Art, the Irrepeatable, and the violence of writing on life

Eduardo Kac argues that the distinction between science and art is the type of knowledge produced: "While in science the elimination of what is not repeatable produces the field where knowledge is possible, in art the irrepeatable is celebrated as the singularity that enables aesthetic knowledge" (192). Indeed, much of what I have read on BioArt emphasizes this idea that the art is irrepeatable. Now, maybe I"m conflating irrepeatable with non-iterable, but I am interested in thinking about how this art is iterable. Indeed, I want to make the argument that in order for BioArt to truly engage its issues with technoscientific production and biopolitics, it must be disseminated through some form of writing, whether that be text, image, or video. Furthermore, BioArt itself is a kind of writing; we may at first be reluctant to admit this since we generally assume that writing is the 'dead letter' rather than living word. How could we "write" with living material? What is a "living writing," a "life writing." But artists, for example, Adam Zaretsky, speak of their work in terms of the signature. He writes,

the habit of inserting an engineered plasmid into the genome of a cell line or organism is a physical artifact that stems from the mortal desire for lasting signature. These still born scupltures, in accord with the libidinal economy of multi-generational directionality, have been impressed upon for the record alone. Consider their mutations to be a sort of genetic graffiti. 

Genetic graffiti--a transgressive form of writing.

Eduardo Kac writes that the green glow of Alba functions as a kind of "social marker" as opposed to a "biomarker," which has many different meanings depending on the field. I want to look into these meanings and see how this metaphor could be extended to more than just Kac's work.

Kac is extremely aware of the symbolic and semiotic elements of his work, as he has deemed his Alba Flag as a "social marker, a beacon of her absence" and has created a work titled Lagoglyphs, a "rabbitographic form of writing" which is a "visual language that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the [series] stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of discourse generated through, with, and around Kac's GFP bunny" (Imaginary Science 66).

I think we should take seriously this idea of writing in BioArt--the marks, cuts, incisions--the violent traces inscribed upon life by these artist-scientists; this can lead us to a powerful understanding, through visualization and material embodiment, to an understanding of the violence of writing and the artistic 'signature'.

Possible Thesis

As biotechnology makes genetic engineering an immanent inevitability, many people are questioning whether we should mess with Nature. Whether the critics are religious or not, the popular phrase we hear more and more, that we are "playing God," suggest that through genetic manipulation of code, we will be able to completely control the immaterial and material world. This makes us the new kind of "author" figure, but this time, rather than writing about the meaning of life, we are writing on life. The fear that geneticists are "playing God," if we take into account the analogy that God is the author of the Book of the World, assumes that the author has complete control over the text of the world and  various readers are  there to merely decipher it. Perhaps if we deciphered the creation of God, we could understand the purpose of life. 

But such a view is not possible in this post-Nietzschean era--God is dead. The Author is dead. 

What I mean to suggest by this parallel is that BioArtists attempt to show that they cannot control life as a God/Author, but nor are they simply readers. Just as we realize that language resists transparent meaning and manipulation, BioArt resists the idea that we could ever read or communicate life in its entirety through deciphering a code. Indeed, BioArtists foreground the idea that life resists code, like a language. Furthermore,  just as New Media artists and theorists have been working for years to insist on the materiality of digital information, so BioArt insists on the materiality of genetic information. BioArtists may begin at the genetic level or the tissue level, but wherever they may begin, each visualizes the materiality of their medium and their embeddness in a complex ecological system that make up their "work." 

Bar notes

So last night--went to a bar to sing Karaoke. Brought along my "thesis" questions. First I will list the questions, then I will transfer my inebriated handwriting to this digital form. I must admit--this is probably not going to make any sense (not that my blogs make sense generally)--but I think of it as a way of archiving an intense brainstorming session.

Questions

1.) Is BioArt a posthuman(ist) art?

2.) What is the relationship between BioARt and net.Art/Digital art

3.) What makes BioArt, "art"

4.) What happens to the impact/effects of BioArt when it is mediated through images, criticism, websites, etc. Is it never not mediated?

5.) Does manipulating living tissue/genetics make something automatically "BioArt"? (here i have written "no!"

6.) Does BioArt actually have to be 'made' in order to have an impact/effect? (I have written here "yes, but only as a way to make it visible")

7.) How does the Tissue Culture and Art Project's work differ from the deployment of these techniques in a "technoscience" context? '

8.) What is the relationship of BioArt to "Animal Studies"?

9.) How does BioArt relate to science fiction?

