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GeoHumanities

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Futile Labor

Ionat Zurr

To cite this article: Ionat Zurr (2016): Futile Labor, GeoHumanities

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2016.1168210

Published online: 23 May 2016.

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Futile Labor

Ionat Zurr

The University of Western Australia

The Futile Labor exhibition (2015) is a collaboration among Ionat Zurr, Chris Salter, Oron Catts, andDevon Ward. Futile Labor explores the relationship between movement as an indicator for life andthe notion of agency, through the growth and construction of skeletal muscle cells as an actuator.Here, I reflect mostly on a couple of somewhat opposing trajectories. The first is concerned with theillusion that developments in biotechnology and the design of Neolife might offer an opportunity tobreak free from hegemonic social constructions of species, gender, race, and class and its relations tolabor. The second futility referred to the human attempt to control and fully instrumentalize livingmaterial. Key Words: biological arts (bioart), movement, muscle actuator, semi-living, tissueengineering.

THE LURE OF THE ORGANIC AUTOMATA

Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.—Barad (2012, 48)

Over the last decade I was seduced and compelled to work, hands on, with muscle tissue bothinside and outside of a body. Around fifteen years ago, as an artist and researcher working withtissue engineering as a material for artistic expression, I witnessed a phenomenon that informedthe research into Futile Labor while growing skeletal muscle cells in vitro (in glass), or, inUhlenhuth’s (1916) words, in “a new kind of body” (690)—an artificial one. These types of cells—myoblasts—have the ability to propagate in a Petri dish, but also to change into a new type ofcell. Given the appropriate conditions, these cells differentiate into multinuclei cells in the shapeof tubular-looking fibers called myotubes. Observing them under the microscope, I was in awe asthese myotubes, in the Petri dish, started to spontaneously contract and expand randomly. Thismovement made the cells appear responsive and alive as they were “twitching” in real time. Inother words, the movement of cells in a dish and my perception of time temporarily overlapped.I was moved.

In 2013 I received research funds from the Australian Research Council, under theirDiscovery Grant, to explore the relationship between movement as an indicator for life andthe notion of agency, through the growth and construction of skeletal muscle cells as anactuator. In short, my team was exploring and making an artistic electromechanical devicethat would facilitate the growth and formation of muscle fibres, enabling the conditions

GeoHumanities, 00(00) 2016, 1–15 © Copyright 2016 by American Association of Geographers.Initial submission, March 2016; final acceptance, March 2016.

Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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(e.g., temperature, sterility, nutrient media, morphological and biomechanical elements)necessary to maintain life and encourage growth. The device (also known as a bioreactor)had the primary function to organize and amplify the inherent movement behavior of themuscle fibers, thus giving the cells the potential to become a moving, semi-living machine.More important, as this was an artistic device to be presented to the public, we wereconcerned with aesthetics; we aimed to create an artistic experience that reflects on therelations among movement and life with different gradients of agency.

The exhibition was titled Futile Labor, reflecting mostly on a couple of somewhatopposing trajectories. The first was concerned with the illusion that developments inbiotechnology and the design of Neolife (technologically created, manipulated, or frag-mented life forms; see Catts and Zurr 2016) might offer an opportunity to break free fromhegemonic social constructions of species, gender, race, and class and their relations tolabor. Although cells and tissues in culture are stripped from these social constructions andcan be grown together as a point of possible departure and escape from socially andhuman-centric engrained discourses, in most cases these same social constructions areinbuilt within and into the developments of these technologies, their interpretations, andtheir applications.

The second futility referred to the human attempt to control and fully instrumentalize livingmaterial. We were relieved to learn that the life we worked with always defied our attempt atfull control. Our own labor in the labor(atory) felt in many cases futile. A muscle in a dish willbehave very differently than a muscle in a biological body. Muscle tissue output—in aconstructed artificial environment—in terms of force and displacement is so minute (andinvisible to the naked eye) that it is a challenge to record this. Our attempt to make theminto actuators can be seen as almost absurd. This fragmented, engineered life carries a mysteryembroiled in mixed tensions of great promise and horrible threat, and has its own ontologicalstory to act and tell.

