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THE MUTAGENIC ARTS
Is our ecosphere being altered by Genetically Modified Organisms built for profit margins without authentic oversight or risk assessment?
If the technology for genome sculpting of new style humans is a possibility, what, if any, effect will imagination play in our future kindred?
What can we know about animal sentience and non-human awareness? How are artists taking these factors into account as they try to express themselves through living collage?
As new biological comprehension sprouts new technological processes, what are the overt and covert roles of creativity on the decisions of which traits get embedded into whose new bodies?
These are today's major issues emanating from the intersection of Art and Biology.
In the following text, I will try to describe how and why certain protocols of biotechnology have been artistically researched, practiced and applied towards artistic ends. We will look at some of the resultant aesthetic or cultural productions that come out of "wet lab work" by biological science research/technology artists. This is a complicated topic for multiple reasons. The technology itself is complex with a steep learning curve. It is also under-acknowledged but many questions about life do remain and may remain unanswered or unanswerable. The artists involved in Bioart are not a group with a manifesto and a singular programmatic but instead have rifts, ethically, philosophically and politically, which keep them from any singular consensus.
Nevertheless, I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds by saying that these artists all have a tendency towards:
- Reminding people about the ever-present complexities of vitality, mortality and mutation all around us.
- Giving non-experts the ability to speak intelligently about science without having to be a scientist.
- Providing hands on labs or exhibitions designed to get rid of fears of complexity while maximizing debates on intelligent applications of technology.
- Exhibiting works which rework preconceptions about relationships between human culture, other living beings and the environment.
The focus of this essay is on Developmental Biology and Art but Vivoart, as an umbrella term, may help us sort the full range of aesthetic and social concerns faced while considering the question of life in art.
Simply defined, What I call Vivoarts is any artistic production that has a living component embedded in it at the time of its exhibition.
MUTAGENIC DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY ARTS
Developmental Biology is the study of body formation.
Organisms develop through a process called morphogenesis from embryos to fully-grown entities.
The study of these processes helps us understand evolution, inherited disease, environmental toxicology and the wonder of living shape. With the use of a variety of technologies, the path of development can be altered.
By "pushing" the process of fruiting bodies, we can sometimes glean portions of the puzzle of where and how life unfolds.
The artists who practice Mutagenic Developmental Biology Arts tend to fall under these three headings: Physical Manipulation Artists, Teratogenic Artists and Transgenic Artists.
Transgenic Art is a subset of Teratogenic Art, which is just a kind of Physical Manipulation Art, as we shall see.
PHYSICAL MANIPULATION EMBRYOLOGY ARTS
Early on in the science of embryology, some amazing physical manipulation/deformation of embryos was carried out on developing Xenopus Frog embryos.
Some artists now also use physical manipulation on a developing organism, an embryo or a metamorphosing organism (I dub this type of scoping and poking Physical Manipulation DevBio Art).
And the artists who practice this type of Embryology Brut do so for as many reasons as there are artists in this field.
Four artists come to mind: George Gessert, Marta Menezes, Brandon Ballengee and Adam Zaretsky.
George Gessert's organism of choice is flowering plants.
His art process utilizes the skills and techniques of hand pollination.
The control of fertilization is really just the manipulating of who gets to mix with whom in any given flower population.
Though not really a physical manipulation of the embryonic body this is a physical manipulative generational process.
Some of the methods include the cutting of stamens (plant penises,) and the covering of plant pistils (wombs) until the time is ripe for the artist to arrange his garden marriages.
George Gessert's projects have included attempts to hybridize flowers away from their kitsch, store bought varieties as well as attempts to democratize the aesthetic decisions by offering a public hand in floral mating strategies.
George's work is a critique of monoculture and includes an ornate indexing of non-market driven pedigrees.
In some ways, this has all the makings of a transgenic art.
George Gessert's flowers are multigenerational and the mutations are visible and invisible, random and unpredictable.
But, these are intraspecies hybrids so we will include his works here.
Marta de Menezes has also worked with Physical Manipulation DevBio Art.
In a project called Nature?, Marta's organism of choice was the butterfly, not the butterfly embryo but the caterpillar transitioning to butterfly pupae.