10.) How is BioArt a form of writing? (this is something I explored extensively last night)

11.) What does BioArt have to offer theoretical humanities/Discourse? (this relates to the Animal Studies question)

12.) Does BioArt have to be visual/visible?

13.) Is BioArt a "practice" or an "art object" or both or neither?

14.) Does BioArt have to manipulate 'living' matter in order to be considered BioArt?

15.) What ethical and political responsibilities do we have to BioArt creations? (this moves beyond my scope)

16.) How can we think of BioArt so that it supports the idea that human beings are "always already technological"? (see David Wills, Dorsality)

17.) What is the relationship between telepresence of Kac and transgenic/BioArt?

18). Is BioArt the artform of the biopolitical, as elucidated by Foucault or Hardt and Negri?


Notes

Art is a practice--a mode of understanding rather than art as an "object" --> This helps us break down the distinctions between so called 'visual' art and 'other' art (textual, material, whatever)

See Claire Pentecost on breaking down and changing artistic practices as the key to opening the public to science.

BioArt's connection with digital or NetArt is its distribution--the very fact that I can access BioArt through digital media shows that its impact does not depend on physical proximity (this may relate somehow to Kac and telepresence)

BioArt is fruitful for Posthumanism because it questions the ontological distinction between human and animal as well as human and machine.

Descartes compares animals with machines--perhaps the mistake is not this conflation, but rather the idea that somehow we are somehow different--we are not machinic (we are not technological). See Derrida "Animal"

It is here ^ perhaps that we need to think agency.

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Regarding whether BioArt is the Art of the Biopolitical --> if the biopolitical is defined as regarding the circulation of ideas, images, etc. without being subject to the law of scarcity. Look back at the H&N's Commonwealth. 


I"m still thinking about this idea that it (BioArt) is writing in two senses of the word

1.) Makes a mark, trace, not only that but it challenges the easy assumptoins about "who does the writing" ? (I think here I am thinking of the 'artwork' created by animals)

ex: The "killing ritual" (in Tissue culture and art project) is the audience's 'writing' the organism -- "the letter killeth"

2.) Kac's "Genesis" the light 'writes' on the organism/gene, altering the phrase from the bible--it is a "re-writing" (see Kac on Genesis) --See Barthes on photography as light directly contacting the surface.

Furthermore, an artwork like Kac's has been appropriated/parodied by Sonya Rapaport (its here when I really start to think about BioArt and writing)

art may be about the 'singular' (see Kac), but just like a signature, it creates the possibility of its iteration in a different context. Indeed, in one sense, because the artwork is 'displayed' by different museums (easy to show by citing websites)

BUT what about the killing ritual? This at once makes the artwork iterable through different media  and at the same time (?) irrepeatable with the same "object", but if art is not about the OBJECT per se this hardly matters-- (aside: See Derrida on Heidegger's "grasping"-- Geschlecht II?)

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Perhaps the difference between technoscience's bio manipulations is the difference between creating na object for 'use' and creating a 'context' (see Kac) or a making visible what remain invisible (see Wolfe on GFP bunny and the architecture chapter--8). Or that an artwork disrupts such an easy 'use' appropriation OR that the technoscientists may not realize that they are creating something (I think maybe here I should look back at Eugene Thacker about 'net.Art' and science fiction)

Again let me re-iterate-- the artwork is iterable but not based on its "objectness" this STILL does nto mean that its materiality doesn't matter. See Derrida "Limited Ink II" on his notion of "materiality" (comes from reading de Man)

BioArt is also writing because it functions as a creation of form (that is kind of 'unform') --I think here I was thinking of Wolfe's discussion of the "formlessness" of the architecture is What is Posthumanism -->

Writing communicates not humans--by marks and traces. The "perception" may be incommunicable, but the communication is iterable. Communication = Writing (translating Luhmann's terms to Derrida's). That is "writing" is something separate from language (or can be. . .)

Look back at Fatal Strategies for Baudrillard's biological tropes.

Cyborg Manifesto-- Writing and "chimeras"

Is it the idea that art allows for an openness to interpretation of its 'function' whereas 'technoscience' is not critical? It only seeks to produce a usable object.

This gets us back into the discussion of Heidegger on "Origin of Work of Art" and Derrida's critique of it--need to look into that. present-at-hand vs. ready-to-hand. See Verbeek on how art is something different.

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Writing is communication--language is a media (see Wolfe on Luhmann)

Maybe its that perception always implies some kind of "representation" or that communication is always a representation and perception is something different.

Does it matter that the artworks are actually created?

