Gallery Exclusive New Work by Paul Freeman

tobias c van Veen on Montreal Duo Bioteknica

Clint Wilson Mechanical Barley
The Autobiographical Musings of RM Vaughan
Mitchell akiyama Vermin and Weeds

PM41389033
ISSN 1718-5017

$6.95
2007

Issue 4
 Bioteknica tell me that there are a few pre-
cautions when playing around with can-
cer—no playing with your own teratomas,
for example—and you’ve got to have a lab,
to keep the cancer from contaminating stuff,
but also to keep it moist and alive and grow-
ing. Everything gives us cancer—we all know
that. Cancer is everywhere and already inside
the body, at this very moment, held in check.
What is cancer? Only cancerous cells and
stem cells, the latter nurtured as tissue cul-
tures in Petri dishes, have the ability to divide
indefinitely. As Hannah Landecker writes, this
apparent immortality, the dream of pure tran-
scendence throughout history—to escape
death itself!—is ironically “one of the traits
D I GG I N G U P TH E COR P S O F B I OT E K N I CA that [makes] cancer a menacing and mortal
By tobias c van Veen
disease of the body.” 1 That which lives for-
ever, at least theoretically and in a perverse
manner, kills us. ­ ends. A subsequent and early exhibition was successful to the point
Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet, BIOTEKNICA LiveLifeLab Documentation. FOFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. 2007.
34 s u s pe c t u s I . 4 n a t u r e & Te c h n o l o g y / fe a t u r e
The virus and parasite have been well exploited by strategies of
art, politics, and philosophy. Cancer—as the excess growth of the self
becomes murderously other—heralds a different kind of process in
corporeal and aesthetic registers. Bioteknica’s artistic projects with
teratoma cell lines—the cancerous cells that grow into tumours—per-
meate the boundaries of art and science. It is a boundary marked le-
gally as well as ethically, and Bioteknica’s endeavours in the interzone
have already been awarded the label of the “bioarts”—if not at the risk
of skirting “bioterrorism.” Steve Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble are
still before a U.S. Grand Jury for their pioneering attempt to marry the
arts and sciences in the use of tactical media art projects. CAE have
been under investigation since 2004 for obtaining harmless bacteria
from a cooperative scientist for an artistic project (allegedly violating
the material transfer agreement of the ATCC2 that requires all scien-
tific materials to remain inside the approved, destination lab—even if
harmless—which raises the question: who owns scientific practice?)
While CAE sought to develop applied tools, such as a spray kit that
would identify GMO3 vegetables and fruits for consumers, Bioteknica
have undertaken an artistic practice that questions and participates
in every level of the scientific process (and industry) involved with
technologically mediated organisms, from teratoma cells and general
cell line research to the corporate and military industries at work in the
biotech sciences. Every aspect comes into play in the aesthetic inter-
rogation of the premises of biotech. Bioteknica is the codename for
a transparently aesthetic inquiry conducted from within: Bioteknica
strictly abides by the procedures of regulation—ethical, legal, health,
safety and scientific—required to gain access to laboratories and ma-
terials. But Bioteknica never pretends to be otherwise than what it
is—an aesthetic intervention. Bioteknica is no covert operation but a
deliberate, technical, and precise incision into the heart of biotech.
Bioteknica, consisting of Montréal artists Shawn Bailey and Jennifer
Willet, began their project in 2000, by modeling a website [bioteknica.
org] on the biotech sector. At the entry level, Bioteknica encompass-
es the familiar strategies of tactical media: adopting the advertising
tactics of an existing corporate sector toward deviant or subversive
35
wherein potential investors became interested in this apparently new
biotech company. But Bioteknica did not want to pursue the path of
misleading investors (or taking the money and running, as they put it
to me a few years ago). Rather, they are taken by researching all the
aspects of biotech, and their representational work—a corporate web-
site with animated yet fake organ “growths,” mission statements, and
self-produced photographs of scientific apparatus—was but a first
step to getting into the laboratory. According to Jennifer Willet:
A lot of what we do is an ongoing performance: Shawn negoti-
ating with Fisher Scientific to get an invoice and ordering sec-
4
tion—that’s part of the thing. ‘Hi, I’m an artist; I’d like to order,
uhh, a fume hood. Or sterile hood. What steps do I have to do to
do that?’ But I do think that, for Shawn and I, the lab that we built
at ISEA with Oron Catts was as engaged in aesthetic decisions
5
as engaged in healthy and safety standards, dut dut dut dut dah.