The visual component of this article is limited, as it does not fully convey the focus of ourproject—the embodied experience of movement as an indicator of life and agency. Using textual

FIGURE 1 Studies for Futile Labor: C2C12 cell lines (skeletal musclecells). (Color figure available online.)

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and visual elements, though, I trace some of the conceptual and technical aspects of this artisticresearch project into using tissue engineered muscle as an artistic actuator. Futile Labor as anexhibition is the culmination of this research that explores, somewhat viscerally, how musclecells technically and conceptually become a technological apparatus, calling attention to thegrowing phenomenon of manipulating and engineering life.

MOVEMENT

Our thinking and feeling in all their ramifications are fraught with the concept of movement.—Giedion (1948, 14)

As biological beings, we associate movement with vitality and respond to it viscerally. Here Iwould like to explore what happens when organic matter—particularly the tissue we identifywith movement, the muscle—is being animated, moving the discussion from concepts of wonderand amazement to the mechanization and abstraction of society’s recent biolaborers, namelycells and tissues.

Giedion (1948) presented an intriguing and alarmist view on the growing relations betweenmovement and mechanization, noting a shift “from the miraculous to the utilitarian”(34).Whereas in ancient times the Greeks or Egyptians used their inventions of mechanization tocreate spiritual and cultural meanings, he argued, “our present-day point of view tends toidentify the inventive impulse with the mechanizing of production—an identity that cannot betaken for granted (32). To illustrate his ideas, he uses the example of the history of the steamengine, which was, in its earliest incarnation, a machine of wonder. Invented by Hero ofAlexandria, the ancient Greek geometer and engineer during the first century AD, the devicewas a novelty, a machine that could move by itself as if it was alive. It was only centuries later,in the late 1600s, when Thomas Savery proposed commercial uses for the steam engine.Through the work of James Watt in the 1700s, the steam engine was propelled to become thesingle most important invention of the entire Industrial Revolution (Thurston 1939). Theliveliness of the machine, which was created through its ability to move by itself, was usedfor utilitarian purposes and for production. At the same time, analogies of the body as amechanical machine flourished: The body became a production machine that can move byitself—an organic automata.

Giedion traced a historical line in conceptualizations of movement from the theologian andphilosopher Oresme to the mathematician and philosopher Descartes, the physiologist Mareyand production engineer Gilbreth. He went on to argue that Oresme is the link between theancient and the modern world, when theology understood the world as a creation by the will ofGod that set it into motion, and as opposed to the Greeks who viewed the world as something thatis static that always existed. Descartes, meanwhile, performs a link between theology andscience in the conception of the nature of movement; Marey explored the movement of organicbodies within the world; and Gilbreth, the engineer, “detached human movement from its beareror subject, and achieved its precise visualisation in space and time” (Giedion 1948, 25). In thenineteenth century, Gilbreth abstracted movement from its context (and its agency) and “har-nessed it for utility and production: thus, a new realm opens: new forms, new expressive values,transcending the domain of the engineer” (25). Furthermore, “Belief in progress is replaced by

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faith in production. . . . With the waning of faith in progress, floating as a metaphysical bannerover the factories there entered that faith in production as an end in itself” (31).

