Expanding the Lab: A Conversation Between Artists Working with Science

Antony Hall ENKI Prototype, 2006

Chair: Verity Slater
Panellists: Lise Autogena, Anna Dumitriu, Simon Gould, Antony Hall, Paddy Hartley, Phillip Warnell.

An increasing number of contemporary artists are exploring and inhabiting sites of science, from self-initiated research to undertaking fellowships and residencies in scientific contexts. The convergence of these worlds is usually driven by the ever-expanding curiosity of artists and often involves close collaborative relationships between individuals. In October 2006, Dialogue brought together a group of contemporary artists and curators who engage with science and scientific ideas within their practice. The result was a lively discussion exploring some of the diverse themes and issues that emerge from these projects, from the role of research to the tensions between evolving and often, organic development of ideas and the presentation of work to audiences. The event took place at the Hunterian Museum, London in October 2006.

Verity Slater: To start, can you each talk about your interface with science and how you started thinking about science within your work?

Simon Gould participating in SymbioticA Biotech workshop, London, 2005 Photo credit: Sana Murrani

Simon Gould: For the last three years I was the curator for the art programme at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) in London. I was very much in favour of artists spending time with scientists without a prewritten agenda with the idea that if you cross interesting people from different paths that wouldn't normally cross, then something interesting will come out. I think it was generally quite successful. More recently, I've developed an introductory course to contemporary art, specifically for non-art professionals. So far I've done that with two groups of medical researchers. This developed out of my experience at the NIMR and realising that even if you have a fantastic art project, it isn't always very well received, partly because there's a language barrier. So I'm trying to bridge that gap and break down the language barrier.

Paddy Hartley William, 2006 Textiles, embroidery and print Project Facade

Paddy Hartley: For the past three years I have been working with Biomaterials Scientist and Research Fellow Dr Ian Thompson at Guys Hospital in the Oral Maxillofacial Surgery Department, and with Dr Andrew Bamji, curator at the Gillies Archive at Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup. We've been working together in trying to tell the stories of some of the servicemen that were injured during the First World War and the facial reconstruction surgery performed by Sir Harold Gillies. Ian and I began working together after I was approached by the Victoria & Albert Museum to produce new work in response to an event examining the impact of cosmetic surgery on society. Facial garments I developed incorporated facial implants that Ian and I made from bioglass material. From that point we just naturally continued working together. Over the following two years I worked alongside Ian in the development of bioglass casting for his patients facial surgery. We don't collaborate in the sense of sitting in a room and working together, it's more a case of we facilitate the development of one another's practice. I'm at the point now where I'm making less artwork and concentrating more on research and the archive. The work is moving more into exploring personal stories rather than the surgery. So I'm kind of working myself out of the collaboration almost in the way that I have understood collaboration to be.

Antony Hall ENKI Prototype, 2006 Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. Cross species communication - work in progress.

Antony Hall: I was interested in ideas to do with science when I was on my degree, I got interested in freshwater ecology, and so I started meeting quite a lot of ecologists. Whilst studying for my MA, I just walked into the fluids lab in Manchester University as I was curious to see what took place there. I realised that there were lots of scientific institutions, scientists and interesting facilities that I could get access to. From that point on I started working with various scientists - not really making artworks as such but talking with different scientists about different projects. For the last seven years, I've worked collaboratively on a technology based project looking at physical computing. In my own practice I spend a lot of time working with technology and science and sometimes I forget where the art is! I don't know if that's a problem or not, it's just an issue.

Phillip Warnell The Girl with X-Ray Eyes, 2006 Presented at Vooruit, Ghent, during the Homo Futuris festival, October 2006. A work in progress presentation of the performance element from The Girl with X-Ray Eyes, a current interdisciplinary project. Supported by Arts Council England.