It had to function. In fact we didn’t want to work in the realm of
representation. Maybe that’s the difference. But every element in
there, every , every texture, every shape, every size, those deci-
sions were come to based upon artistic perceptions.
Bioteknica is a kind of activist infiltration in open source aesthetics.
As Jennifer says, “Shawn and I are activists… And I think that we need
a chorus of people working in a variety of different ways, and Shawn
and I are best when working in institutional channels. And that prob-
ably brings us to the type of practice that we have, where we follow
the rules and we follow the protocols.” 6 By operating within the lines
but, one could say, with radical outlines, Bioteknica have managed
to assume decision-making capacities within the university environ-
ment concerning the approval of aesthetico-scientific projects. And
of course they also engage in the very production of science—sci-
ence as myth, space, knowledge, and practice. Once in the laboratory,
notably at Australia’s SymbioticA—an “art and science collaborative
research library” established in part by artist Oron Catts with the Uni-
versity of Western Australia—Bioteknica are able to begin, in a sense.
It is here that they pose the question: exactly what is an aesthetic
intervention in the biosciences? And what becomes of aesthetics in
the contaminated culture of science?
Wild Observations on the Unruly Aesthetics of Science
We aestheticize and even, I would go so far to say, fetishize a lot
of equipment in the lab. The relationship Shawn and I have to
science is a conflicted one. We have slightly differing opinions
and we will argue often over little points here and there... But
in general both Shawn and I have a deep, deep respect, love,
appreciation and aesthetic interest in science and medicine. But
at the same time we are both deeply critical, analytical, interested
36
in really mulling it… We are interested in analyzing the situation
as it goes on around us.
—Jennifer Willet
What kind of space is a laboratory? What goes on in there? What
goes on when artists get in there? Bioteknica’s practice of late has
consisted of learning the basic protocols of growing cell lines in the
lab, documenting each step, from photography to video, and then
devising, at each level, ways in which to inject aesthetic and political
questions. For example, they have latched onto the unruly and wild
P-19 mouse teratoma, which, when the cells reach confluence—the
state at which the cells fills up one layer along the bottom of a Petri
dish—they start sticking together irregularly, exhibiting what is called
three-dimensional clumping. In short, for Bioteknica, orderly cells are
boring; they grow flat and stop growing when they reach confluence.
P-19s are self-destructive: the cells in the centre of the clump don’t
receive growth solution—as there is no vascular system, unlike the
body—and so the inner cells die off. Only one-third to one-half of the
cells survive. Thus, P-19s are “ugly cells” for scientists; scientists like
flat, pretty, geometric cells. P-19s are “irregular and irrational.” Obser-
vation one (concerning the geometricism of science): the orderliness
of patterning produces reproducible results. But this isn’t really “na-
ture” then, is it? It’s a politics of the orderly.
Or consider drawing cells under a microscope. Apparently Shawn
draws nice cells—which is to say, he doesn’t draw the cell at all, which
to the untrained eye looks like a globular mess with indistinct shad-
ings and all kinds of little bits floating around. Shawn relates being in
a room full of artists told to “draw only what you see” and then having
the instructors freak out as the artists rendered the visible chaos of the
cell. “No! No!” the scientists would scream upon seeing the drawings.
So Shawn asked what it is he was supposed to see, and then drew
a purely schematic cell: basically, a circle within a circle. Observation
two: what you see is not what is supposed to be seen.