Giedion (1948) added another important aspect to his ambitious attempt to historicizemechanization (and “the concept of Movement, which underlies all mechanization” [5]); thatis, he asked, what happens when mechanization encounters organic substances? In his book,he looked at mechanization of the soil (agriculture), growth (egg hatcheries), and the produc-tion of bread and meat (the mechanization of slaughterhouses). Writing in the aftermath ofWorld War II, when the achievements of mechanization were put into practice in destruction,he observed:

The questions involved are but narrow sectors of a far broader complex: man’s relation today tothose organic forces that act upon and within him. The catastrophes that threaten to destroycivilization and existence are but outward signs that our organism has lost its balance. . . . Ourcontract with the organic forces within us and outside of us has been interrupted—a paralysed, torn,chaotic condition. This contact is increasingly menaced as the tie with the basic human valuesbecomes frayed. Here, if anywhere, overturn has become inevitable. (6)

In the present day, I would suggest that although movement (and the association of lifeand agency) has linked with information and information transfer, the organic automata (andhence bodies or parts of bodies such as cells and tissues) are, through the fields ofbiotechnology and synthetic biology, becoming engineered parts devoid of agency, rawmaterials for manipulation. Today, it is the movement of information that is changingconcepts of time and space, and to some extent it is the information engineers who definethe contemporary concept of movement, and its associated labor (the users of Facebook andGoogle) who are the new slaves; it is their unpaid labor—online activity—filling the Internetwith content. A paradox is growing in which human technology is becoming more lifelike (inthe form of robots, drones, and artificial intelligence) while organic life is treated as rawmaterial to be engineered.

THE SEMI-LIVING

Since 2000, Catts and I, as part of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), have stagedexhibitions and public situations in which living (or as we refer to them—semi-living1) tissueconstructs are put on stage for the audience to be seduced by and confronted with. The small“blobs” of tissue are positioned inside specially designed artificial bodies that act as their life-support mechanism—bioreactors. These tissue constructs are floating, seemingly motionless (ascells’ size and movement is too minute to be seen by the naked eye in real time), in their pink-colored nutrient media liquid. We have to explain to the viewer that these semi-living tissueconstructs are alive and growing, and the viewer has to trust us (or be assured by the supportingtechnological apparatuses) to take this leap of faith that what he or she is presented with is anactual living, growing tissue (Figure 2).

These semi-living sculptures respond to the growing abstraction of life and the continuingengineering approach to living matter (see Catts and Zurr 2014); they are literally parts offragmented bodies kept alive and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes by an artificial,surrogate body. As artists, we wanted to viscerally explore this phenomenon and put the

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audience in situations that will destabilize their expectations. Partly for practical reasons, andto heighten the experience of the “aliveness” of our semi-living sculptures, we introducedthe ritual of feeding and the ritual of killing. The former involved the act of replacing thenutrient media in the vessel with a fresh one. This was done in the sterile hood (and in fullor partial public view). The second ritual was much simpler, and for the first time, enabledthe audience to be more than passive viewers and become participants. Ironically, it wasusually at the stage of the “killing”—hence once the exhibition was finished and weperformed the Killing Ritual of the semi-living—that the audience had the opportunity totouch and be touched by the semi-living tissue constructs. The killing (or sacrifice or

FIGURE 2 Semi-Living Worry Doll H 2000, by The Tissue Culture &Art Project McCoy Cell line, biodegradable/bioabsorbable polymers andsurgical sutures. Dimension of original: 2 cm × 1.5 cm × 1cm. (Colorfigure available online.)

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culling) of the tissue was done by removing it from its sterile environment and exposing it tothe contaminants of the normal environment. By letting the audience touch the tissue withtheir hands, we hasten its death due to contamination of bacteria and other microorganismsexisting on the hands (as well as the external environment). We made these dying fragments,conceptually, alive again.

It was during the Killing Ritual that members of the audience felt that their awarenessof the tissue’s aliveness was heightened. The poetic (and literal) connection betweentouch and death as a realization of aliveness was (and still is) intriguing to us. Wewondered, however, whether there was another strategy for making a sensorial, ontologicalconnection between entities on the edge of being that did not resort necessarily to death(through touch). It was the random, somewhat awkward twitching of the skeletal cells inthe environment of the Petri dish that we believed had the potential to reintroduce, throughanimation of living abstracted material, fresh perspectives on our current understandingof life.

