- Some personal observations on the relevance and urgency of collaborations between art, science and technology -
For more than 5 years now I am the director for The Arts and Genomics Centre, located at Leiden University in the Netherlands.[1] The Arts and Genomics Centre is active at the intersection of art, science and technology, and from the beginning we focused on exploring new forms of collaboration between the humanities, the life sciences and the arts. In this paper I will reflect on why I think it is necessary that artists and scholars engage with the sciences and participate in art-science collaboration. I will explain why The Arts and Genomics Centre finds it important to explore new forms of collaboration between the humanities, the life sciences and the arts. I will also discuss the rhetoric and the pitfalls of art-science collaborations and how we can avoid these pitfalls. In that sense this paper is also about the specific role and function of art in our society and culture. I will thus discuss the specificity of art: what makes art different from other media or other forms of communication?
From the beginning The Arts and Genomics Centre focused on artists that participate in the practice of the life sciences, i.e. bioartists.[2] There is a growing number of artists that make use of the possibilities of the life sciences to work with new materials, that is, living materials that traditionally do not belong to the artistic realm.[3] The use of these living materials, or moist media,[4] in artistic practice also implies the application of the tools of the life sciences in the arts. Much bioart - as we call it - literally comes out of the laboratory. The materials, tools, and technologies of the life sciences, however, are hardly neutral of course; they are rife with all sorts of cultural, political, social, and ethical assumptions and implications that are part of this particular scientific practice. In other words, the accomplishments of the life sciences, both scientifically and culturally, are directly linked up with these sciences' materials, tools, and technologies. The concrete results of, say, DNA research, as well as the promises, expectations, and fears tied to this effort, are comprised in it. The use of its materials, tools, and technologies within an artistic context automatically means that artists have to deal with these promises, expectations, and fears, including their cultural, political, social, and ethical ramifications. With the use of biomaterials - tissue, blood, genes, - in artworks, artists have taken on board also the discourses and practices in the scientific lab. Bioart is the artistic outcome of the ways in which artists deal with living materials and life science practices.[5]
One of the most famous bioartists is Eduardo Kac. Kac has produced a number of works incorporating living materials, but he is most well known for a work of art, that he called GFP Bunny. It is an albino rabbit called Alba that glows green when illuminated with light of a specific wave length. Alba is a transgenic organism, and these are organisms which have inserted DNA that originated in a different species. Alba was created in a biogenetic lab in France with EGFP that is an enhanced version of the original green fluorescent gene found in jellyfish. One of the issues that this art work addresses is what it means that we can now have transgenic animals as pets. The work challenges us to consider our responsibility for these new kinds of transgenic pets. The GFP Bunny provoked an immense public response, especially among life scientists. The discussion mainly focused on ethical questions, such as can it be allowed to genetically modify a living organism for purely artistic reasons, however, such questions in itself point to the issue of our responsibility towards the creatures that we can produce with technological means and the boundaries that we set ourselves in creating new organisms. Kac himself claims that his art "does not attempt to moderate, undermine or arbitrate the public discussion. It seeks to contribute a new perspective that offers ambiguity and subtlety where we usually only find affirmative ("in favor") and negative ("against") polarity.[6] He considers his art to be art as social intervention.
Other bioartists, such as an Australian artist group called The Tissue Culture and Art Project, have chosen to turn the practice of tissue engineering into the medium of their artworks.[7] The Tissue Culture and Art Project create sculptures from livings cells that, as they claim, bring into question deep rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self, and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment.[8] One of their most famous projects is the 'disembodied cuisine'. In this project they grew frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer for food consumption. To grow these little pieces of meat they procured cells from a living frog without killing or even hurting it. This project culminated in a feast at the international biological art exhibition L'art Biotech' in Nantes, France March 2003, where the little pieces of this so-called victimless meat, were marinated in calvados, fried and then consumed by friends and other artists. While the frog from which they procured the cells was leaping around among the eating guests, who were eating frog legs seemingly also suitable for vegetarians.[9] Another work of them is "victimless leather" in which they grow a leather jacket using again tissue engineering. As in Kac's work, in TC&A's art works are issues at stake of responsibility for the new entities that we are able to create with life science technologies such as tissue engineering.