The tools are microsurgical needles, red-hot cauterizing needles and tools for micrografting.
The butterfly pupae show signs of wing development during their metamorphosis.
By micromanipulation of the "wing imaginal disk," new wing patterning results.
Some of the resultant patterned effects are non-intuitive, effecting color and design elements as well as sometimes creating new eyespots on the wings.
The wounds are small and heal seemingly seamlessly, the pre-wing disks are without nerves and the butterflies are presumed to carry on normal lives.
The regenerative and alternative pathways available to an organism in a major morphing transition can include a surprising modicum of resilience and plasticity.
Marta produces these "novel natural" butterflies for dual purposes.
As an artist, her butterflies are living paintings, living art forms.
These organisms are artistic creations as opposed to a product of random evolution.
But Marta is also quite engaged with scientists in pursuing her works.
Her collaborative spirit and her hope for furtherance of both art and science should be taken seriously.
The protocols she uses are the same as many DevBio insect labs around the world.
Her toying with scarified color patterning has the potential to reveal evolutionary insights.
In other words, Nature? and works like Nature? have the potential to be utilitarian, fact producing, "good" research as well as controversial art.
We can find a synthesizing-antithesis in the Physical Manipulation Embryology Arts by examining Brandon Ballengée's Malformed Amphibian Project.
Brandon Ballengée has multiple organismic familiars but he has focused on frogs enough to call him a sort of Frogman.
I am most interested in the aesthetics, ethics and underlying rational for his early web cast collaboration with a certain Dr. Stanley Sessions.
Brandon Ballengée and Dr. Sessions practiced an experimental, mechanical disruption in developing amphibian limb buds as a part of Ecovention, an Ecological Interventionist exhibition, 2002.
The twiddling of the embryonic pre-limbs with a physical tool resulted in super-numerary limbs.
These experiments are couched comfortably in Brandon Ballengée's real art and science curiosity into the root causes for recent increases of malformed frog populations in North America.
When speaking of these works it is fair to underscore Ballengée's commitment to aiding public environmental awareness of threats to wildlife preservation.
Brandon's biodiversity ethos is implied by his immersive involvement in performing field biology at the North American Reporting Center for Amphibian Malformations (NARCAM) as well as his more celebratory works (see Love Hotel.) I happen to sense a deeper but not more cynical message in his live web cast of an aggravated creation of abnormal, many legged frogs:
"There is a significant amount of information not yet known about amphibian regeneration. Many of the malformations found in the wild can be induced through injuries caused by parasitic infestation.
The intention of exhibiting their experiment is not to "shock" or "disgust" the viewer but instead hopefully it will help to inform viewers about the complex growth processes of other living organisms. Also they hope to demonstrate the type of experiments necessary in order to understand what is happening in the environment around us."
Brandon Ballengée
As for the hidden motives for any artist's delving into Physical Manipulation DevBio Arts, Its sometimes best if we take a long hard look in the mirror. I will now review and critique motives for my own dabbling into the world of Physical Manipulation Embryology Art by explaining my botched project, Initial Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery.
My plan was to cut the head off of one growing zebrafish embryo and transplant (paste) that head onto another "whole" zebrafish embryo. Done correctly, this might develop into a two-headed, fleshy and fashionable, "Mosaic Brut" designer zebrafish. I used handmade glass microsurgical tools and a microscope to decapitate one embryo. The disembodied yet still living head was then gently applied to a full embryo but it did not did not graft/stick. After a few tries I decided it was either a lack of luck, patience or skill on my part. It was only later that I learned that micropins are often used in embryology collages such as these.
As far as my motives, I am not too proud to admit a simple, carnivalesque sadism was involved in my inquisitive and acquisitive embryological slicing. The urge to scope and poke, force evolution and morphologically sculpt is a bridge that joins the Arts and the Sciences. But, I will say this once because it is quite clear and concise, I think this process is cruel.
Physical Manipulation DevBio Arts as a way towards knowing or sculpting Development is non-intuitive, intriguing, curious and lovely but there is no doubt that the process is meddlesome, violent, surgical and often gratuitously so.