THE MATERIALITY OF MUSCLE

Thus the properties of materials, regarded as constituents of an environment, cannot be identified asfixed, essential attributes of things, but are rather processual and relational. They are neitherobjectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, everyproperty is a condensed story. To describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of whathappens to them as they flan, mix and mutate.

—Ingold (2011, 30)

Muscle tissue in vertebrates can be divided into three types: smooth muscle and cardiacmuscle—which are both involuntary muscle—and skeletal muscle—used mainly for main-taining posture and locomotion, which is voluntary muscle. Hence, a grown or constructedbody that hosts skeletal muscle has the ability, with limitations, to control its actionby will.

The etymology of the word muscle is derived from the Latin musculus (a muscle), meaninglittle mouse, from the diminutive of mus (mouse). It might be because the shape and move-ment of some muscles (especially biceps) were thought to resemble mice. Our work deploysmuscle cells that are literally derived from a mouse. These cells were transformed into whatare called immortal cells, or a cell line titled C2C12. They were originally obtained by Yaffeand Saxel (1977) through the serial passage of myoblasts cultured from the thigh muscle ofC3H mice2 after a crush injury. Whereas lab mice life expectancy is two to three years, we aretrying to actuate the cells of a mouse that, if it were alive, would be more than thirty-nineyears old (Figure 3).

During the research, and while attempting to explore the tissue engineered muscle actuator asan entity that does not represent a specific sex, gender, class or even species, an article in Naturewas forwarded to me. The article, by Pollitzer (2013), urges researchers to pay attention to andseriously consider the sex of the cells in culture when doing their in vitro experiments. As anexample of its significance, Pollitzer shows that “Muscle stem cells taken from female mice

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regenerate new muscle much faster than those from male mice when transplanted into diseasedmuscle of mice of either sex” (23). She expanded:

Researchers have also found that cells taken from male and female mice respond differently to stressand that human cells exhibit wildly different concentrations of many metabolites across the sexes.Evidence is mounting that cells differ according to sex, irrespective of their history of exposure tosex hormones. These differences could have major implications for the susceptibility to and courseof many diseases, their diagnosis and treatment. However, most cell biologists do not note whetherthe cells they are using come from males or females. (23)

The sex of C2C12 (the cells used in our research into Futile Labor), although not specified, canbe determined by chromosome text. I was somewhat taken aback when I learned that C2C12carry the XY chromosome; therefore, we were working with cells taken from a female,laboratory-bred mouse. Unintentionally, our work makes the symbolic and literal connectionbetween the female body as a laborer in the lab, in the farm, and in life in general.

MUSCLE REANIMATION

The transition Giedion (1948) identified, from the miraculous to the utilitarian, and the so-called mechanization of movement, has a long historical arc. For example, Galvani’s experi-ments in the eighteenth century spectacularly demonstrated how a muscle can contract in aninert, dead body. These experiments helped shape an increasingly materialist and mechanisticunderstanding of life. Today, we are witnessing a renewed interest in the engineering of newkinds of bodies and automated new forms of labor. This new “revolution” is where livingmaterials and systems are seen as automata that can be engineered, mechanized, andstandardized.

FIGURE 3 Studies for Futile Labor: C2C12 cell lines (skeletal musclecells) forming myotubes in a Petri dish, 2015. (Color figure availableonline.)