Most bioartists also share a fascination for the new media and its artistic challenges, that life science technologies make available, such as moist media. For example, the Australian bioartist Boo Chapple has created the installation A Rat's Tale with collagen that she derived from rat tails. The tails used in making this work were scavenged from life science researchers once they had finished with their rats and in this sense, A Rat's Tale can also be seen as an investigation of waste and use-value, both with relation to living bodies and to the production of art. But when we look at this installation we can see that Boo Chapple is clearly fascinated by the opportunities of collagen as an artistic medium and its aesthetic appeal.[10]
From these examples it becomes cleat that bioart does not necessarily addresses the content of science but rather the social/political/economical forces and ethical and aesthetical values that may be driving the research and the societal application of knowledge gained by the scientific discoveries. And these are also the concerns of many scientists and scholars.[11] Precisely in the space were shared concerns of the sciences and the humanities meet and often clash, bioart can be active as a catalyst to establish a new and more productive relationship between the humanities and the sciences, and an opportunity to make the artistic practice a integral part of scholarly and scientific reflections.
Why does The Arts and Genomics Centre think we need to seek for this new relationship between the arts, the sciences and the humanities? Over the past years the humanities have become increasingly less involved in the process of agenda setting regarding major issues and developments in science. In debates on the consequences of developments in life sciences, scholars often find themselves at the end of the pipe line, so to speak, to critically respond to scientific developments or technological applications which are already put into practice. The growing complexity and inaccessibility of science and technology make it increasingly harder for scholars in the humanities to formulate responses that move beyond those of the general public while many also have to rid themselves of their own personal anxieties regarding science.
It is this complexity that causes that the ethical issues and questions prompted by the results of the life sciences are more and more addressed or resolved within these sciences themselves. This happens, for instance, in ethical commissions, which rely on scientific expertise and standardized protocols. Looking from the outside as scholar and as concerned citizen, the answers and solutions these commissions provide appear often pragmatic and policy oriented, while issues that require profound or fundamental ethical reflection seem to be largely ignored.
This points to a dilemma in the relationship between the sciences, the humanities and the public; a dilemma that arises from the clash between scientific integrity and societal anxiety. Scientists often express frustration that the publics fail 'to understand as they do' as a reason for rejection by the public of new technologies and that their scientific integrity is not fully appreciated as a valuable contribution to the public debate. In the public, a different appreciation of benefits and related risks, but also of social and moral values (i.e. different from sciences), seem to play an important role.
In 2009 President Obama lifted the ban on stem cell research, and at the same time he issued a memorandum, directed to ensure scientific integrity in government decision making. Obama declares: The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions.[12] In response to this memorandum Robert George, a bioethicist at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics says that the memo could run the risk of tarring opponents of stem-cell research as ideologues and enemies of science. "It's not a question of science on one side and ideology on the other," he says. "It's a dispute about what ethical norms will govern science."[13] This dispute is at the heart of bioart; think of Boo Chapple's A Rat's Tale, which is, as I said, an investigation of waste and use-value with relation to living bodies, i.e. the work has a tangible ethical dimension that makes us reflect on these issues. Therefore, Chapple's work is in the first place a wonderful work of art, at the same time it opens up the public discussion to unexpected and ambiguous perspectives on ethical, cultural and political values that underpin decisions made in life sciences research.
This is possible because bioart shares with the life sciences a material engagement - something that the humanities do not have - and both bioart and science are engaged in constructing new metaphorical relations between life and matter. The relevance of bioart to the humanities is that this new form of art provides the humanities - through this artistic material engagement - with a unique and unexpected access to the life sciences, allowing scholars to participate in debates on the implications of these sciences from their own humanities perspective. Bioart makes evident that the clash between scientific integrity and public anxiety can be made productive in collaborative practices between art, science and the humanities.