Microscopy—the art of taking pictures through a microscope—has
also become a site of aesthetic dialogue with scientists. The standards
for scientific photographs are quintessentially formalist. The scientists
loved Bioteknica’s slides, as the duo was consistently able to capture
the “aura” around the cell (the light reflection off cell boundaries). Eight
years in art school had them producing beautifully framed and well lit
photographs that were the jealousy of every scientist. Scientists love
perfect photographs for their journal articles. Observation three: an
aesthetic of the beautiful permeates the cellular sciences. Observa-
tion four: one can observe the tremendous waste in the biosciences,
the non-recyclable materials, the vast amounts of resources required
to keep very small things alive; the politics of sustainability has yet to
invade. We are now able to make a meta-observation: all manner of
s u s pe c t u s I . 4
(scientific) practices are swept up in an idealism guided more often
than not by unconscious aesthetic assumptions that defer the ques-
tion of responsibility. And as Freud taught us, the unconscious is more
often than not governed by anal drives.
Getting a Piece of (Your) Ass.
Science is a learning and at times anal process. For Bioteknica, sci-
ence is the object of their art and also its stuff. No one technology—
unlike the frame and the grain of the photograph for photography, or
the video channel and apparatus for video art—informs their practice.
For Shawn and Jennifer, theirs is content-driven, not technology-driv-
en, art. Even to pinpoint a particular medium runs into difficulty. As
Shawn says,
I’m not sure what medium we’re working within. The media is un-
Bioteknica performance with tobias.dj, Cabaret for Critical Art Ensemble,
defined. The media term the art historians are using right now is UpgradeMTL.org, 22 September 2005. Photo: Sophie Le-Phat Ho.
“bioart,” with which we’re uncomfortable with. We don’t want to
a sterile tissue culture lab, engineering facilities, and cryogenic
be considered bio-artists, though we have been grouped in with
facilities at our disposal, that we can work with in a way that is
a number of other diverse practices that involve living systems
productive.
in some way as opposed to merely representing living systems.
There are two forthcoming goals. The first is to develop a gallery in-
That seems to be the sort of cut-off point. In order for living sys-
stallation certifiable as a Level 1 lab (out of four levels, Level 1 is the
tems to be involved there has to be—and you know, it’s a form of
lowest, but conforms to criteria of sterility and utility). The second is
realism, it actually goes back to that argument about realism in
to gain a permanent “lab of their own,” thus opening the possibility
art practices—there has to be some documentation of this, which
of creating nothing less than Bioteknica’s own cell line from a piece of
then comes to a kind of scientific, and empirical, and objectivist,
Shawn’s ass. In Shawn’s words, “the protocol that we are developing
logical positivist perspective on verifiability of what your claims
is to have a skin biopsy done,” which is a nice way of expressing that a
are… In this sense, the microscope is absolutely essential to our
four-inch piece of his ass will be removed and grown into a nasty little
work… But the technology is not the subject.
culture. Bioteknica have researched the way it has worked in the past
Learning science as an aesthetic inquiry is a process of training,
and know of the extraordinary difficulties of growing ass; developing
which—although at every level there are opportunities for produc-
one’s own “immortal” ass cell is a complex protocol and their chance
tion of aesthetic objects—is directed toward a level of proficiency in
of success is low. Yet the possibilities of ass culture are amazing. Once
the lab which would allow the creation of an art that is generative of
one has one’s own ass on the line, one can bypass ATCC regulation
and interrogative toward life itself. Bioteknica aim to become fully-
(informed by U.S. law and military interests) and make ass available
proficient practitioners of the sciences without becoming scientists
on a not-for-profit basis.
themselves. In a pragmatist way, this entails access to resources. This
As Jennifer remarks, a Bioteknica cell line would be what she calls
doesn’t mean that all radical possibilities of transgression have been
a “critical participatory methodology” in action. “We’re utilizing sci-
abandoned. According to Shawn:
entific protocols in order to engage in art production. But then it be-
We have violated many laws and regulations and moral codes in
came even more convoluted as we started thinking about what is our
both of our art practices over the years. One has to choose your
working methodology, and we do have a very experimental working
battles. For me, right now the endgame is being able to accom-
methodology where we bring together a set of ideas, concepts, space
plish what we want to accomplish, which is growing these kinds
time objects, dut dut dah, and then see what erupts out of that, what
of new life forms and to really focus the debate upon the com-
happens, setting off a chain of events.” Here the chain of events goes
mercialization of life forms that are technologically mediated.