Yes, because only through actually doing it can we show the limits of the techniques/creations/contestable futures even if the 'possibilities' could be shown through image or discourse--some other form of writing.

Perhaps rather than thinking transgenic art (Kac's Genesis, etc). is an "invisible aesthetics" (see Bardini) we need to think how form the perspective of writing and rhetoric art as defined by Luhmann "makes visible" the invisible (see Derrida in Gift of Death on visible/invisible/absolutely invisible)

Does Kac's work make visible the 'invisible victims" (Catts and Zurr's terms)

Yes beacause from the perspective of a consumer of food, for instance, the process of growing is hidding and the visibility of the transgenic food becomes naturalized.

Because it is 'dialogic" (see Kac for definition) it allows the audience to participate to the same degree as the Catts and Zurr installation with its killing/feeding rituals--at least for most of the participants. We need to look at the degree of participation present in Stelarc's work as well.

Kac's work depends on an "observer" (second order?) Some of Tissue Culture and Art Project depends on the observer (I'm not quite sure what I was thinking here. . .I think I was trying to think about how the "worry dolls" of Catts and Zurr effectively function in a dialogic manner similar to Kac's work).

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Thesis Speculations--On a Posthuman Critical Dystopia/Utopia

I have been wracking my brains to figure out what framework I want to use for my exploration of BioArt (and BioArt as a problematic term). I have read several texts from both artists themselves and crtics/theorists who have explored BioArt from the perspective of posthumanism and other angles including Donna Haraway, Eugene Thacker, Eduardo Kac, Patricia Piccinini, Steve Baker, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Stelarc, and others. Haraway thinks she finds something powerful in thinking ethics as an 'sf-worlding', which she defines as an "invitation to speculate, imagine, feel, and build something better" in order to nurture a "more just and peaceful other globalization" (92, 3). Eugene Thacker has explored how Net.Art can fulfill a 'critical function' of science fiction in an age where our technoscience has become science fiction. Thacker explicitly mentions groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble. These artistic movements do much to de-mystify science through parody and theoretical texts.

Eugene Thacker extends Frederic Jameson and other critics' thoughts on SF literature to net.Art and "new media" art. My question is whether we can apply this--or at least use Thacker's ideas--to look at Bioart. Thacker argues that the point of net.art and new media art is to take the critical function of SF and "re-insert it back into the discourse of contemporary technoscience."But since we live in an age where the fictions of SF literature have been incorporated into technoscience, the classical literary SF is insufficient to critique technoscience. Technoscience creates imaginative futures, but creates them in the mode of what Thacker calls "actualization." That is, the point of technoscience's narratives are to actualize them uncritically--leaving the criticism to culture, popular opinion, and, most likely, the courts. New Media/net.Art, in contrast, is in the mode of potentialization: "Regarded as potentiality, as the work of imagining critical futures, science fiction is not locked into the narrow path of simply realizing the future or actualizing it" (Thacker 158). Thacker concludes with the main contrast between SF literary art and the New Media art of which he speaks:

Whereas literary science fiction was limited to describing technologies in exrapolative, near future scenarios, new media and net.art contain the capacity to actually embody and utilize these future technologies in radically new ways [and ask] important questions concerning the future of the human-machine relationship. (158)

 A couple things about this. For people like Jameson and Suvin, the actual technologies that are "extrapolated" are not really considered in their concrete possibility. Rather, reading Jameson, we see him trying to see the big picture of an other world that would be alternative to the current system of global capitalism. He looks at the larger structure of the SF work using interpretive frameworks such as the Greimasian square. Thus, what differs is not only the embodiment of these technologies (more on that later), but also that for Thacker, the specific imaginings and extrapolations ask posthuman questions that tie the political to the biological--the biopolitical. As Donna Haraway puts it, the ethics (and perhaps this is another difference between Jameson and Haraway et. al.--complicated material ethics comes up in addition to macro-political orders and alternative worlds and utopias) "is in the whole ontological apparatus, its thick complexity, int he naturecultures of being in technoculture that join cells and people in a dance of becoming" (138, When Species Meet). Perhaps (and I only mention this as something to be explored later) we can explore Jameson's sense of the power of totalization and closure in order to open up new possibilities and that introduced by Nikalas Luhmann, as explored by Cary Wolfe in What is Posthumanism--are they similar? For Jameson, there is a logic of total revolution; for Haraway, the micropolitical contributes to the macro--the metaphor shifts from revolution to terms from biology--ecology, environment, etc.