Phillip Warnell: My engagement with science is probably best described as a consequence of an artist's curiosity. My research interests, rather than specifically being art/science based, traverse different disciplines, including things like the relationship between the body, technological interfaces and medicine. I'm working on a research project at the moment premised through scientific description - one that is impossible, in a sense, to represent because it's an invisible, immaterial thing - a chimerical phenomenon of radiation. I'm interested in the crossover of disciplines, or ideas that can be referenced in a number of fields. The project, called The Girl with X-Ray Eyes, is based on an encounter with a Russian teenager called Natasha Demkina. It is purported that Natasha has some sort of supra-organic vision and can see through people, she claims down to the cellular level, it's a diagnostic, extraordinary form of penetrative vision. The project is simply to record an encounter with her, to make a visit and have a consultation process between us. I'm also working on a collaborative project with the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University, the NHS and Transplant UK, who are the national coordinators for the distribution and circulation of organs across the country. I'm planning to develop a real time data space environment that transposes the availability of organs and circulation of organs in and around the UK - producing a kind of visual interface for the invisible dynamics involved.

Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium 2001-2004

Lise Autogena: I was trying to think back when I first developed a specific interest in science. This was probably when I was doing my MA in curating at Goldsmith's ten years ago. We were exploring those big questions at the time which involved a lot of scientific findings and I remember thinking that it was a great shame that we had an endless stream of curators coming to talk to us when we could have really benefited from hearing from scientists.

My contact with scientists has come out of a necessity to realise a particular idea. I have not been involved with science through residencies or associations with universities, but through the process of developing my projects. I've worked on a project for some years that has involved collaboration between biologists, artificial life researchers, economists and astronomers. At the moment I'm working at Imperial College across different departments. It's my first encounter with science in academia, which is a little scary! I have been working with a range of people in an attempt to locate the bluest sky in the world. It started as a kind of utopian quest, which has turned into a rather complex process. It involves a similar process to my other projects - collaboration across many different fields. We have found a way of identifying and locating the bluest sky! The very first 'bluest' sky was fantastic; it was above Pedro's Mobile Home and Trailer Park, somewhere in the south of the US.

Anna Dumitriu Phone Flora, 2005 Mobile phone wallpaper with digitally enhanced micrograph of corynebacterium group G.

Anna Dumitriu: When I was a child I used to have a reoccurring nightmare about being chased around corridors by a kind of a mould that was covering all the walls, I'd run away from it and it would come after me and envelop me. I think that maybe that is where my work stems from! From my childhood interests and fantasies. I'm working with normal flora bacteriology and moulds - looking at their existence in our environment. I'm very interested in really embedding myself within the science. As part of my PhD research I'm studying clinical microbiology, so rather than having to collaborate with the scientist, I hope to be my own collaborating scientist. I think that part of the challenge of working with scientists is to actually know what's possible. How can you make those leaps of ideas if you've only been told a small section of what's possible in the field? I'm quite interested in the nature of research too and how artists can play a role within research. Science and pure analysis is at one end of the scale and at the other end of the scale there is pure human emotion. I think that art can somehow form a dialectic between those ideas.

VS: Can we pick up on Anna's thoughts on research and explore this further? Another reason to do this is that Paddy, you said in your introduction that you were at the point where you were going to produce less work and concentrate on research. What form do these research processes take and how do they meet with scientific research?

PW: My concern with this is that when you become immersed in the specifics of a subject, especially at a research level, it can be difficult to re-immerge, to become objective or just engage elsewhere. I rather like the idea of keeping well back from that kind of immersive approach - yes, be facilitated, but then step back and allow your interests to adjust or realign. An artists' research is also specific, but by its nature is equally eclectic and diverse. An engagement with scientific research can be a natural extension of one facet of this, but isn't necessarily the entire concern.

LA: I agree. You can facilitate ideas that then they grow and become other things. I recently met James Lovelock. While speaking to him I was unaware of who I was talking to. I introduced myself as an artist and he said he felt that so was he, and that his studio was in his back garden. After a while I realised who he was. He talked about his frustration that there were no independent scientists anymore, no scientists grappling with the big overview. He felt it was one of the biggest problems in science today - that everybody has become specialists and so there is no one with the bigger view. I thought this was quite similar to our situations as artists.