Taking these considerations and arguments as theoretical basis The Arts and Genomics Centre decided to address issues surrounding the life sciences in a joint effort from art, science and the humanities. We agree with Kac that "it is impossible-and unacceptable-to circumscribe the questions raised by biotechnology within the realm of scientific research or industrial production, precisely because they take place in society at large."[14] It would therefore be inconceivable not to involve artists, designers and scholars in these discussions. And indeed what we see happening at the many symposiums recently organised that address important issues such as designing life, designing nature and owing life - typical issues implicated by the developments in the life sciences - that almost always artists and designers are invited to participate in discussing these issues. And exchange projects between artists and scientists, such as artist-in-lab-projects, have become common and a large number of organizations have emerged that stimulate and initiate collaboration between artists and scientists.[15] Research funding organizations in the humanities, such as the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), have also initiated all sorts of research programs that explore and support interactions between art and science.[16] And the recently established Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (http://iarta.unt.edu/) at the University of North Texas can be considered as part of this movement as well. It seems that, art-science collaborations are here to stay.
As it seems that the bridge between art and science is firmly constructed and not subject of discussion anymore. However, in spite of these positive developments it is my contention that it is still and even more important is to reflect on the nature of this bridge, how strong is this bridge, who builds this bride and why, for what purposes, who is supposed to cross this bridge and who is actually crossing? And I observe - much to my regret - that there is still a huge difference between the answers of science and the industry on the one hand, and of art and design on the other hand. Artists and scientists seem to build different bridges to each other with different aims in mind.
Why do we consider it so important, urgent and necessary for art to play a societal and cultural role in addressing issues such as designing nature, designing human life and questions such as 'who owns life?' That is in essence a question about what exactly the role of art is or can be in that discussion about our future. Why is art needed for that? Think for instance about issues of Who owns life? and the commodification of nature and the body: that is the phenomenon that genetic engineering techniques transform living things - plants, animals, and human bodies - into marketable biomaterials. Animal bodies are engineered and cloned to serve as research tools. Human body tissue is turned into valuable raw material for pharmaceutical products.[17]
Recently two rather disturbing books were published about these issues: David Koepsell, Who Owns You: The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes and Donna Dickenson, Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit.[18] When we read the blurb of Body Shopping it is immediately evident why these issues are so disturbing: "According to law, you don't actually own your own body, and you might be shocked by the cunning ways everyone from researchers and entrepreneurs to doctors, insurers, and governments are using that fact to their advantage. Thanks to developments in biotechnology and medicine, cells, tissues, and organs are now viewed as both a valuable source of information and as the raw material for new commercial products." After reading these books, to me the question remains what can artists and designers add to this discussion? And I mean that on a fundamental level, what can they add to this discussion that is not already part of this discussion. What can artists add to this discussion with their works of art, that is arguments, feelings and intuitions that I cannot extract from books or articles?
Can art transcend the verbal rhetoric of the relevance and urgency of art's engagement with science and of art-science collaborations, a rhetoric which is most of the time not reflected in the actual art works that comes out of art-science collaborations? Art-science collaborations should implicate much more than scientists and artists imagining or imaging together possible scenarios for the future or how to embed on a cultural and societal level for example new developments in nanotechnology by making art works with the help of nanotechnologists to arrive at conclusions, intuitions, insights and ambiguities already offered in books about the implications of nanotechnology.[19] On the one hand, most art-science collaborations seem to have a one way exchange of knowledge and technology from the sciences to the arts. On the other hand, in most art-science collaborations the central question is what has art to offer to science, what can art do for science? And the answer is often to help us (and science) to understand or to become critically aware of the implications of science or to help us (and science) to reshape culture in the face of technological developments. That seems to be art's gift to science: to culturally embed science, critically or not. And there is of course also the rhetoric of art's gift to science as hybrid vigour: for instance, on the website of iArta we read "The use of new technologies in art often acts as a laboratory for subsequent industrial and commercial applications."[20] A rhetoric reiterated over and over again: art can really add something to science which science itself cannot achieve on its own. This might very well be true. My argument however is that we should also ask the question what science can do for art above and beyond providing new artistic media and technological knowledge. What's science's gift to art? To make such a gift possible involves a fundamental rethinking of the role and position of science towards art, a change in the hierarchal relationship between science and art. Art-science collaborations often strike me as an artist’s search for articulating an attitude vis-à-vis science. If such quest is perhaps characteristic of art in general, while one is unlikely to see scientists embark on a similar effort to define their relationship to art, this particular dynamic also indicates that the position of art regarding science is unclear, a situation that is upheld by the overpowering presence of science and technology in today's society. There is an overall uncertainty on the role of art in society. Although the cultural status and importance of the natural sciences are taken for granted, the cultural role or significance of the arts is much less clear.