from early representational work to learning the ropes to using those
That’s worth compromising some degree of the artistic or radical
ropes to hang—or at least submit to bondage—the ringmaster. One
intentionalities by adhering to State and government guidelines
is implicating oneself in the structure and taking it one step further,
of how to proceed in such a way that hopefully we wind up with
as both the propagator and subject of biotech: I am the educator, the
n a t u r e & Te c h n o l o g y / fe a t u r e 37
artist, and the work itself. The question is whether an aesthetic project
is able to generate change in the overall structure; if, by sticking out
one’s own ass, one can hand the ATCC its ass on a platter. If it works,
Bioteknica’s endeavour will announce the first widely—if not wildly—
available, Creative Commons style cell line with share-like attribution
for bioscience and aesthetic research. And, yes—Shawn would have
to be weary of his own ass. As one’s own immortal cells are danger-
ous to oneself, at stake would be a deadly, performative relationship
with one’s own “work.” Unlike Jennifer, Shawn sees this autothana-
tology—the study of one’s own death—at the level of the methodol-
ogy itself. For Shawn, all oppositional critical operations are, a propos
Theodor Adorno, “ultimately unsuccessful and doomed to fail” and
thus destined to become reappropriated by the biotech industry. Yet
that does not stop him from being “concerned and critical about the
nature of some of the protocols being used in the lab, and the com-
mercialization and corporatization of these protocols,” including the
secrecy of research whose outcomes “will affect our entire ecology.”
Too many times is assing around the property of being an ass; at least
even in this doomed scenario of poking holes in the science of grow-
ing ass, it will be the biotech industry getting it up.
38
Cancer of this Mortal Coil
For Bioteknica, the horrific and the abject are the most beautiful.
The teratoma cell lines are an object of great fascination—these cell
lines of cancer horded for scientific investigation—and it is tempting
to argue for a new aesthetic strategy, one that, post-viral, would align
itself with the cancerous. Possible though it may be to discern its out-
lines in Bioteknica’s work, the duo denies any such conscious “can-
cerous” strategy. Even Shawn’s fetish for the death-drive, marked by
his love for abject beauty and dangerous self-experimentation—and
even as he annuls the eventual critical outcome of their work through
an investment in Adorno—does not allow any such possibility of ter-
atomic strategy.
While a cancerous praxis might be “critical” and “participatory”—to
grow within, to expand unstoppable as the operation of critical death,
to throw the host, literally, into crisis—it would also be self-defeat-
ing and paradoxical. Cancerous methodology would entail multiply-
ing indefinitely in the host. Such a methodology is self-defeating as
it would kill the host itself as well as the cancer—that is, the aesthetic
strategy, if not technically and vitally, the artists themselves. Unlike
the viral motif of tactical media—secret infiltration, incorporation and
s u s pe c t u s I . 4
replication, usually of images or billboards, such as the détournement
or disruption and reappropriation of corporate media seen frequently
by the likes of Adbusters and developed by the Situationist Interna-
tional—a cancerous methodology could not be adopted by marketing
strategy. In this case it would, on the one channel, be ultimately suc-
cessful, though deadly so, in destroying its capitalist host, along with
itself. In a sense, teratomic strategy could not be reappropriated. But
if it cannot be reappropriated it is because teratomic strategy already
exists. Like cancer, as it is cancer, the ontos and techne of cancer, it is
already within: it has already begun and died a thousand deaths. And
would not capitalism itself be the cancer of the species-being? Cancer
has a hint of nihilism to it that at the same time contains something
of the beauty that tinges all that is beyond good and evil. Bioteknica
find themselves drawn to these zones of the abject, that which is nei-
ther subject nor object: the horrific state of the corpse, the cultural
manifestations of ritual in death and war, our fear of the mortal coil,
the devastation of technology—and yet, also and significantly, from
the personal and embodied sense of witnessing cancer in those close
to them. Cancer irrupts from within, or rather is what happens when
the immune system fails to irrupt that which it patrols and protects.