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In 1771, Galvani discovered that the muscles of dead frogs’ legs twitched when struck by aspark. A popular legend tells the story of this discovery: While Galvani was carefully skinning adead frog, his assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve with a metal scalpel, which had pickedup a charge. At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog’s leg kicked as if it was alive(see Bresadola 1998). This experiment led Galvani to be the first researcher to value therelationship between electricity and movement as part of life, leading to the knowledge behindmuscle movement (electrical energy carried by ion) rather than what was until then the dominant“balloonist” belief that muscle movement is powered by air or fluid. More than that, though,Galvani dramatically, and with a spectacular spark, blurred the boundaries between life anddeath through the animation and movement of a dead organism. As a result, electricity became awidespread popular demonstration tool because it problematized the relations between move-ment and vitality—it could create an artificial movement that goes against the agency of theperson. In its early years, electricity was thus key to the public performances staged by scientists,who were also commercial showmen. Electricity represented the vital spirit of life itself. AsStephens (2015) argued:

Experiments in galvanic reanimation were a particularly attention-grabbing instance of thewider cultural transformations produced by mechanization taking place in the early 19thcentury. They fascinated popular and professional audiences alike because they made sostrikingly visible the process of mechanization—of automated movement independent of theagency of the individual subject—that was in the process transforming life and experience inevery cultural domain. (277)

In the eighteenth century, the dominant understanding of human biology was mechanistic.Automata like Vaucanson’s Defecating Duck, Kemplen’s Automaton Chess Player, andJaquet-Drosz’s Musical Lady were “more than mere curiosities: they were the embodiment ofa daring idea about the self” (Woods 2002, 17). As de la Mettrie ([1748] 2000) observed:

Man is but an animal, or a collection of springs which wind each other up. . . . If these springs differamong themselves, these differences consist only in their position and in their degrees, and never intheir nature; wherefore the soul is but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of thebrain, which can be regarded, without fear of error, as the mainspring of the whole machine, having avisible influence on all the parts. (243)

Stephens (2013) went on to argue:

[W]hat was marvellous in the eighteenth-century would transform the fabric of everyday life in thenineteenth. . . . Thus where eighteenth-century audiences had marvelled at automata that seemedalive, Vaucanson’s later, commercial mechanical inventions would, over the course of the nineteenthcentury, turn men into machines. (10)

Where the eighteenth-century technologies and scientific advances might allow machinesand inert matter to be transformed into intelligent, animate human life, the nineteenthcentury threatened to systematically reduce humans to mechanical objects, robbed ofagency or will. It was during the Industrial Revolution that the idea of the mechanisticaspect of life and the reduction of the organism into a mechanical machine slowly gainedinfluence. While man became a machine, the machine “robbed” the place of the individualman; his muscular power was tied to the machine. For Marx and Engels, in their Manifestoof the Communist Party:

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Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians haslost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendageof the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack,that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, tothe means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race . . .Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory . . . are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.(quoted in Tucker 1978, 479)

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attributing agency to moving machines (e.g.,drones), has fragmented, abstracted, standardized, and optimized the organic body. How can wethen interpret the idea of biological muscles taken outside of a body to become a machine? Dothey resemble the human or animal laborer, or will they liberate or rob the worker of his or hermuscular duties? Who will care for these muscles? Who will change their nutrient media andfeed them with antibiotics? Who will become the source of blood plasma to feed these cells? Thephenomenon of muscle cells growing—forming myotubes and twitching randomly in a Petridish—begs questions of their agency and sentience.

In many ways, our project is following a long tradition of the amalgamation of living andnonliving labor to the production of a task; a living being pulling (or being pulled by) anonliving apparatus. The project attempts to harness skeletal muscle cells in a dish into asemi-living labor; energy is here created by isolated cells in vitro that work and respond withinan artificial environment or body to perform a task. Thus, we are both following and divertingfrom a long tradition of the use of different forms of labor for productive tasks—from human,slave, and women’s labor, to other animal, to machine. We are further abstracting the life that isused for mechanical tasks.

We are also unsettling the concept of machine, however, by reintroducing to it elements ofagency and imperfectability that characterize all living matter. As I go on to explore later, themerging of life and machine to create force is concerned just as much with the sustaining andwell-being of the life that is attached to the machine. The muscle actuator bioreactor is not just alabor, it is also a life supporter and surrogate.