SG: I think there are a lot of scientists who would like to take a more independent position and be able to take a less specific overview in the way that a lot of artists do. But I don't think that's so much a difference between artists and scientists, but more the arenas in which they work - the economic, political, academic and other pressures they have on them.

LA: It's quite interesting that at the moment, arts funding is becoming increasingly channelled in to particular things, for example art/science practice. I think there are some interesting overlays to be aware of in relation to where the funds come from, what's expected and how things are being narrowed down in terms of what they are branded as.

Anna Dumitriu The Institute of Unnecessary Research, 2006 Surgical spirit, tomato and detergent 45 minutes Participants in Anna Dumitriu's Unnecessary DNA Extraction Experiment. Photo credit: Sara Duffy

AD: I think that the funding issue is quite interesting. In terms of science funding, my research would be described as 'of no medical or commercial interest', the stuff I'm studying would not be studied in a science context but Arts Council England gave me a grant to study it as an artist. So artists can actually move outside the normal funding areas and research things purely out of their own interests, which is something scientists can't do.

SG: The NIMR is quite a case in point for that because when the art programme started in '98 there were a lot of the scientists undertaking blue sky research and it was one of the few institutes in the country still doing this. Things have changed since then - some of that research is being cut short because of medical or commercial imperatives.

VS: This links with your work, Anna, on the Institute of Unnecessary Research. Could you tell us about how you're exploring these issues to do with research sites?

AD: The Institute is a performance project where we bring together a number of artists who are working in crossover fields. It's become a bit of a hub for artists working in this way. So you've got Paul Granjon as Head of Robotics, Kira O'Riley as Head of Tissue Research and many others including a Head of Joy and a Head of Crockery.

Ansuman Biswas Zebra, 2003 Still showing Ansuman Biswas as character from 'For Daws to Peck at'. Project curated by Simon Gould Photo credit: Simon Gould

SG: Are you doing that to try and create a hierarchy that would have some parity with a scientific institute so that you can then go to them and say look, we're researchers?

AD: Not particularly, it's about being able to move outside of normal research ideas. It's an epistemological question of where we draw the line. I think in a lot of scientific research there's definitely a line drawn around the commercial interest and we're able to go outside of that and look at different areas. We create performance events where we engage with groups of people who participate in experiments and join in with the research.

AH: I've realised that it's also okay to do that and that research can be output as performances or experiments which people can take part in. And, you know, I just think it's quite an interesting thing to do, to display research.

Phillip Warnell Endo-Ecto - GI Tract & Host Interface, 2006 London, ICA February 2006 Endo-Ecto devised and organised by Phillip Warnell Produced by The Arts Catalyst

VS: Phillip, this relates to some of the work that you've done before, doesn't it?

PW: Yes. I did some work at the ICA earlier in the year, I called it an event space presentation. It was a performance/medical procedure with no particular hierarchy between one and the other. A medical procedure that was put to another use as a live performance during an event which featured two components from very different fields that I'd brought to bear on the single amalgamated space.

First, I swallowed a miniaturised pill sized camera. It's a light-emitting device, documenting its journey through your GI tract, taking about sixty-five thousand photographs during its passage. This live demonstration of mediated interiority was combined with something that was rather different, although interconnected - a demonstration of bioluminescent light produced from single cell organisms that emit their own light which penetrates their bodies. I wanted to create a generative space that made a link through associative thinking rather than the specifics of what you might find in the specialist laboratory. I felt it was successful, but could I call it an experiment? I'm not sure that I would.

VS: But 'experiment' is a word that does come to mind. Can we explore the links between the idea of the experiment and the performative aspects of your work?

Antony Hall Long Nose Elephant Fish, 2006 Unit de Neurosciences Intgratives et Computationnelles. Cross species communication - work in progress.

