A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart

Abstract

In this paper I present an experimental project carried out at The University of Western Australia's art and science organisation, SymbioticA. The paper looks to the embodied practice of learning to make bioart through consideration of the tools and protocols required in the making process. In so doing, the paper traces through the process of “making” by attending to the sense of touch in the laboratory. As an analytical guide, I work through Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge, which I approach through a focus on the sense of touch, to consider the ways in which proximate knowledge is generated at SymbioticA between artist, objects and subjects. This is knowledge that not only emerges to enable the experimental project, but which also re‐works it. Such an approach provides mechanisms for close consideration of the various actants with which knowledge is generated. In so doing, I offer a post‐phenomenological account of embodied practice in the space of the laboratory to think through the roles of the somatic senses and non‐human others, as well as artists themselves, in the acquisition of knowledge at SymbioticA. Deploying an experimental project as research method is, I argue, a valid methodological manoeuvre for geographic studies into experimental spaces such as the laboratory as it enables unforeseen lines of inquiry to emerge through “doing.”

Perspectives of Bioartists and Community Lab Organizers on Working with Living Organisms

“…There has been attention from several research communities on both the potential and implications of the bioart movement. Much of this research comes from critical media studies and sociotechnical studies [30][31][32][33]44,47]. For example, Lapworth explores the ontogenetic possibilities of bioart, past thinking through the meaning of art, life and the sciences, but to thinking through the reconfiguration of the subject; the material production of new subjects and worlds [32].…”

“…Lapworth also posits that art-science collaborations not only enhance the public awareness of new technologies, but develop what Simondon termed new technical mentalities, or more material transformations in our embodied capacities for perceiving and affectively engaging with technologies [33]. Straughan focuses on tacit knowledge, specifically through the embodied practice in the lab space to "think through the roles of the somatic senses and non-human others, as well as artists themselves, in the acquisition of knowledge" [47]. Radomska argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart allows us to reimagine the ontology of life, including our dichotomies of living and non-living [44].…”

Cultural geography III: The concept of ‘culture’

“…Uses of the term experience vary (on which see Jay, 2005), but what work shares is a concern for how and with what consequences relations and events become palpable and are felt. Accompanying this orientation to experience as it happens has, therefore, been a (re)conceptualisation of a cluster of terms that were at the heart of humanist and humanistic approaches to cultural geography, including sensation, perception and bodily life (Colls, 2012; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010; Straughan, 2018), affect, feeling and emotion (Davidson, 2016; Anderson, 2014), subjectivity (Dawney, 2013; Simpson, 2017) and consciousness (Rose, 2018). As one example of how this version of culture has become hegemonic in Anglophone cultural geography, consider how an important recent special issue of Cultural Geographies on ‘cultural geographies of precarity’ articulates what today constitutes a ‘cultural geographies approach’.…”

“Following the SWP Uniform”: A Play with ‘Bleeding’ Humans

“…Together, Researchers and other LARPers co-create "Ethnographic Places", it says in her tales. With this notion, she highlights that ethnographic research can never be fully reproduced or upscaled, as it generates 'tacit, felt knowledge' (Straughan, 2019) that is unique to the situations and the bodies involved in Research-encounters.…”

“…H "So far, so understandable…." (Straughan, 2019) that shaped her perception of the SWP's role, as well as her own relative to the SWP uniform she followed. On top of that, she formed relationships with the people wearing the SWP uniform, who disclosed to her their tribal wisdom that "We are all human".…”