MACHINE AS A LIFE SURROGATE: ARTIFICIAL MOTHER

Bioreactors are sophisticated incubators; they provide a simulation of a body that enables thegrowth and survival of its life in residence. The human incubator was initially modeled after thechick incubator, and it was Dr. Martin A. Couney, a European physician, who promoted the ideaof mechanical incubators as an aid for the prolonging and saving lives of the neonatal, whootherwise would have died. The way these incubators were promoted in Europe and the UnitedStates was through public fairs, in which the enthusiastic public had to pay for admission towatch a show of the “Infant Incubators with Living Infants.” Indeed, Couney had a permanentincubator on show at Luna Park on Coney Island, New York, from 1903 to 1943 (when thetechnology was “transferred” to hospitals). Why was a successfully working technology, whichsaved so many lives, so slow to be accepted by the medical community, while it was thrivingwithin the public entertainment realm? I would suggest that, again, as with the steam invention,when distinctions between machine and life are being blurred and there is no articulatedscientific and moral classification, these vexing cases have to be articulated initially via

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aesthetics. These help shape, to a large extent, public imaginations, as opposed to solelyscientific or engineering modes of presentation. Such an aesthetic can also be discerned incurrent depictions of muscles as moving machines.

CONTEMPORARY MUSCLE CELL ANIMATION (OR SOFT ROBOTICS)

Let us examine some contemporary examples of the depiction of muscle tissue as “movingmachines,” that present biotechnology through the aesthetic tropes of intentional or unintentionalwonder. Although the official narrative, with all these examples, foregrounds utility—mainly todo with medical devices or ironically army devices—they indicate also wonder, frivolity and,above all, cultural leads of possible futures that are still engrained with contemporary biopolitics.

The first example is a summary outline of the project “A Swimming Robot Actuated byLiving Muscle Tissue, wherein Herr and Dennis (2004) created electrodes made of frog musclesthat are attached to a plastic spine with electrodes. The robotic fish was placed in a tank of buffersolution designed to keep the muscles alive; these were then stimulated to produce a swimmingmotion. The robot could swim forward, swim backward, turn, and stop. Herr is the Director ofan MIT Laboratory that seeks “the end of disability. . . . First, we seek to restore function toindividuals who have impaired mobility due to trauma or disease through research and devel-opment. Secondly, we develop technologies that augment human performance beyond whatnature intends” (Biomechatronics 2015).

A robotic semi-living fish can ignite other cultural visions, however, such as companion pets,submarines, and other novelties, which, although they are not openly articulated by the scientistor engineer, are provoked by the hybrid apparatus he or she chose to design and present visually.Artists, by contrast, tend to be open and direct in their use of the spectacle (after all, they have anartistic license to do so). In 2001, for example, the artist Joe Davis discussed his “Latest project. . . to build a biomechanical ornithopter powered by electrically stimulated frog’s legs and to flyit across the Charles River” (see Wayt Gibbs 2001). Both Herr and Davis were looking at similartechniques, but whereas Herr emphasized “real” applications, Davis celebrated the futilityinvolved. Ironically, where both have lost limbs, the former—the scientist and engineer—hasa robotic replacement, whereas the latter—the artist—has a peg leg.

Another illustrative example is of a cardiac muscle actuation that blurs the boundariesbetween the biomedical and other applications and possibilities, and presents a somewhat iconicimage that was nicknamed by its creators as the Medusoid—an artificial jellyfish made of rat’scardiac cells grown over silicone. As Nawroth et al. (2012) explained, “When placed in anelectric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.” Medusoid was created by ateam from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and asummary of the project was published in Nature. Although the rhetoric used by the scientiststhat created Medusoid asserts that it will assist in understanding biomechanics, and can be usedas a platform for testing drugs, it is also designed and promoted in the media as an evocativeobject or entity that ignites the public imagination. The shape of the apparatus as well as itsname—Medusiod, which is a homophone of the female name—connotes the story of Medusafrom Greek mythology, a beautiful woman who was punished by her transmogrification into ahideous and dangerous creature, who could, in turn, transmogrify others.