AH: When I approach a scientific institution or a scientist, sometimes I'll present myself as an 'amateur' scientist - as a person doing research. Sometimes I'll reveal myself as an artist but often I won't until I know them quite well. It's about perceptions, sometimes the idea of an artist concerns them and suddenly they change their whole approach to you. I was working with a scientist recently and I wanted to explore a specific idea through an experiment. We couldn't agree on a way to take the idea forward - basically I couldn't get any further with the experiment. So I'm now in the studio trying to prove this idea which, I want to take back to the scientist and say look, this is possible and let's try and move this to the next stage. It will be the first time I've been in a position where I have to undertake an experiment and prove my an idea scientifically.

SG: That's really interesting because you got to the point where the scientists say no, and that could be very frustrating but it can be a really crucial point in the project. It can also be important to say I can't take this further scientifically, and then the ideas can become a critique of the scientific world. This is what happened with Neal White's residency at the NIMR¹. He was interested in the idea of self-experimentation and proposed to stage a cocktail party in which scientists would swallow a pill of Methylene Blue. But when we proposed this, the scientists didn't understand it at all. We tried to explain it but the language wasn't working, so we tried to rephrase it as a clinical trial and went through all the procedures of writing the methodology and the protocol and the whole thing. It was received by the ethics board but refused clearance. In a sense, the project became a critique of the institution rather than an experiment. In the end it took place in International 3 in Manchester and at the Barbican, so entirely art situations, although it has since happened in the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, where I think the attitudes were a bit more exploratory.

PW: This is about a pivotal moment, the self-experiment within a scientific context - where the scientist has to do something transgressive that incorporates risk. If a scientist is desperate to prove their theory which no one's taking seriously, the only way to do it is to swallow the proposed cure to prove a point. At this moment they have to set up a, kind of, new rationale. I don't see live work and performance as embodying risk in quite the same manner. Performance is a language, one constituted by considerations that aren't necessarily about risk - although some artists explore this - I think they do it for very different reasons. Hence I prefer to avoid the term 'experiment' because it seems to me that a performance is often, in artistic terms, the culmination of a series of undertakings, not necessarily the point of experimentation. The idea that it's an experiment can marginalise the artwork from the very beginning; it's as if the artist hasn't yet done the thinking.

AD: In my own work I'm taking on the role of a scientist. I'm actually doing the full thing with the lab book, writing up the research, getting it signed each time and documenting it. I want to understand the process. Unless I can really understand it I don't see that I'll have the full range of abilities to really engage with the subject. When I talk about experimenting in terms of the Institute of Unnecessary Research, we create experiments that require the collation of data from audience members, so it's more about participating in something. It's a different kind of idea.

VS: Science and scientific subjects are quite abstract, expansive and nebulous. It often seems to me that artists explore this relationship between expansive concepts with ideas of the personal or the individual.

PH: It's funny because I'm at a point where I feel I'm working myself out of collaboration as I understand collaboration to be and working more with people who have benefited from or suffered the consequences of the surgery which the servicemen underwent. I've become more interested in these people - the servicemen and the relatives of the servicemen. I feel as though I'm moving away from the scientists and the surgeons - the deliverers of healthcare and moving more towards the recipients of healthcare.

AD: Isn't this about art being a kind of dialectic? Between the knowledge about the surgery or the archive, and those personal, emotional stories. I think art has this role of looking at the science but looking at the personal as well. If you're trying to understand TB, you can read medical books on it, or you can read Ode to a Nightingale by Keats to see how it felt.

PW: And you could argue that all your prior investigations are informing your current interest. It may be a departure, but it's an informed one.

Paddy Hartley Henry Ralph, 2006 Textiles, embroidery and print Project Facade

PH: It's a comfortable departure to a degree, because I've never been driven by one creative process. I've gone from working in ceramics and casting to working with textiles. Now I'm assessing whether producing objects is the best way of getting these findings across. I don't feel as though I am an artist anymore, and I don't even know if I ever really was!

