Bioeconomics - Oron Catts

So what is Invertica. Invertica. is a research laboratory that is dedicated to the exploration of scientific knowledge in general and biological technologies in particular from an artistic perspective. It's a very unique place as far as I know and there is not another place like it in the world in that it is an arts managed and run space within a biological science department, that enables the artist to engage in what we refer to as biological art practice.

We set it up with the philosophy of identifying trends in biological sciences and to explore possibilities for the purpose of mainly proposing alternative directions in order to initiate cultural debate. We're creating what we would refer to as contestable futures, or contestable scenarios. Sue was talking earlier today about the role of artists in the acceptance of technology by the public. We are not here for that - we are here to create a debate.

First, before we can accept the technology we really have to generate some kind of a cultural discussion about where those technologies are taking us. Maybe when we refer to biological technologies we believe that our cultural belief systems are not really equipped to deal with what we know about life and how we're going to apply it. From my perspective, that's the most important part of SymbyoticA. Also exploring and creating the ethical issues or as we prefer to call it, the uneasiness of dealing with biological systems, from both the artistic perspective and for any other application.

I hope that our presentation will make you uneasy because that is what we are all about. We want to explore why we are feeling so uneasy when dealing with these issues. We hope to come up with new ways of exploration and on the practical level we are providing non-scientists and non-biologists access to laboratories in order for people to have these phenomenological experiences of how it is to deal with the living biological systems in the way that scientists and biological companies are.

We set up several research and teaching modules within SymbyoticA. The one which we are the most proud of is the art and biology course for undergraduate art students. Together with Adam Zaretsky, we are going to run the first art and biology course in Australia and I would say the first formal laboratory by art students in Australia, or even the world. We are going to run this course for second and third year art students and we will let them engage with those technologies in a hands-on manner. It will be quite interesting to see what results we get from this course.

Additionally, we are open for residencies and are exploring multi-disciplinary research teams. 'Fish and Chips' was one of the first projects in SymbyoticA and we had a multi-disciplinary group of eight which included artists, scientists, computer programmers and film makers. It was like the old Indian story about six blind people trying to ride an elephant but it was a very interesting experience - I urge you to check Fish and Chips on the Web and see what kind of results we achieved.

We are also trying to build up student teams of different disciplines. At the moment we have an anatomy honours student and are trying to get some students from philosophy and other disciplines as part of their research.

So as I said it's the first research laboratory of it's kind in the world and we are acutely aware that everything we are going to do there is going to be a precedent and will be looked at quite closely. There are many issues that were explored in the last session but I would like to stress them because we are dealing with biological technologies. The issues that we are addressing and will continue to address in the future are the ethics of using biological materials for artistic purposes, and that's a very contentious area particularly where animals are being used. One key issue is the responsibilities of artists and researchers. How can you create a responsible and safe research without compromising the artistic integrity? How can we really guide the artists about doing things in the correct way? And what is the correct way? Can we really set up boundaries that shouldn't be crossed? This issue of boundaries is something that we will review on a case by case basis together with the University in which we are operating.

We are taking a leaf from Steve Wilson's thesis about the role of artists as researchers. We want artists to be there and to explore the different possibilities that knowledge and applications can bring us - to have them there from the word go when new knowledge is being discovered, when new technologies are being created.

We look for new subversive ways of directing technology in order to create cultural debate and sometimes to just explore the possibilities from a fresh perspective. As Nigel expressed so nicely, we have problems regarding ownership and intellectual property issues - we are working with new knowledge all the time and we're going to stumble on new things. How can we really keep the artist working within this system and get all of the IP issues sorted out. Again we are working hard to try and resolve these problems and each case will act as a case study for us.

My own art practice is in tissue technologies. Ionat and myself have been working in a tissue culture and art project since 1996 when I came up with the idea of using living surfaces to coat artefacts. Since then we have continued to develop and explore the use of tissue technologies. I would like to stress that we are not dealing with genetic engineering in our practice. We sometimes use genetically modified cells and tissues but that is not our area of interest, we are really interested in the creation of what we refer to as semi-living objects - things that are partly alive and partly constructed. In order to explain this I should explain a bit more about tissue engineering.

Tissue engineering is quite a new technology which was developed in the mid 90s. The technologies allow you to grow cells in three dimensions over a scaffold structure in a desired shape and then implant them back into the body and create a body replacement part. You do so by having a degradable polymer which breaks down as the tissue grows. Although research being conducted now suggests that we can shortly start to grow near fully functioning organs, some writers have suggested that by about 2005 they will be able to grow a fully functioning human hand. When combined with the area of stem cell research, the issue of growing spare body parts with your own genetic make up is becoming closer to reality.