TERATOGENIC ARTS
A subset of the physical techniques for the alteration of future architectures of the developing lifeform is through the application of teratogens. Teratogens are those chemicals, viruses or radiations which can cause defects in a developing lifeform. Teratology is the real science of monsters. Once again, the artists are late on the scene. The history of teratology is a terrific and fascinating area of research. A great deal is already known and documented about the variety of aberration in form and function of developing embryos due to various teratogenic effects.
By using chemicals, viruses or other mutagens (like utlraviolet light, x-rays or gamma-rays) on the unborn, an artist can alter the body plans of developing living organisms. The effects are quite random and often lead to a pained existence (when they are not lethal.) Sometimes a trait for some sort of high weirdness can randomly occur. If these teratological agents reach the germ cells (the eggs or sperm) of the experimental art organisms, this can affect their progeny. This might even result in a permanent and inheritable alteration of this organism. But we will save an analysis of the effects and artistic feats of germline alterity for the Transgenic Arts section, the multigenerational subset of the Teratogenic Arts.
The modern historical originator of highbrow, Teratological Mutagenic Arts is Edward Steichen.
He dosed his Delphinium seeds in a chemical bath of Colchicine.
Rumor has it that he was taking Colchicine for his gout.
Colchicine is known to have a teratogenic propensity to double chromosomes in vivo.
It is also a known carcinogen.
Regardless, Steichen showed his mutant Delphinium gleanings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.
Edward Steichen produced the most massive, mutated and handsome Delphiniums ever.
He never showed the ones that didn't make it to the MOMA.
There were certainly ugly, stunted, febrile and demented resultants to his teratogenic Colchicine Delphiniums.
Steichen's reject Delphiniums might make a great alternative retrospective.
In comparison, the online live-art interface for Eduardo Kac's Genesis allowed viewers to see transgenic bacteria with the insertion of the Genesis Gene (see below in Transgenic Arts) and offered the online public a chance to voluntarily mutate these bacteria with an interactive interface that activated an ultraviolet light. Just as UV Light from tanning salons (or the more organic version, sunlight) can give you skin cancer, Ultraviolet lights cause mutations in bacterial genomes. Ultraviolet Light is a know teratogen and can be deadly at the right intensity and duration. With the online UV option, Eduardo Kac ran a sort of interactive but impersonal, bacterial Milgram Experiment.
In a similar mode of teratogenic dementia, in the bioart performance, "pFARM," I practiced a method called Organic Mutagenesis.
Since prehistory, the breeder's craft may have included various organic teratogens to speed up novelty. The collaborative, performative pFARMers (Organic, Biotech Fetishists) used Gelman filters to make sterile solutions of potentially mutagenic organic foods and medicines (I.e. Ginseng, Spilanthus, Primrose Oil, Herbal Infant Diuretics.) Developing chicken embryo airsacs were injected with these solutions publicly. The experimental, organic, fertile Mutant Chicken Embryos were then sold for a dollar each at an open-air market in Woodstock NY, USA. These were injected by the artists but made to order for the customer. The chances are good that most effects were lethal or ineffective. The results were not tracked.
Though much of our planetary diversity is based on random mutation, very few artists have taken to using teratogens as an organismic paintbrush. So far, the artistic use of radioactive, photonic and chemical teratogens to create a living mutagenic artwork has been directed towards bacteria, flowers and chickens. It is important to note that the artist's trajectory seems to be heading towards a sort of macho, daredevil's tempestuous approach towards crossing "the fur barrier." The fur barrier is a cultural complex based on sympathy biases that people tend to have for warm blooded, cute, big eyed, bilaterally symmetrical and fuzzy life. The random results of the Teratogenic Arts are too often painful and lethal for the human-ish animal arts. Many of the failures may make insistent trans-species comprehensible calls for a speedy, humane euthanasia. But, if you don't mind statistically successful after massive waves of annihilation, if you don't mind being catcalled with neologisms like, "The Stillborn Artist", then the field of Teratological Mutagenic Arts is wide open for you…
TRANSGENIC ARTS
If you want a supposedly more accurate, benign, targeted and genetically stable Devbio Artwork, then a genetic edit should be inserted with the protocols and methods of Transgenic Arts. Recently (since the 1970's) modern molecular biology has found more and more ways to direct mutation through a process called transfection or Transgenic Infection.