SG: To me the most important thing is that you have a strong sense of what you're interested in and what you want to do. You've tried one way of expressing it and you're now reassessing that. So you can work elsewhere or you can give up the word artist altogether, as John Latham did, and called himself an incidental person.

VS: I think that marrying the medical material with the personal histories is about traversing the abstract with the personal.

PW: But there is also the reverse at work - a kind of blurring of those distinctions. Jeff Wall spoke about it in his recent exhibition ², about how, through the production of a body of work, there is a shift of emphasis that one might have through time in relation to one's work, developing a number of perspectives incorporating multiple viewpoints that lead to, or generate something that isn't necessarily a point of view. Rather than a singular perspective, it's an amalgamation or an abstracted view, it is the body of work speaking as opposed to the artist as individual. Artists can have a strategic involvement with a whole manner of environments and I think it's one of the reasons we get interested in science. You can sublimate your individual perception on something and it re-emerges, re-engages through a body of ideas.

VS: For you Phillip, there is this idea of how you use the 'inside-ness' of your body. You have used your body as a site, and as Lisa Le Feuvre has suggested, it 'becomes a place rather than a person, an object rather than a subject position, bringing to the fore questions of representation.'³

PW: I'm not particularly interested in the specifics of the body solely in terms of its physiology, for me it's more to do with how we can represent a notional or contested sense of something. Take for example, the notion of the transparent body, which provides a number of complex issues surrounding how technology and medicine are driving towards a purported visibility for mediated visualisation or transparency. I find it very interesting how the body relates, in this context, to all sorts of technologies, like medical imaging techniques, military developments and their by-products, along with the industrial consideration that if you can see something then you can hope to understand it. This presumption, however, also gives rise to a counter misunderstanding, as in the notion that if we witness somehow by remote means, seeing the inside of the body from the inside, we'll therefore have solved all its problems. But of course, this is a misdemeanour because there's an accompanying set of new problems and risks, such as technologically assisted contamination or the misunderstandings arising from providing mediated or false viewing perspectives.

VS: Lise, you talked earlier about bringing people from disparate disciplines together for a particular project. Could you tell us more about this?

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium 2001-2004

LA: Yes, I was thinking of the Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium project. I have been fascinated by how - after many years - this project continues to generate interest and emails from people that want to get involved - for absurdly different reasons. Two weeks ago I had three emails - one from a Head at the US Air Force and two from US professors in poetry. It is a layered and complex project, so people continue to find their own ways in to it. That's what I find so interesting about working on projects over long periods of time - the idea evolves and mutates and grows new meanings. My main interest is in this kind of process, more than in an finite work or an exhibition. I'm interested in how ideas can travel and grow - how a project takes on its own life.

PW: It's interesting how interdisciplinary projects have all these different layers, and how ultimately, they are fed back in to an exhibition context. It's fascinating and a touch frustrating when you consider the context of the gallery, with the commercial gallery at one end of the spectrum and the virtual presentation, the archive or even the performance presentation sat towards the other end. Sometimes it seems to me that institutions don't necessarily look for interesting solutions to merging these different types of potential presentation spaces. I've found this very problematic and I've always been, in a sense, someone who can slip through the gap, because a static exhibition curator doesn't necessarily know how to integrate your work when it's premised on something live, archival or made for distribution. There ought to be other models for presentation that go along with the development of propositions for new academic departments or new funding strands, mirroring emerging areas of production.

Phillip Warnell Living Room (detail), 2006 Presented at Endo-Ecto, London ICA 2006. A installation and performative collaboration between Phillip Warnell & Anne-Sophie Cussatlegras of The Institute of Oceanography, Marseille. A live demonstration of marine single-cell organisms capabilities of producing light.