Cancer is not the next evolutionary step but is a breakdown in the
continuous cancer of the cell (though might it not lead to evolution-
ary mutation?) Cancer is always already inside us. We are always ap-
proaching the limit of cancer—it’s just that most of the time, cancer is
kept in check. What keeps it in check is nothing less than death itself.
Cancer irrupts when the cell refuses to die. As the cell evades death
it grows into its own useless organ—the tumour, the teratoma, the
zombie sculpture of living tissue, the bringer of death. We all need
a little bit of death to avoid our untimely death. Thus we get cancer
x-times a day; but as the immune system breaks down—from all the
ecological damage to our world that over saturates the body with pol-
lutants, from overexposed sunlight to cigarette tar—cell DNA gath-
ers mutations in the cell, and the human body’s state of quasi-cancer
can no longer be arrested. The Hayflick Limit of preprogrammed cell
death that eventually leads to our aging and natural death is over-
come (52 cell divisions). In this sense, cancer does pertain to the viral
motifs of the excess of the limit, as found in the writings of William S.
Burroughs (language as a virus, and all the strategies toward its dis-
ruption) and Jacques Derrida’s writings on consciousness qua virus.
Cancer would be the non-viral proliferation of self toward immortal-
ity by an abject part of the self. It is the uncanny within, asserting
its own autonomy, refusing to die and yet accelerating death in the
n a t u r e & Te c h n o l o g y / fe a t u r e
same moment. As Shawn says, “The interesting thing about cancer is
that it is a cell that has decided to become immortal.” Bioteknica are
not interested in the melancholy of these very material “motifs.” They
are certainly not romantics, as Jennifer expresses, and citing Susan
Sontag from Illness and Metaphor, they are not caught up in gothic
mourning for the death of a young poet. Rather they are captured by
the teratoma cell lines because cancer is portrayed as the holy grail
for human cloning, and so, precisely, remains a “double-edged sword
as it is often fatal. Cancer is a cultural object, lived object, a thing.” It
reflects, in itself and its strategy of growing-toward-death, the com-
plexity of ideas concerning biotechnology. Cancer clones itself indefi-
nitely, until it kills the host. It offers itself to us as the pharmakon of
the 21C, the poison and the cure. A cancerous methodology could
thus be multiplied otherwise in aesthetic practice, but only in a nihil-
ist endgame, for example, as deadly mutation of the host itself—the
laboratory otherwise, all the world a laboratory, all the worlds, experi-
ments of the multitude gone awry—infinitely until it, us—we—kill our
greater Host—the Earth. The endgame cancer plays, as the corps of
humanity, is the corpse of catastrophe. In this sense, humanity itself is
already a cancer. For Shawn:
Viruses are beautiful... [T]hey get in there, they assimilate them-
selves, they ultimately become part of the host. Whereas the
cancer of the tumour doesn’t do any of those things. It’s greedy,
it’s a greedy new organ that…takes as much as it can get its
hands on. If anything, cancer is a fucking outstanding metaphor
for the times that we live in because the entire fucking human
race is a fucking cancer on the face of this planet, and every en-
vironmental report coming out right now indicates that we are
completely fucked, on every level. Which raises some really, re-
ally, really disturbing questions.
Indeed. ls
Thanks to Bioteknica for sharing their germs & gems with me.
Notes
1 Landecker, Hannah, “Immortality, In Vitro. A History of the HeLa Cell Line,” in Biotechnol-
ogy and Culture, Ed. Paul E. Brodwin, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000, p. 61. All subse-
quent quotes unless otherwise noted from Landecker’s essay.
2 American Type Culture Collection [atcc.org]. “The Global Bioresource Centre,” and
currently one of the only places to get cells and other biological material for research.
As Bioteknica explain, this non-profit organization nonetheless demands U.S. protocols
-- thus U.S. political decisions concerning, for example, stem cell research could affect
research worldwide.
3 Genetically Modified Organisms.
4 [fishersci.com]
5 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts [isea.org].
6 All quotes from an interview conducted 03/02/07, over wine, in Montréal.
Facing page: Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willet, BIOTEKNICA LiveLifeLab Documentation.
Department of Biology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. 2007.
39