Ioanat Zurr & Oron Catts
(spanish)
The Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) explores the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. We manipulate living tissue as a point for reflection on our relationships with other living and partially living beings.
Partially living beings or Semi-Living entities are being grown/constructed by the TC&A through the use of tissue engineering techniques.
This technology was initially developed for the fabrication of body spare parts. In short, a 3D scaffold is made in the shape of the organ in question, using special biodegradable polymers on/into which appropriate cells are being seeded. The whole construct is being kept in a ‘techno-scientific body’ (such as a bioreactor) which attempts to emulate the conditions of the body from which the cells originally came from. The techno-scientific body supply the semi-living with nutrients, appropriate temperatures, CO2 gas exchange and sterile conditions.
TC&A has been growing different semi-living entities in different shapes, from different cells type and from different host bodies without being speciest. i.e. human cells have been grown together with other animals cells such as mouse to create different semi-living cultural artefacts.
As discrepancies between our cultural perception of what life is, and what we know about life scientifically, and can now do with it technologically are becoming more obvious, so are the hypocrisies we have to employ in order to create an illusion of moral continuity (or co-exist with our paradoxical existence?).
Humans have always exploited other living systems for survival and for a sense of well being/recreation. Survival and recreation are usually interrelated and confused and so is ‘need’ and ‘desire’.
Humans employed novel techniques for the continuation of exploitation of life while distancing themselves from the actual physical entity that is being exploited. Hence, the furthest away you are from your victim, the easier it become to believe that there is no victim.
TC&A have created a new class of object/being – that of a Semi-Living- as an evocative object that will enable a further exploration of our treatments of notions of life. The Semi-livings and Partial lives are a new class of objects/beings constructed of living and non-living materials; cells and/or tissues from a complex organism grown over/into synthetic scaffolds and kept alive with an artificial support. They are both similar and different from other human artefacts (homo-sapiens’ extended phenotype) such as constructed objects and selectively bred domestic plants and animals (both pets and husbandry). These entities consist of living biological systems that are artificially designed and need human and/or technological intervention in their construction, growth and maintenance.
Recently we developed the Victimless Series , with the attempt to see whether we can use life for anthropocentric purposes in a way that complicates the notions of life, death, victimless and exploitation. We want to explore the ‘price’ we have to pay for a technologically mediated utopia. Firstly, we looked at the possibility of eating victimless meat by growing semi-living steaks from a biopsy taken from an animal while keeping the animal alive and healthy.
This piece deals with one of the most common zones of interaction between humans and other living systems, and probes the apparent uneasiness people feel when someone ‘messes’ with their food. The project offers a form of a symbolic “victimless” meat consumption. As the cells from the biopsy proliferate, the ‘steak’ in vitro continues to grow and expand, while the source, the animal from which the cells were taken, is healing. Potentially this work presents a future in which the killing and suffering of animals destined for food consumption will be reduced. However, by making our food a new class of object/being – a Semi-Living – we risk making the Semi-Living a new class for exploitation. In addition, the nutrients in which the steak is bathed contain animal derived products. The distant from the victim sometimes makes us forget that almost any form of diet involves victims- no matter how processed, engineered or organic the food is.
Our own research into this project began as part of our residency at the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2000. The first steak we grew was made out of pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle). We used cells harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born.
We finally were able to present and perform this project in 2003 as part of L’art Biotech exhibition in France. We titled the installation Disembodied Cuisine, playing on the notion of different cultural perceptions of what is edible and what is foul. We grew semi-living frog steaks, with the intention of raising questions about the French resentment towards engineered food and the objection by other cultures to the consumption of frogs. We found a source of cells that did not required inflicting an injury to an animal. We ended up using an immortalized cell line (cell lines are either modified or cancerous cells that have the ability to grow and divide indefinitely and can be seen in the context of our work as a renewable resource). The cell line we used was developed using non mutagenic techniques and according to the advice we received was considered safe for consumption.These cells were developed at a Japanese laboratory in the late 1980s from the skeletal muscle cells of a tadpole of an aquatic toad, Xenopus laevis.
We grew these cells over a biopolymer scaffold for potential food consumption.
For the installation in L’art Biotech we constructed two terrariums; one had four Xenopus laevis (the same type of toad from which the “steak” cells were obtained) and four edible frogs we rescued from the local edible frog distributor. By the end of the show, after the Nouvelle Cuisine style dinner, we released the frogs to the ponds of the beautiful botanical gardens in Nantes.
In our latest project, Victimless Leather , we have grown a miniature stitch-less jacket out of immortalised cell lines which formed a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix. The Victimless Leather project concerned with growing living tissue into a leather like material.
This artistic grown garment confronts people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and further confronts notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing ‘leather’ without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion. Saying that, the production of the “leather” was not totally victimless – we still used animal derived ingredients in the nutrients we provided the tissues with. Hence our reference to the “victimless” is an ironic one, and should be read as a critique of the type of technological mediated promises of “utopia”.
Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings. We see our role as artists as one in which we are providing symbolic yet tangible examples of possible futures, and research the potential affects of these new forms on our cultural perceptions of life. It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context.
This piece also presents an ambiguous and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving ‘a victimless utopia’ as the stitchless jacket that was grown as part of this project could only survive within a techno-scientific body – a bioreactor.
Usually people who oppose our project find it difficult to articulate the source for their disapproval and react more from a knee-jerk impulse, which we tend to believe is a result of a the TC&A forcing people to reassess their perceptions of life by presenting life at its visceral and somewhat abject form as manifested by the semi-living.
Artists can play a role in exploring these issues and spawn ‘philosophy in action’. Using the very same tools and techniques offered by biotechnology for the sole purpose of generating cultural debate. There is a growing discrepancy between our cultural perceptions of life and what we know about life scientifically and what we can do with life technologically. The instrumentalisation of living systems through different aspects of biotechnology is of great concern to us, in particular in the context of post capitalistic forces. Our work deals with the tension between caring for living systems on the one hand and instrumentalising life on the other. We believe that art is best situated to confront such a paradox in ways that constructively raise philosophical and epistemological issues.
Acknowledgments:
The Tissue Culture & Art is hosted in SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia
Oron Catts
Artist/Researcher and a curator. Co-Founder and Artistic Director of SymbioticA. Founded the Tissue Culture and Art Project in 1996. Uses living tissue from complex organisms as his medium. Exhibited and published internationally.
Artist/Researcher and a curator. Artist in residence and a lecturer in SymbioticA. Co-Founder of the Tissue Culture and Art Project. A PhD candidate researching the ethical and epistemological implications of wet biology art practices.
