hence he posits that:

the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, (Bourriad, 1998)

The emphasis on ‘models of action’ here resonates with Zylinska’s argument that bioart can operate as ‘bioethics in action’. For both Bourriad and Zylinska particular forms of art, under certain specific conditions can make a difference in the world (haraway, 1997).

Sian ede’s Art and Science provides a selective overview of the relations between these two domains and it maps and catalogues art and science collaborations since the mid-1990s, with a focus on developments in the UK. at several points in the book, ede seems to reject particular visions of art serving science. For example

7 Bernard Steigler, in Technics and Time makes this argument in the following terms: ‘technical exteriorization was but the pursuit of the very movement of life’ (Steigler, 1998: 163).

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in the opening chapter she writes that, ‘Artists don’t ‘do’ prettification, product or propaganda for the public understanding of science’ (2008: 3). She implies that artists are doing something more profound. In a section mainly concerned with genomics she frames bioart as ‘The ethics of the future’ (2008: 158), and suggests that ‘the ethics and protocols concerning the use of human or animal material, whether for what some may regard as frivolous purposes for art or deadly serious ones for science may well be the next major issue.’ (2008: 158). This impulse to see bioart operate as an ethical probe is shared across the literature reviewed so far, and in this example ede indicates that it probes a future question about the use of human and non-human animal materials in cultural production. These questions about the curation of biomaterials are already with us however, and as I have illustrated, chadwick’s project ‘Unnatural Selection’ was already probing these questions in the mid-1990s.

Conclusion: Conditions of possibility

The conditions that make it difficult for genomic art to do anything other than reinforce genomic science include geneticisation or genohype theses, the recent life of the two cultures lecture, sciart funding in the UK, and efforts to use art as a public relations vehicle for genomics. however, under some conditions it is possible for the arts to open up interstices in the prevailing bioeconomy and these possibilities are not confined to bioart. In her suggestion that bioart might be an ‘ethics of the future’ (2008: 158) ede hints at the limitations of contemporary bioethics. These limitations are suggested through reference to particularly well-established and institutionalised bioethicists such as Francis Fukyama and peter Singer. In this strand of her analysis, ede construes bioart as a third space, beyond the current institutions of science and bioethics and she emphasises its potential for raising critical perspectives on biotechnosciences such as human genomics. This proposal has some connection with Joanna Zylinska’s argument (2009) that the realm of institutional bioethics needs radical revision if it is to come to terms with the ‘being-in-difference’ that contemporary biotechnocultures frame as the conditions of possibility for the lives of ‘humans, animals and machines in the age of new media’ (Zylinska, 2009: 174). In the context of what seems to be an almost inexorable rise of genomics – in its pervasive everyday life incorporations throught institutions, economies and aesthetics, and such diverse sites as forms as doctor’s surgeries, television screens and picture frames – spaces for questioning genomics are limited.

helen chadwick’s in vitro embryos and Kathy high’s transgenic rats seem to open up a space of possibility for questioning the biotechnologies they engage. These pieces operate as probes, ethical spaces, or as forms of relational encounter. The publics constituted through the creation of audiences for both of these art pieces in their production processes, in their exhibition, but also through catalogues, press, and other commentary, draw their audiences into encounters

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with the assisted conception embryos and transgenic rats – the biotechnological participants, or actors in Latour’s (1995) terms. Intersubjective and intercorporeal encounters are staged by the relocation of these technological participants from laboratories, to art galleries, and their transportation between these spaces. In both projects these encounters are offered in order to make these participants appear as subjects, as well as bodies. By giving the rats names, by offering herself as mirror to them, and through the elicitation of treatment suggestions from viewers the rats are subjectivised. hence, high extends the possibilities for intersubjective identification with the rats. The gallery space is a prime site for these encounters between bodies. In high’s exhibition, the gallery-going audiences were more like visitors to a park or zoo where a spatial relationship between human and non-human animal bodies is experienced. Through the strategies outlined above, the rats emerge as bodies and beings, present to and with the human publics with whom they interact.

chadwick and high both take a critical distance from the biotechnologies with which they engage. chadwick’s embryos are manipulated, preserved and photographed in the laboratory at the assisted conception unit at King’s college hospital, and this work was completed with the staff and patients at this hospital and under the purview of the hFea. however, the photographs travel, they are taken out of the laboratory and are relocated in, and as part of, a series of artworks. In the piece ‘monstrance’ (1996), seven photographs of different embryos, each a few days old were arranged in a vertical line as though they were jewels on a broach. The images are of cells under a phase-contrast microscope. In the roman catholic church the monstrance shows the body of christ to the assembled congregation, the vessel itself is an ornate but empty frame in which the host, or the body of christ is inserted so that it can be viewed. The monstrance used in roman catholic liturgy, and chadwick’s ‘monstrance’ are both materially-semiotic in haraway’s (1992) terms.8 chadwick’s ‘monstrance’, shaped as a broach, with a pin behind it, enacts a kind of rich semiotic materialism by showing the embryos, as bodies and symbols, to the members of the gallery going public and as the piece circulates beyond the gallery into the media circulation of multiple publics.

The kind of relationality that chadwick’s pieces invoke change over time and they continue to work as probes. The images shown in ‘monstrance’ replicate the images circulating in the embryo debates of the 1980s. however, the broach pin of ‘monstrance’ that lies behind the broach face containing the embryos now can also be seen as pointing to the widely circulated image of somatic cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, that circulated widely after announcements of the cloning of dolly the sheep in 1997. The pin probes the image of human cloning which was initially circulated at the time the artwork was created. Since the announcements about dolly, and since the stem cell debates of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, the image of the micromanipulation of the oocyte, or egg, in which

8 This is a formulation that haraway links to roman catholic thought to mean at once body and symbolic of that body.

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the tube of the micromanipulation process can be seen permeating the egg, have proliferated. The broach pin of the ‘monstrance’ piece probes the image of the micromanipulation tube since in chadwick’s piece the transparent tube of the pin lies behind the images of the embryos from assisted reproduction. at the time of this piece images of micromanipulation were just beginning to emerge. however, since therapeutic cloning has become a more common scientific practice the image of the tube penetrating egg cells has circulated prolifically (Haran et al., 2008). This distinctive image of therapeutic cloning, like the image of the embryo, is also from a phase-contrast microscope.

The ethical spaces created through the encounters with high’s transgenic rats and chadwick’s assisted conception embryos are not however a future ethics (ede, 2008). rather, their engagement with the present is what gives them an ethical dimension. The art works offer intersubjective and intercorporeal relations with entities that already exist in the world, entities with a substantial past and present biomass, when accounted for over space and time. although a single embryo is as Franklin notes ‘the size of a comma’ (1999), hundreds of thousands of in vitro embryos have been created since 1990 and hence their aggregate biomass is quite significant. In the case of High’s rats, the creation of transgenic animals is part of the everyday practices of both agricultural biotechnology and biomedicine. The aggregate biomass of transgenic rats is also considerable. chadwick’s and high’s spaces of relationality deal with entities already living. In this sense their pieces are based on found objects, which they attribute with subjectivity and which they engineer into bodily encounters. rather than ede’s ethics of the future, they offer an ethics of the present through staging an embodied and intersubjective relationality with the embryos of assisted conception and the transgenic rats of biomedical research. This ethics of the present is a way of looking at the terms of ambiguous engagement with technoscience, at the everyday incorporation of biotechnology across many sites and lives including those of rats, embryos, and human-animals.

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Chapter 4: Imaginative Incorporation: Art and Genomics

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Transcript of Chapter 4: Imaginative Incorporation: Art and Genomics