The uncertain and searching position of the arts vis-à-vis science surfaces in the dangers that threaten art that engages with science. The first danger is the Dazzled by Science Trap: artists can be so dazzled by the challenges and possibilities offered by new technologies and materials, that they lose themselves in playing with for instance nanotechnology in creating nano paintings or whatever, without any deep interest in or knowledge of nanotechnology itself or the societal or ethical implications of these technologies and without a sustained artistic focus. And scientists often happily play along with these artists as they see an opportunity there to improve their public image.[21] The question though is, should art please the sciences? What to think of art that is funded by science and industry money, when the sciences and industry have created a play field for art to fool around with their materials without any real consequences for or critical approaches to these sciences?
A step further is the Complicity Trap. This trap is phrased as dilemma by Ziarek in relation to bioart: 'In the context of this thinning boundary [between art and technology], it seems legitimate and necessary to ask whether and to what extent transgenic art is complicit with the manipulative flows of power or whether, on the contrary, it exposes, complicates, or perhaps even contests them.'[22] The question is should art be one of the voices that reassures us about technological developments and solutions and by the melding together of science and artistic expression help to ease the way to a popular acceptance of new technological applications? Is art that makes scientists happy good art? Should art be instrumental to the aims of disseminating science and technology?
And what about art that merely repeats what is already done in science and technology. More and more artists make use of the internet to create art and/or include interactive interfaces. Inventive as these works may be, according to Ziarek, they are 'nonetheless thoroughly determined by the same principles of interactivity that underlies e-commerce, Internet trading and banking, and so on, as well as other forms of Web interactivity.’[23] And as we know from computer games, interactive shows and web browsing, interactivity was commodified even before it was extended into the realm of art. This kind of art works are 'often more repetition than rupture, more of the same rather than of the new'.[24]
Considering these traps therefore, any art-science collaboration is to start with a question about the nature of the surplus value in inviting an artists as participant into a project. And this in the end a question about the specificity of art. What is it that makes it important for art par excellence to address issues of designing nature, designing human life and who owns Life? In other words, what sets art's images, discourses, practices apart from other images, practices and discourses, especially those of the sciences?
An important aspect of the specificity of the practice of art engaging with the life sciences is the relation between ethics and aesthetics. This of course specially applies to bioart. The fact that these works of art are conducted in part in a biology laboratory must, by force, give rise to ethical considerations, irrespective of the main focus of the artwork. Furthermore, simply the fact that biological material or live organisms are used, either to present the work in a public space or as medium for artistic expression makes this type of artworks inescapable from ethics. That is for example the case with the work of bioartists Adam Zaretsky; his work has been called 'bioethics in action'[25] in order to distinguish between the theoretical and discursive level of ethics and the level of ethics that only reveals it self in the hands-on artistic practice of a bioartist, such as Adam Zaretsky.