Aside from these differences (which I believe give more credence to the actual figures in the text rather than as dismissing them as extrapolations or allegories for larger political structures), because bioartists (even more so, I might argue, than net.Artists) participate in the techniques of technoscience and also uses new media in radical ways, they are able to, in the words of Clair Pentecost, change "the nature of art itself and the apparatus of its distribution" which will help to redefine the public's relationship to science (Pentecost 116), helping to erode boundaries "between research conducted within scientific laboratories and experiments taking place outside" (de Costa 376).

In other words,  we might say that whereas literary fiction, according to Jameson, estranges the present by masking it's particular content, new media art (and by extension BioArt) changes it by transforming its form--although this may be too radical of a claim, and a claim I would have to back up with a lot more evidence, particularly due to the importance Jameson ascribes to form in all his work (and the fiction and cultural objects he works with).

Maybe I should stick here with Pentecost's language--these artists attempt to change art's apparatus of distribution. Rather than estranging us from science, or using science as a  trope for a deeper political structure, BioArt at its core seeks to de-mystify science by encouraging participation in the artwork (even though, I suppose, SF invites the same type of criticism). By looking at science fiction as a genre in which the particular technologies "extrapolated" do not really matter--we do an injustice to SF's engagement

I am arguing myself out of my initial claims, but I"ll try and press on, knowing that I may be making unfair distinctions to serve my own ends. Perhaps we can look at another theorist/artist's conceptual distinction, Eduardo Kac. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of the dialogical, Kac reconfigures and radicalizes it. Whereas for Bakhtin, literature is inherently dialogical, Kac literalizes this concept and argues that most literature and even most net.Art (referring back to Thacker) is still monologic--even if it remains interactive:

Naturally, dialogic art is interactive, but dialogism in electronic art must not be confused with interactivity. many interactive electronic artworks are monologic, for example, a CD-ROM, or a self-contained website. (104)

 So perhaps we can say, agreeing with Thacker that there is a distinction to be made, that rhetorical artistic projects that use new media, but are merely websites rather than incorporating performance, "wet" elements, or some sort of 'live' interaction with the audience, are not "dialogic."

Kac's work strives to be "dialogic," which he relates to another key concept, telepresence:

Crucial in the context of dialogic experimentation in the arts is the understanding that radical works of art cannot be limited by visuality; instead they are lived experiences based on contextual reciprocity (the context of the experience as reciprocal; i.e. it enables one to take the intiative to interfere and alter the experience. (Kac 111)

 Thus, artists are the "creators of contexts," rather than a creator of "works." Dialogic art allows the audience to participate and to change the artwork, whereas "interactive" would mean that they follow a set of patterns that cannot be changed. In this sense, then, Sonya Rappaport's quest to "redeem" Kac's artwork Genesis remains, perhaps, "interactive," but not truly dialogic. Her website for the Golem gene shows her plans for the work and allows the reader a kind of freedom to navigate the website and interpret what she is trying to do, but the view of the site is not welcome to change the code of it--that is, "change" the artwork (her work can be found here: http://users.lmi.net/sonyarap/redeeming/index.html.) In contrast, Kac's initial exhibit, allowed users online to click a button in order to change the artwork. He writes in his essay "Genesis,"

Employing the smallest gesture of the on-line world--the click--participants can modify the genetic makeup of an organism located in a remote gallery. This unique circumstance makes evident, on the one hand, the impending ease with which genetic engineering trickles down into the most ordinary level of experience. On the other, it highlights the paradoxical conditions of the nonexpert in the age of biotechnology. To click or not to click is not only an ethical decision, but a symbolic one [. . .] In either case, the participant faces an ethical dilemma and is implicated in the process. (252)

--But it needs to be said: I can no longer "participate" in this artwork--I am an outside viewer, trying to understand and interpret the artwork purely from its documentation. A question: once the artwork is "over" --once the performance is done--does the artwork remain "dialogic"? Or does the artwork become just as "monologic" as the website or piece of literature---maybe even more so (the website is still 'interactive'). In other words, do the distinctions Thacker made between literary creation and net.Art/new media art still hold and do Kac's work maintain a "dialogic" dimension in his sense? What is the significance of Kac's engagement of the "nonexpert" in terms of the demystification and democratization of science?

To begin to address these questions I plan to look at some of the arguments in Jens Hauser's brilliant essay in Tactical Biopolitics, "Observations on Art of on an Growing Interest: Toward a Phenomenological Approach to Art Involving Biotechnology."  More on that in another blog post.


I'd like to explore these very issues in terms of Kac's work, but also that of the Critical Art Ensemble, and especially the Tissue Culture and Art Project, led by Oron Catts and Ionatt Zurr.