VS: I wonder whether we can move on from presentation spaces to think about audiences - about how people engage with the work. Anna, could you talk about your recent work with a group of young people?

AD: The project, called 'Sensitive', explored the nature of allergy and the emotional impact of allergies on young people. I chose to work with an age group of fourteen year olds specifically because they are the group most affected by allergy. From a conceptual point of view, to have them participate in the making of the artworks was very important. Each student had an allergy or knew somebody that was affected by allergy, so they could contribute from the point of view of their own experiences.

SG: The residencies at the NIMR usually focussed on process. There were outcomes, but the audience to my mind was always an intangible long-term audience, by which I mean that through the interaction, the artist and scientist were informed in some way by the others' knowledge and experience. One of the senior scientists once said that he was not sure of the benefits, but he knew that something positive was happening and somehow the experience would affect his life, his work and how he talked to other people.

AH: The main audience for most of my projects is online. The web is a context in itself, but you don't have to justify that context - it's just there or it's not. You can present the same project in an artistic way and a scientific way. You can be quite subversive and attract different audiences to different sites. It's quite a strange, nebulous thing - you're never sure who's looking at your work. Sometimes it's got very little to do with the 'art world' as such, but it's there - it's functioning and it's happening.

PW: I think we can get caught up with numbers, which often happens with the web, everyone being desperate for hits. I'm still really interested in the idea of bespoke presentation spaces and I wouldn't be dismissive of the gallery space at all. At its best this isn't about having a space to fill, it's a negotiated space and that's what it should be. When you get that or if and when you get that, the brilliant thing is that you can attract a smaller audience but they're really engaged on a deeper level. The issue isn't just whether people attend an event, but also whether there is a pevasive, active culture of involvement.

AD: The positive thing is that you can target audiences that might not usually have the opportunity to experience work, like school groups. I think it's important to engage with the ideas of reaching out to people. I want to understand things and I want other people to try and understand those things as well, so I want to reach out to people and help them to understand and work with me. I'm not talking about teaching though - I'm talking about understanding, enquiry and curiosity.

PW: But if you're specialised you have a knowledge that you don't necessarily impart, it's not all about understanding something we can simply share. I'd argue that specialist knowledge is really important. One of the brilliant things about artists is that we can end up being constituted by a whole manner of influences - we become curious conduits for all sorts of activity. To witness that - where I become the viewer of your work is the thing that's fascinating, rather than a need to understand exactly what you're doing.

AD: When I talk about understanding, I mean understanding from a philosophical point of view. Often we're exploring things that you probably can't really be properly understood understand but it is an attempt to understand, an attempt to pass on that kind of desire for enquiry on multiple levels from the emotional to the analytic. It's about sharing the experience and the desire - that's what I mean when I use the term 'understanding'.

Anna Dumitriu Sensitive, 2006

Further information
More information on Antony Hall
More information on Paddy Hartley
More information on Phillip Warnell
More information on Lise Autogena
More information on Anna Dumitriu

Notes

¹ Neal White's residency at NIMR took place between September 2004 and April 2005. The Void (the Methylene Blue cocktail party) was staged at The Sensory Clinic, International 3, Manchester, April 2005; Colour After Klein, Barbican, London, July 2005; Colour and Chemistry, Sherbourne House, Devon, May 2006 and after the Self-Rapport workshops organised by Katrin Soldhju at Max Planck Institute, Berlin, May 2006. For further information see www.nealwhite.org/index.html
² Jeff Wall from Contacts - Volume 2: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography, Arte Video, 2000, (DVD). This DVD accompanied the exhibition: Jeff Wall, Photographs 1978-2004, Tate Modern, London, 21 October 2005 - 8 January 2006.
³ Lise Le Feuvre, Suture, London, 2005. Pamphlet text to accompany the exhibition Suture, The Old Operating Theatre, London, 2006.

All images the artists with the exception of 'SymbioticA Biotech workshop' & Ansuman Biswas
'Zebra' (2003) Simon Gould.