I will give a brief example of Zaretsky's bioethics in actions. In one of his bioart classes at The Arts and Genomics Centre Zaretsky tried to make pheasant embryos transgenic in the hope that they would grow two heads or four legs, all in his relentless quest for a transgenic aesthetics.[26] In the Netherlands there are no ethical procedures regarding bird embryos. What Zaretsky and the students did in this class - making a window in the eggs and ejecting them with plasmid DNA - is totally within the bounds of science ethics and no licenses are necessary. This has to do with (one of the) definition of life in use in the life sciences: something is considered alive when it can sustain itself alive independently and when it can reproduce itself.[27] Therefore: what is not allowed is that these eggs hatch, because at the moment the pheasant is out of the egg we have life. So the students had to kill the embryos before the eggs hatch and Adam offered to the student several humane methods to kill the embryos - although we may argue whether 'to kill' is the proper word in this context. The choice for one of these so called humane methods to dispose of the embryos caused a lot of discussion, anxiety and even tears among the students. Adam himself remarks about this event: "My 'Transgenic Pheasant Embryology Lab' workshop concluded with students being invited to 'kill' their genetically modified pheasant embryos in any way they wanted to (these included frying, flushing down the toilet and putting to sleep with valium). The disturbing nature of this to the general public raises interesting ethical questions about the right to life. Interestingly, this work would not cause any specific problems for science ethics, which would find it completely acceptable. The work demonstrates the gap between the wider public and science ethics."[28]
In my view this embryology lab is a perfect case of bioethics in action. In that respect I consider Adams performance also a key to ethical education of young science and humanities students much more than any educational program that I know, in the sense that they hands-on participate in ethical judging and acting by becoming part of Adams performance - not by looking at it from the outside. The way that Adam has staged this performance made sure that also the life science students present at this class gained a new perspective on what for them had become already more or less a routine within their study. The hands-on tampering with life - however basic - by the students themselves set within this artistic performance – alienating them from every day's student life - gave them a deep and new experience and understanding of issues raised by the life sciences. In this embryology lab a lot of questions, anger, confusion, ambiguity and misunderstandings emerged from all sides, still, or therefore, I see this performance of Adam as a wonderful example of creating a platform at which scientists, artists and scholars can work together on important issues about tampering with life. The art work is nor the objects or eggs neither the processes and activities, the art work is the open space created with these objects, processes and activities in which something can happen, in which insights can arise that are not predetermined, but unexpected, surprising, threatening or unpleasant.
An even more radical project of Adam Zaretsky's is his project "Initial Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery". The goal of this project 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."[29]
The transplant operation did not succeed but to Adam the lesson learnt from his attempt is: "By learning standard microsurgical skills as an art productive process, I am attempting to focus on the liminal relationships that are formed at the border between the creation and the destruction of living beings. This is an attempt at waking the sleeping dreams of personal beauty. Therefore, I am not shielded by the rhetoric of moral sanctity implicit in the public face of scientific rationalization. I also believe participatory observation is a prerequisite to the comprehension and recontextualisation of any practice. But this is self expression, first and foremost." [30]
In relocating a scientific or technological practice into the artistic domain, Adam offers a different approach of nature than science, in the sense that he calls upon aesthetic motives to explain his artistic research; I quote from his web site: "the limits of the possible realms of bio-sensuality have not even been approached." Yet he undertakes his artistic quest into the aesthetic and therefore ethical unknown with the tools of the life sciences in a hands-on approach and fully covered by ethical procedures within science. Another quote from Zaretsky's web site: "This is the infinite approach to the mutual unknown that scientists, artists and even most novelty seeking organisms entertain." As a work of art his project "Initial Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery" is not the beheaded embryo, nor the tools and procedures. The art work is the open space created by the interaction between the embryos, tools, procedures, moral hesitations, public anxiety and scientific and aesthetic hubris. Only in such undefined open space a fruitful and non-hierarchical exchange and understanding between scientists, scholars and artists can arise.
Zaretsky's Transgenic Pheasant Embryology Lab and his artistic work in general demonstrates what art and design participating in the practice of the life sciences can add to the academic and public debate, while carefully preserving artistic integrity and independence from the sciences. By turning a scientific practice into an artistic practice and placing life at the centre of art, bioartists can address, within the realm of artistic imagination, the cultural, ethical and political implications of the life sciences. The artistic imagination may capture our fears, expectations, and out-of-control imagination with respect to the life sciences in tangible images. Bioartists can reveal the cultural meaning of the tools and technologies of the life sciences, but also their hidden dreams and expectations.[31]
Bioartists can do this quite differently than for example philosophers of science or science consultancies: in the field of possibilities opened up by the artistic register, such as inconsistencies, paradoxes, ambiguities, uncertainties, an artist can try out different and sometimes opposing avenues of understanding without being troubled or getting stuck in linguistic paradoxes and dualisms.