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BEING MOVED: THE MUSCLE TISSUE POINT OF VIEW

The attempt to view the world through the eyes of the subject being explored, even if the subjectis nonhuman, and furthermore does not have eyes in the human sense, and to thereby explore itsontological position, has recently seen a revival, especially in the humanities. Here, it seems that“‘constructivism’ is passé, the linguistic turn has reached a dead end and rhetoric of materialityis almost obligatory” (Rose 2013, 4). This human attempt has appeared in different masqueradesthrough human history. In the context of this article, I would like to mention one story from theearly twentieth century that involves the material of life—cells and tissues; that is, the story ofthe British scientist Honor Bridget Fell (1900–1986).

Fell’s engagement with tissue culture presented a different approach to the field in the earlytwentieth century, not just scientifically, but in terms of perception and ritualization. The reasonsfor this might stem partly from the fact that the head of the tissue culture lab, called (whenconsidering the wider context of tissue culture—somewhat poetically) “Strangeways,” was awoman. In her laboratory, personal relationships with the cultures were openly discussed, andFell coined the term “the tissue culture point of view” in an attempt to explore partial life (orsemi-living) from the perspective of the fragment of the body in the dish. In this way, thefragment of life was not only transformed to be some sort of agential semi-being, but was alsoanthropomorphized. This empathic, even somewhat romantic, approach to tissue culture createda different kind of ritualization; more of a nurturing one. Fell, a known and credible scientist,was able to take the scientific method of tissue culture beyond the methodology and scientificdiscourse into the philosophical realm, discussing tissue culture as a method that drew attentionto the permeable border between life and death, the embryonic and cancerous, the human and theanimal, by emphasizing different gradients of vitality, agency, or both. Tracking back throughthe history of tissue culture, she observed that it was noticeable that the relationship between thetissue culturalist and the tissues growing in vitro were more than just an objective experiment.For Fell, “Tissue culture often suffers from its admirers. There is something rather romanticabout the idea of taking living cells out of the body and watching them living and moving in aglass vessel, like a boy watching captive tadpoles in a jar” (quoted in Squier 2000, 33).

Squier (2000) herself explained that, “The writings on tissue culture reveal a tendency toidentify with the tissue culture as subjects rather than objects of study” (44), but “theStrangeway’s researchers had no access to the point of view of the culture itself. The point ofview they articulate is that of the tissue culturalist” (45). Although this position might skew thescientists from their objective view, it also encouraged them to draw on their imagination “as anaid to epistemology” (57). In relation to my research, the approach of Fell offers a small andsymbolic gesture toward a postanthropocentric view, in which the point of view taken is that ofthe fragmentary and dependent entity; she has practiced, unknowingly, a materialist ontologicalphilosophy.

Research into the tissue-engineered muscle actuator point of view might be unique, as itemploys simultaneously working with and thinking about twitching skeletal muscle in adish—a hybrid life/machine that coheres to labor for art. Movement can be voluntaryand forced. Certainly, in terms of muscle tissue, skeletal muscles are moved by what canbe perceived as the organism’s agency. In our project, ironically, we, the human operators,in concert with the machine, force the muscle to move (by mechanical or electricalstimulation) to enhance the perception of vitality of the tissue in a dish; forcing the

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movement to adapt to our human scale anthropocentric needs; in most cases, with notmuch success.