Transgenesis is another kind of Physical Manipulation Art.
Though it appears bloodless, it is not minimally invasive. It is a surgical and teratogenic process.
But it is a specialization with both elegance and novel enigmatics.
As with many biotechnological artworks, the technology itself sometimes needs defining.
WHAT IS A TRANSGENIC ORGANISM?
Transgenic organisms are different than wild type organism.
Transgenic organisms are organisms that have foreign DNA inserted into their genome.
This means one or more genes from a different organism (i.e. animal, bacteria, plant, fungus or virus) has been added, through some tricks of modern molecular biology, into the nucleus every one of the organism's cells. Transgenic organisms are walking around with non-spontaneous expressible molecules in their bodies, minds (if they have minds) and the genetic material that goes on to make their children. Sometimes referred to as hybrids, cyborgs or chimeras, transgenic organisms are an interspecies mix of DNA, a targeted collage of two or more organisms. The most important thing to remember is that their alteration is permanent and inheritable. That means that their kids and their grandkids with have the same difference that they do.
WHY DO NON-ARTISTS MAKE TRANSGENIC ORGANISMS?
Genetically manipulated organisms, are considered promising tools to decode physiological processes and cure diseased metabolisms. Sometimes non-human models are not the best mirrors of human health. Sometimes sickly humans will volunteer to become human subjects. Humans are similar to all living organisms in some ways but if we can make organisms more similar to humans then we can increase predictability. So, in the name of progress and a faster drug development pipeline, molecular biologists in the medical field are creating human-other hybrids as disease models.
Specialists in agriculture and animal husbandry have other goals than human health. Some want more yield for more profit, others want disease resistant organisms to erase fears of chaotic loss. There are even some pet producers who are using transgenic techniques to create aesthetic differences as a way to make newer, more seductive, cuter or stranger companion organisms. And, some animals are used as industrial factories for producing rare metabolites. These products are hard to make in a chemistry lab but can be produced in large enough amounts inside a body that a company can live off these special transgenic bodies and their body fluids. These animals are considered to be alive only as appliances or production facilities solely for manufacturing.
It is the medical applications that carry the bulk of the reasoning for the application of these technologies. Although medical science is a "for profit" venture worldwide, there is a certain amount of awe for doctors and scientists who dedicate their life work and somewhat cryptic brainpower to advances in curing human ills. Although far from a panacea, modern medical science has helped many people live longer and better lives. Nonetheless, It is important to realize the other uses and forces driving novel transgenesis as a breeding process for commercially engineered or, some would say, force-evolved processing units to manufacture proteins for the global market.
Already, I can sense some of our reader's shackles rising. Mutaphobia is a tendency that can be both wise and xenophobic. One of the most contentious issues surrounding the application of Genetic Modification is who gets to decide which safety levels are imposed for this potentially dangerous technology that can live freely and reproduce itself ad infinitum. When scientists first developed gene-splicing technology, these same worries were discussed at a historic meeting called Asilomar. As scientists realized the power of cutting and pasting genes, they entered into a voluntary moratorium, levels of danger were debated, risk assessments were made and levels of containment were thought out. But, scientists don't decide policy for whole technologies. Scientists are often only able to shore up how to rule themselves in the lab. This academic "freedom" and "respect" for research is traded for "value-free," objective, technologies, which are then applied in the cash intensive world outside the lab.1
WHY DO ARTISTS MAKE TRANSGENIC ORGANISMS?
For what reasons do artists practice this lifescaping, flesh hacking, transgene collage methodology?
Let's look at a few artists who display living organisms whom have been subjected to a variety of Insertational Genetic Alterations.
From these reviews, perhaps we can intuit some of the intentions and effects which these Transgenic Artists have on the public perception of these technologies, on the living organisms they have "effected" and on their own sense of artistic integrity (if this is not an oxymoron.).