Marrying stem cell research, cloning and tissue engineering will enable us to create organs that won't be rejected by the patients. It's got some good outcomes obviously but we are interested to see what happens when these technologies are used for purposes other than strictly saving life. What will effect the decisions that we are going to have to make in order to cope with that? And how will economies of scale determine the need for these projects? Are we going to be subjected to an advertising campaign that would talk about the fact that we need an extra body part.

We really have to look closely at where and how we are going to proceed with these technologies. We are mainly interested in the semi living objects, things that are partly alive and partly constructed - a totally new class of object beings - tissues from a complex organism which are taken out of the context of the body and put in a different context. We are asking the question whether we can create a fully functioning organ outside of the body and if so why not change its design to fulfil other tasks and why not sustain it to live outside of the body for the duration of the use. How are we going to treat such an object or semi-living object? As artists, we are really asking should we go down this path. By proposing this scenario, we are not advocating but simply proposing the question. The Pig Wing project came out of our research in Harvard Medical School. I'll jump now to the website and you'll be able to follow it nicely - just read a little bit from the artists statement.

"We are looking at advances in biological technologies such as tissue engineering and transportation," Ionat is going to touch on this subject soon, "and genomics promise to render the living body into a malleable mess. The rhetoric used by private and public developers and well as the media has created the public anticipation for less than realistic outcomes. We are arguing that with all of the hype around the human gene projects and also recently around the transplantation, the public is expecting something which we believe is less than realistic. Developments and many of the rhetoric which is being used when, for example Bill Clinton and Tony Blair stood up way before the project was even close to completion and stated that human gene project is completed and from now on life would be sweet.

We feel that they have really created some kind of anticipation for something that scientists can not deliver at this stage. We took it a bit further and said 'OK you're promising us something - so what if pigs can fly one day'. If they could we wondered what shape their wings would take.

So we designed the revolutionary solution of flight and we looked also at the cultural values attached to those wings. When a bird wing is attached to something that is not the bird, its usually attached to an engine or something which is pure and beautiful and good. When a bat wing is attached to something that is not a bat, it is usually satanic and evil. Ionat will talk about the other issues around this project but I would like to share with you the beginnings of this project and how it came about.

We were invited by the Welcome Trust of England to submit a proposal for a commission. First of all the Welcome Trust is the biggest private funding body for biomedical research. They claim that they are not attached to any institute or to commercial outcomes although the fund itself is heavily invested in by biotechnology companies. The Welcome Trust also is one of the biggest sponsors of the Public Human Geno Project and they also manage an art gallery in London where they present works by artists who engage in art/biomedical research.

So we are invited as a selected group of artists to present what our perception of their completion of the Human Geno Project is and they invited us to participate in an exhibition titled "Working Drafts ?Envisioning the Human Geno".

In their words from the proposal document, 'Undoubtedly, our lives will be changed by the developments arising from developing of the Human Geno. Therefore public debate to ensure awareness of all potential outcomes of the Geno leads to participation and exploration of the issues by artists.

So we proposed the Pig Wings project or as we called it then 'Wings Detached ?the Good, the Bad, and the Extinct'. We sent the proposal outlining our use of stem cells from pigs and were told that 'the artists, curators and scientists in the exhibition advisory group, unanimously felt that Wing Detached presented a somewhat unrealistic reflection of public opinion on the Geno and does not contain relevant scientific thought. Even giving wide latitude for artistic expression we felt the somewhat 'Jurassic Park' feel of the proposal would not fit well alongside our other exhibits.'

An interesting reply - there are a few points that came out of it. One of them was obviously when you speak about the public perception and then in the next sentence describe the work as Jurassic Park (one of the most popular movies of the time) there is a bit of hypocrisy. While we respected their decision, we decided to clarify some issues with them and went through some of their press releases to look at the language they used in presenting the Human Geno Project to the public. Some quotes follow, 'I think there was something magical'?I think it's quite extraordinary and awe inspiring, that the book of human kind is even more wonderful and mysterious than previously thought.'

It became obvious that we were not presenting the 'right view' of how the Human Geno Project should be perceived by the public. After further correspondence we got a reply from them saying, 'Perhaps I could have better voiced the advisory groups opinion on your proposal. However the bottom line was simply that we did not favour your vision of what the Geno represents.' They wanted the artists to be the public relations personnel for the Human Geno Project.

Other examples clearly show that artists have been used by the PR machine. A certain exhibition in New York was funded by a 'dot org' company, The Joy of Giving Something. When you look down its supporters list you note many biotech conglomerates that support artists in some way. When the exhibition was presented, there were two full page advertisements in the New York Times calling for the public to attend. There was no critical mention, there was not even the names of the artists in those advertisements. So either you can take the disgruntled artist view of not being promoted appropriately or see that the whole exhibition was a sham to improve the public perception of Genomics.

Clearly, as artists dealing with these technologies we have to be aware of and have to be quite cautious about how that is going to be interpreted and how we are going to proceed.

© Oron Catts 2002