I feel like fake frogs’ legs tonight
Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts
The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) explores the use of tissue technologies as a medium for artistic expression. We manipulate living tissue as a point for reflection on our relationships with other living and partially living beings.
TC&A has created a new class of object/being–Semi-Living–as an evocative object that will enable a further exploration of our treatments of notions of life. The Semi-livings are constructed of living and non-living materials: cells or tissues from a complex organism grown over or into synthetic scaffolds. These cultures are kept alive with artificial support in a ‘techno-scientific body’ (such as a bioreactor), which attempts to emulate the conditions of the body from which the cells originally came from, providing nutrients, appropriate temperatures, CO2 gas exchange, and sterile conditions.
Semi-Livings are both similar and different from other human artefacts such as constructed objects and selectively bred domestic plants and animals–pets and husbandry, for example. TC&A has been growing different semi-living entities in different shapes, from different cells types and from different host bodies without being speciesist–i.e. human cells have been grown together with other animals cells, such as mouse cells, to create different semi-living cultural artefacts.
As discrepancies grow between the cultural perception of what life is and what we know about it and can do with it scientifically, so are the hypocrisies we have to employ in order to create an illusion of moral continuity. Humans have always exploited other living systems for survival and for a sense of well being, or for recreation. Survival and recreation are usually interrelated and confused, as is ‘need’ and ‘desire’. Humans employ novel techniques for continuing the exploitation of life while distancing themselves from the actual physical entity that is being exploited. Hence, the further away you are from your victim, the easier it become to believe that there is no victim.
Recently we developed the Victimless Series, in an attempt to see whether we can use life for anthropocentric purposes in a way that complicates the notions of life, death, victimhood and exploitation. We want to explore the ‘price’ we have to pay for a technologically mediated utopia. Firstly, we looked at the possibility of eating victimless meat by growing semi-living steaks from a biopsy taken from an animal while keeping the animal alive and healthy.
This piece deals with one of the most common zones of interaction between humans and other living systems–eating them–and probes the apparent uneasiness people feel when someone ‘messes’ with their food. The project offers a form of symbolic "victimless" meat consumption. As the cells from the biopsy proliferate, the ‘steak’ in vitro continues to grow and expand, while the source, the animal from which the cells were taken, is healing. This work presents a possible future in which the killing and suffering of animals destined for food consumption will be reduced. However, by making our food a new class of object/being–a Semi-Living–we risk making the Semi-Living a new class for exploitation. In addition, the nutrients in which the steak is bathed contain products derived from animals. Distance from the victim sometimes makes us forget that almost any form of diet involves victims–no matter how processed, engineered or organic the food is.
The first steak we grew was made out of pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle). We used cells harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born. We were finally able to present and perform this project in 2003 as part of L’art Biotech exhibition in France. We titled the installation "Disembodied Cuisine," playing on the notion of different cultural perceptions of what is edible and what is foul. Here, we grew semi-living frog steaks, with the intention of raising questions about the French resentment towards engineered food and the objection by other cultures to the consumption of frogs. We found a source of cells that did not require inflicting injury to an animal. These cells were developed at a Japanese laboratory in the late 1980s from the skeletal muscle cells of a tadpole of an aquatic toad, Xenopus laevis. We ended up using an immortalized cell line (cell lines are either modified or cancerous cells that have the ability to grow and divide indefinitely and can be seen in the context of our work as a renewable resource). The cell line we used was developed using non-mutagenic techniques and, according to the advice we received, was safe for consumption.
For the installation in L’art Biotech, we had four Xenopus laevis (the same type of toad from which the "steak" cells were obtained), and four edible frogs that we rescued from the local edible frog distributor. By the end of the show, after the Nouvelle Cuisine style dinner, we released the frogs in the ponds of the beautiful botanical gardens in Nantes.
In our latest project, Victimless Leather, we have grown a miniature stitch-less jacket out of immortalised cell lines that formed a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix. The Victimless Leather project involved growing living tissue into a leather substitute material.
This artistically-grown garment confronts people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and further confronts notions of relationships with living systems, manipulated or otherwise. The possibility of wearing ‘leather’ without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion. Saying that, the production of the "leather" was not totally victimless–we still used animal-derived ingredients in the nutrients we provided the tissues with. Hence our reference to the ‘victimless’ is an ironic one, and should be read as a critique of the type of technological mediated promises of "utopia."
This piece also presents an ambiguous and somewhat ironic take into the technological price our society will need to pay for achieving a ‘victimless utopia,’ because the stitch-less jacket that was grown as part of this project could only survive within a techno-scientific body–a bioreactor.
Usually, people who oppose our project find it difficult to articulate the source for their disapproval and react more from a knee-jerk impulse, which we tend to believe is a result of TC&A forcing people to reassess their perceptions of life by presenting life in its visceral and somewhat abject form, as manifested by the Semi-Living.
The instrumentalization of living systems through different aspects of biotechnology is of great concern to us, in particular in the context of post-capitalistic forces. Our intention is not to provide yet another consumer product but rather to raise questions about our exploitation of other living beings. It is not our role to provide people with goods for their daily use. We would like our work to be seen in this cultural context, and not in a commercial context. Our work deals with the tension between caring for living systems on the one hand and instrumentalizing life on the other. We believe that art is best situated to confront such a paradox in ways that constructively raise philosophical and epistemological issues.
The Tissue Culture & Art Project is hosted by SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. www.tca.uwa.edu.au