We will look at a few of the transgenic artworks of Critical Art Ensemble, Kathy High, Joe Davis and Eduardo Kac to explore this thorny question. All four of these artists have tagged particular transgenic organisms as living art forms. All four of these artists have achieved these ends in different ways and for different reasons. All four of them have intentionally or not, opened up public dialogue on issues which stem from Life's Technological Redesign and which are intimately bound to the overlapping grounds of the physical and the social: genes, goal directed change, chance, danger, non-human awareness, pain, death, ego, new model life in the lab, free-range new model life, unpredictable, long-term environmental effects and safety. The can of worms I'm opening won't be itemized in the space provided so lets just open up the debate.
A CANVAS OF TRANGENIC ARTWORKS
Joe Davis has made two major transgenic bacterial strains based on artistic concepts.
The Riddle of Life and Microvenus are both some of the first organisms to have an artist's hand in their mutation using the protocols of modern molecular biology. To Joe's credit, these microorganisms were not made to order but their novel genetic sequences were instead both designed and inserted stably into the E. Coli's genome by the artist with aid from voluntary scientist collaborators. I emphasize the use of the artist's hand in the process of Bioart production because there is a certain striving among active wetlab artists to be as technologically involved in the making of their altered entities as possible. To alter a hereditary cascade for your fancy is an unusually egotistical and ethically tarnished state of mind. Loaned life, ready-mades and/or mail-order varieties of Transgenic Art have the potential to suffer from ethical detachment or technological ignorance.
Joe Davis' bacterial strains have secret messages hidden inside them.
The Microvenus bacteria have a sequence that represents a conversion of an ancient Celtic rune to the zeros and ones of computer-encoded bitmap, which is then further encrypted into a DNA sequence.
The Riddle of Life, referencing the mythic Sphinx, is a sequence based on Joe's own English Alphabet to DNA codex. These types of language to DNA or graphic to DNA cryptographic systems are not impossible to comprehend.
In fact, they can easily become teach tools for all ages to explain the structure of DNA, how heredity is transmitted and the role of amino acids in replication, transcription and translation. These are reproduction's basics, the so-called Central Dogma. But, much more than teach tools, Joe Davis' Art Germs are living and quickly replicating life forms. E. Coli divide every twenty minutes when they are kept at body temperature. This means that Joe Davis has made his poetic sequences into a permanent part of the bacterial strain's genome.
For the purposes of this review, I wish to convey that these sequences were chosen by Davis to exemplify a certain aesthetic and that his aesthetic is not expressed visibly by the organisms in question. Instead, the message is genomically embedded poetic license, without gene function and presumably without any organismic effect. The importance of invisibility, a concept that will inform our debate, is implicit in Davis' genetically modified strains. These strains of bacteria carry multi-generational molecular inscriptions somewhat permanently. In this incarnation, the organisms are artistic vessels. At the molecular scale, structural change of DNA sequences have real differences in shape but the difference can only be "seen" through processes of technological sleuthing (I.e. DNA Isolation, PCR, Use of Restriction Enzymes and Gel Electrophoresis Joe Davis' designer bacteria look more or less morphologically "normal" through a microscope but they carry a message, which has the potential to outlive the human race or live among us (even inside of us) ubiquitously, without a trace.
Another transgenic artist, offering a permutation of these literary concoctions, is Eduardo Kac.
Eduardo Kac has been artistically keen to utilize the both the invisible and the highly visible in his transgenic artworks.
Famous for Alba the Green Glowing Bunny, Eduardo Kac has worked to conjoin kabalistic hidden codes with genes which physically express visual difference "in the flesh" of transgenic organisms.
Eduardo Kac' first transgenic work, Genesis, seems to emulate many of Joe Davis' bacterial aesthetics. Translating a passage about dominion from the Torah into Morse code and then into sequenced DNA, a new sequence was inserted into a strain of E. Coli. But, instead of emphasizing a permanent, hereditary thumbprint, a sort of "artist was here" designer organism, Genesis emphasized the continued evolution of transgenic living organisms beyond the intentionality of the artist's hands. Though the emphasis on codex and genetic code have their similarities with previous transgenic works, Eduardo Kac inserts not a mythic signature of genetic graffiti alone, but a living text which is subject to environmental degradation, popular mangling, multiple re-readings and continued mutant alterity.