THE FUTILE LABOR EXHIBITION

In this article, I have discussed themes concerned with our hands-on exploration into the use ofmuscle tissue as an organic automata; looking at the use of muscle actuation and its effect on ourperception of life, bodies, and perceived agency. Now, we ask whether the movement effect ofthese biological apparatuses affects and enhances their perceived vitality, and to some extentallows the attribution of a sort of agency. Such an experimentation follows Giedion (1948),insofar as,

one sphere is already taking clearer shape: one that intervenes directly into organic substance. Herethe demand for production delves into the springs of life, controls generation and procreation,influences growth, alters structure and species. Death, generation, birth, habitat undergo rationa-lisation, as in the later phases of the assembly line. . . . It is experimentation with the very roots ofbeing. (4)

Can we, actually and conceptually, look at biological material as an equal (or better)replacement for a nonliving tool, as the new form of labor? Rather than using the nonlivingto mechanize the organic material, can we seek to fragment, abstract, mechanize, and controlthe living or semi-living organic material itself? If previously human or other animal’smuscle power worked the machine (e.g., as in a plough,), contemporary biotechnology isnow using living matter as machines and factories—as a continuation of activities such asfermentation or, more recently, the use of bacteria to create antibodies. How can we look totissues as a biomachine or the new laborer? In other words, what does it mean when biologyis being mechanized and becoming a technology?

Our work emphasizes the futilities of full control over life (and life’s ever defiance), as wellas the futilities of attempting to engineer or grow an entity that can break free from ourhegemonic social constructions. As the wall text to the exhibition observes,

Avoiding the fallacy of “seeing is believing,” Futile Labor challenges the idea that scientific truth isbased on what can solely be visualized and instead plays upon what is carnally felt in the bodies ofthe audiences. In the exhibition, the tension between human and machinic bodies, the living, semi-living or non-living is correlated with the very thresholds of human perception: the humble, almostinvisible and barely perceptible random twitches of microscopic muscle cells in a dish rather than theefficient and apparent movement of a well-oiled machine. This human dream of engineering life maythus turn out to be, in the end, just a vapour in the wind [Figures 4 and 5].3

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Figures 1 through 5 are from the Futile Labor exhibition (2015), John Curtin Gallery, Perth,Western Australia. The Futile Labor exhibition (2015) is a collaboration among Ionat Zurr, ChrisSalter, Oron Catts, and Devon Ward.

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FIGURE 4 Futile Labor (2015). Ionat Zurr, Chris Salter, Oron Catts, andDevon Ward. (Color figure available online.)

FIGURE 5 Futile Labor (2015). Ionat Zurr, Chris Salter, Oron Catts, andDevon Ward. (Color figure available online.)

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NOTES

1. TC&Awas practically interested in investigating human relationships with the different gradients of life through theconstruction and growth of a new class of object or being—that of the semi-living. These are parts of complexorganisms that are sustained alive outside of the body and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. Theseevocative objects are a tangible example that brings 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. We areinterested in the new discourses and new ethics, epistemologies, and the ontology that surround issues of partial lifeand the contestable future scenarios they are offering us.

2. “C3H/HeJ mice are used as a general purpose strain in a wide variety of research areas including cancer, infectiousdisease, sensorineural, and cardiovascular biology research. A spontaneous mutation occurred in C3H/HeJ at thelipopolysaccharide response locus (mutation in toll-like receptor 4 gene, Tlr4Lps-d) making C3H/HeJ mice moreresistant to endotoxin. C3H/HeJ (Tlr4Lps-d) mice are highly susceptible to infection by Gram-negative bacteria suchas Salmonella enterica” (The Jackson Laboratory 2016).

3. From the Futile Labor exhibition wall text, John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Western Australia, October 2015.

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IONAT ZURR is an artist, researcher, and curator who co-developed the biological arts initiative, the Tissue Culture andArt Project since 1996. Her research was instrumental to the development of SymbioticA in 2000 (which became theCentre of Excellence in Biological Arts in 2008), an artistic research center housed within the School of Anatomy,Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. E-mail: ionat.zurr@uwa.edu.au. She is also a Visiting Professor at Biofilia—Based for Biological Arts, Aalto University Finland(2015–2020). She is considered a leader in the growing field of biological art, both as a practitioner and a theoretician.

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