However what we see in most recent art-science collaborations, as in the broader debate on art's role in society, is that there is an uncertainty in formulating or understanding the characteristics or specificity of art and that this is mostly solved by using art in an instrumental sense: art as moral education, art as a vehicle for criticizing science or art as a tool for social change. Despite the intention of putting the emphasis on art's assumed importance in addressing urgent societal issues, art's specificity remains unanswered. That is unanswered by the scientists, but in many cases not understood by the artists themselves. Science's gift to art should be to allow and help create a space for art in the practice of science itself in order to develop and understand art's specificity within the practice of science. This sounds simple but it is not as simple since I see this only rarely happening. It means that science in its own house must give control to artists, that science must reconsider itself in the face of an artistic practice that permeates scientific life. It entails, on the other hand, a deep understanding of what is happening in science, on the side of the artists. Only then can we think of what it means to say that it is urgent and relevant for art to engage with science and not stick to mere rhetoric about the importance of this engagement.
There is a fundamental ambiguity in art's position and role in our contemporary society, again elegantly phrased in The Force of Art from Krzysztof Ziarek: "Can art affect the power momentum of the society of which it is itself a product and in which it often plays the function of an aesthetic object and/or commodity, and if so, how can it do this?"[32]
You almost tend to think that this is indeed impossible, and when I look at most art-science collaborations, I find it very difficult to see art in these projects as enriching, destabilizing, transforming or complicating the scientific discourse as Ziarek would like to see. The implication of Ziarek is that science does not seem to need art to do what is does. Science only allows art in when art more or less stays with the discourse of what he calls the manipulative flows of technoscientific power.
In a more optimistic mode we can say that art-science collaborations can only be successful when artists involved make art that scares the scientists, that unsettles them, that disrupts them, art that threatens them. That is not only my conclusion drawn from my experience as director for The Arts and Genomics Centre and from my very positive experience with Zaretsky's artist in residencies at our centre, because he is exactly doing that and that is why his residencies are so controversially successful, but I read this conclusion back in an article on interdisciplinary research in which the authors describe as the most successful mode of interdisciplinarity what they call the agonistic-antagonistic mode: "in the agonistic-antagonistic mode, interdisciplinary research is conceived neither as a synthesis nor in terms of a disciplinary division of labour, but as driven by an agonistic or antagonistic relation to existing forms of disciplinary knowledge and practice. Here, interdisciplinarity springs from a self-conscious dialogue with, criticism of or opposition to the intellectual, ethical or political limits of established disciplines or the status of academic research in general".[33]
What is argued here is indeed, as I said before, something completely different than what I see happening in more recent art-science collaborations, where artists are tolerated into the lab to see if they have something to offer to science, but in which art has to stay within the boundaries set by the sciences and in the end can not exert any transformative force.
W.J.T. Mitchell speaks in his article "The work of art in the age of biocybernetic reproduction" of the 'tactical irresponsibility' of bioartists. This 'tactical irresponsibility' writes Mitchell "might be just the right sort of homeopathic medicine for what plagues us".[34] I think that 'tactical irresponsibility' neatly describes the artistic strategy performed in Adam Zaretsky's project "Initial Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery" and that makes Zaretsky therefore the perfect artist for the agonistic-antagonistic mode of interdisciplinary research.
To find sustainable solutions for the important challenges mankind will be facing for many years to come, including improvement of public health, food security, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change and protection of our societies against crimes and acts of war, the development and application of technologies will be increasingly needed. The impact of these new technologies on our daily life however is and will be significant; developments in the life sciences and their applications generate all sorts of new concerns. That is why we cannot leave the decisions about societal applications of new technologies to scientists alone. We all must feel responsible, we all are responsible for the direction our society and culture is heading under the influence of new technologies, and that includes of course also artists and designers. Zaretsky's work - as most bioart works - give an artistic shape to a personal responsibility - perhaps it is better to speak of an embodied responsibility - for the implications of the life sciences. That is, bioart reveals in a very specific artistic manner how in collaborative projects with the sciences and the humanities a new and more effective (i.e. ambiguous) understanding of our individual ethical and esthetical responsibility can arise out of the openness of a work of art, for instance for the living organisms that we can produce technologically.