Treading down a more slippery slope, Eduardo Kac was the first transgenic artist to cross the Fur Barrier.
In some ways the use of ready-mades like Alba, the GFP Bunny (who was never displayed, R.I.P.) and the GFP+ mice in The Eighth Day (who were displayed and then sent back to the lab, R.I.P.) saved Eduardo Kac the grief of responsibility, which these creations imply. In other ways, Eduardo Kac saved himself most of the blame for the inevitable pain and death that comes with the production of these organisms in the first place. Recently, Eduardo Kac has mixed both the encoding mythic text and the utilization genes responsible for morphological change in a living plant in his artwork, Move 36.
Move 36 is not a fur barrier piece, plants can be fuzzy but not furry (unless Laura Cinti's very hairy, human-haired cactus is not a hoax.)
The plant in Move 36 is not a ready-made though it was probably made to order.
But, this is the first non-loaned transgenic art organism to carry a morphological mutation which can be appreciated by the naked eye. Certainly, Move 36 is an invitation to go further, to art-morph life beyond the fur barrier, eventually to free sculpt the human genome. The irony is thick and intentional in these VivoArts pieces. In Eduardo Kac's creative misuse of philosophical quotations there is a subtle bent against both organized religion and scientific objectivity as complicit in the paranoid project of controlling nature.
Whether it is the slick irony of postmodern transgenics or the more classic, heartfelt futuristic transgenics, the Critical Art Ensemble handily takes the quest "to boldly go where no man has gone before" to task. Critical Art Ensemble has been working as a collective towards the re-education of the public through tactical media, electronic interventions and biotechnological activism. CAE encourages skepticism about popular, industrial concepts of what gets to count as safe and sane. Particularly adept at criticizing the mad rush towards distribution of novel organisms from the lab into the "outside world," Critical Art Ensemble has performed a variety of Publicly Accessible and scientifically repeatable alternatives to the standard rhetorics of Big Science.
Critical Art Ensemble has two projects - Free Range Grains and GenTerra that actively critique the lack of industrial oversight on issues surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms and Foodstuffs. They reveal through art and science their technological analysis of topics such as GMOs and human health, GMOs and the environment and, in the U.S., the complete lack of GMO labeling to the disservice of potentially informed consumers. In the Transgenic Hobbyist performance, Free Range Grain, Critical Art Ensemble (with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu) used DNA sleuthing techniques to make their art. The project uses DNA Isolation, PCR, Restriction Enzymes and Gel Electrophoresis.
In Free Range Grain, these laboratory techniques of "fingerprinting" are used to identify unlabeled GMO products picked off of market shelves or out of supposedly non-GMO food sources. The public is shown, by amateurs, technologically accurate, visual proof of difference between modified and unmodified foodstuffs. The procedures are performed publicly to make the omnipresent transgenic ecology we live in and consume daily more scientifically visible to a wider audience.
The artistic presentation is less about heroic adventure and more of a broad sketch revealing the potential ecological footprint of these types of chic crops. Standard industrial foodstuff contain genes which are equally as invisible as Joe Davis' conceptual genes. The alteration is usually not expressed in any morphological way.
The effects of the modification are expressed in a functional way, a profitable way (a resistance to pesticides, for example) but the existence of difference is hidden to the naked eye. In this case the invisibility of difference is based on public relations (propaganda) as opposed to any more esoteric reasoning. CAE's Contestational Biology went a step further by researching an enzyme which was a harmless vitamin but which could both tag the invisible genetic graffiti of Monsanto's Round-up Ready crops and metabolically jam the pesticide resistance that those crops were adorned with.
The Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine was designed as a transgenic component for GenTerra, a collaborative performance project with Critical Art Ensemble and Beatriz da Costa. A sort of roulette wheel of Petri dishes, the TBRM spins at the push of a button and a robotic arm opens one of the agar plates to the open air. On the agar in each Petri dish is a growing sample of E. Coli.
One of the ten plates is transgenic, with the reproductive ability to pass on random human genomic fragments.
This is another Milgram Experiment (N.B. see ) disguised as interactivity performance but it includes a personal risk/benefit analysis, which belies a deep respect for the public in this otherwise sadistic prank. By the way, common scientific rhetoric assures us that E. Coli cannot fly so the actual TBRM "release" is a symbolic gesture, a mere exposure to air. Nonetheless, the public walks away with the metaphor of GMO release as Ecological Russian Roulette.
Critical Art Ensemble has other transgenic works, including the transgenic beer and wafer produced as sacraments for the followers of The Cult of the New Eve (with Faith Wilding and Paul Vanouse) and the infamous call for Fuzzy Biological Sabotage which can be read in the online book, The Molecular Invasion.
With these two projects there are real questions about of art and the ethics of the intentional release of transgenic organisms. This question has stimulated some debate in our multipolar community.
Should artists be held to the same rules of containment as scientists?
Is intentional release a human right?
Who is more irresponsible, industry or the arts? Who in the transgenic art arena seems to be authentically asking, what about the non-human transgenic cyborgs as entities?
So lets wrap up this discussion with Kathy High and her transgenic Art piece, Embracing Animal.
Kathy High has brought us a mixture of transgenic art and ethics which we haven't seen displayed "in the flesh" before.
In Embracing Animal exhibit she has three readymade transgenic rats, Tara, Star and Matilda Barbie.
These rats are retired breeders and they are stably transgenic HLA-B27 lines.
The HLA-B27 line of rats is used as a disease model to explore potential panaceas for those suffering from Cohn's Disease and various related autoimmune disorders. This means these rats have transgenes intentionally inserted into their lineage that causes a version of these diseases including all the pain and metabolic disarray that comes with these disorders. The rats have been used exclusively for research, until now.
Kathy High has decided to reward the retired breeders for serving up multiple sacrificial litters to the medical research industry by supplying a grandiose retirement plan for these beings.
This empathetic mode of interaction may have something to do with Kathy's own autoimmune disorders.
In her previous video, Animal Attraction she explored issues of animal cognition, animal consciousness, animal communication and even psychic ethology.
But in the case of Becoming Animal, Kathy extends the olive branch to some of our transgenic disease models as mirrors and partially-human, cyborg others.
Kathy High has had a large environment built for the rats filled with hiding places and other explorative areas.
She provides them with a varied diet, plenty of water and medical attention.
She makes sure that The Barbies are enriched (link to ) and cared for.
She even has the vets try alternative medicine like herbal and homeopathic cures which she has found useful for her own condition. After the show is over, Kathy High will take these rat familiars home and live with them. Embracing Animal showcases the less pretty side of transgenics. The Barbies are often loosing their hair or not quite walking right. But in this new world, a world outside the lab, they are often frisky and their personalities are becoming more pronounced.
This question of transgenic consciousness, the engineered life that looks back at you is worth considering.
Especially if you are a young artist considering Developmental Biology Arts, ask yourself, how will the living organisms react to being altered by another life form's will?
What will be their quality of life? How much is owed to them for the usury you have confined their life too?
CONCLUSION
In any and all explorations, biology, art, body, lifeworld and beyond a broad canvassing of multiple works should lead to a sort of messy unnamable as we wrap up.
I will leave it to the reader to define, modify, refine and extrapolate from this lengthy diatribe.
Suffice to say, there is much creative and morphological ground left untrodden.
Organismic life feels pain, tries to evade death, feels pleasure and may have evolved motility just to get closer to hedonism's sources and further from the horror. But we, as organisms and the earth, as stage, are only so plastic. One question which draws and redraws us is, How Plastic? Another question is how to digest the repercussions of our failures, especially after they have left the nest and begun ambling about in the open air? Biology and Art both have their separate and conjoined effects but often enough, we know not what we do.
Notes
1 : For more on this debate, see:
a- Paul Berg, Asilomar and Recombinant DNA, on Nobelprize.org.
b- Photographs from Asilomar:
International Conference on Recombinant DNA Molecules, in MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections, February 1975.
c-
Genetic Engineering, on Union of Concerned Scientists
d - Stuart Newman, Australian Mouse Study Confirms CRG Warning, on Council for Responsible Genetics. 
Adam Zaretsky
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