Abstract:
What are the hopes and fears of becoming a hybrid in a de-modern scenario? How to understand neobiological civilization and its anxieties? Can artists and creative practitioners substantially contribute, by cross researches and productions, to the treatment of major diseases and chronic pains? When it comes to uncertainty, a complex set of our thoughts and attitudes of doubt is based on an archaic and suspicion-led skepticism linked to “dubitare”, to vibrate. Where is our hybrid frontier, if we have one? “Hybrids exist, they are among and with us...”(Bernard Andrieu). Therefore, let us critically reflect on neuromutation, our “immersion into the tissue of the world” (PoIona Tratnik) where we all act as “mutalogues” (Louis Bec), interconnected with other biomasses, cultures, and artefacts, being immersed in a world of a dreadful crisis, looking for invariants in the middle of omnipresent mutation(s). Franco torriani
Keywords: body as a flux; complexity; disease; hybridity; pain; peculiar creativity
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Franco Torriani
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Crossbreeding Sensibilities * franco torriani
Introduction
In these last few years the developments of the Life Sciences, often connected with different manipulation levels of the living systems, produced conflicting effects. In itself, the ever-changing Life Science outline acts on how, individually and collectively, life is perceived. Nowadays, in times in which many solicit a determining or conditioning biopolitical age, what isn't simple to define as life has become its characterizing reference. Talking about the living, about something living as Paul Ziff would say, “... is like talking about an organism in its environment”i. But how late biological is our age?
Machines, artefacts, bioentities dramatically expand the humans changing the relation with the environment. The outcome has been an anthropic environment in which non-living forms evolve as living entities, based on origins, which are partly organic and partly inorganic, or totally inorganic. However, as Bernard Andrieu observes: Far from replacing mankind in a posthumanism and disembodying the subject, the world and the technique co-construct the constitution of a hybridizing body. Whereas miscegenation and melting modify the social body, hybridization integrates the technical modification in the professionals' daily gesture. Technique is no longer an alienating and dehumanizing adversity, it obliges the medical and the social worker to become each other; adapting rules and converting its functions to limits which are always beyond the other's bio-corporality. The inequalities in the access to knowledge related to these new technologies of electronic surveillance, self-health and biocontrol has to be described through the meeting between social imaginaries and individual representations. Denouncing human mechanization, the dominant ideology does not conceive technique as a positive and constitutive interaction of a new identity.ii In the artistic scenario, as a dominant science, biology has set off an unrestrained spreading of biological metaphors, offering in the same time many “expressive tools” (quoting Hauser) to the artists.
Virtually, some artists approach the living, considered as a model, simulating it, that is adapting ‘the artefacts’ to the processes of life, making them basically, as Domenico Parisi would say, “natural artefacts”. Other of them, such as Eduardo Kac, Oron Catts and his colleagues from SymbioticA manipulates and recreated living organism, generating "presence". The confrontation between the programs (to the impressive role of the Artificial Life) and the action on the living is linked to the Nicole Karafyllis' notion of "Biofact", a hybrid in continuous mutation between life, bios, and artefact.
Background How is changed the relationship between body and environment in the neo-biological era (or post-)?
Where is the new frontier of hybridization after the manipulations of the living?
“Skin is a metaphor for the unstable boundaries of our bodies and our lives” (Jeans Hauser)iii
How art practices may push more on borders of interdisciplinary actions on disease, handicaps, pain?
The technological invasion of nature, and especially of life, is ancient.
Nicole Karafyllisiv illustrates the labile connection between technology and nature in post-biological era marking that “...While the technical manipulation of life is as ancient as the practice of domestication and breeding, new technologies such as cells cultures, organ transplants, reproductive medicine and computer simulation of biological processes now call into question our traditional and common sense distinctions between nature and technology.”
Actually the future step in life evolution, although to be considered cautiously and with the long period serenity, implies the transit, already undergoing, from the organic to a composite system within which organic, inorganic living forms and their mix are included.v
Louis Bec uses the term “Living design” to describe this “artificialization of the living” aimed to:
The cultivation of skin and tissue, the manufacture of bones, the regeneration of nerves, the cultivation of embryos and organs, the conception and raising of factory-animals, xenogriffes of temporary bionic systems, the positioning of patients’ sensors and regulators using replacement technology. (…) These activities on the surface and within living subjects, on genetic, organic, morphological, physiological, behavioural and cognitive levels, confirm a tendency toward atavistic manipulation, expressed over the ages through animal husbandry and domestication, hybrids, artificial insemination, and now through cloning and genetically modified organisms.vi
As Pier Luigi Capucci observes:
Sciences and technologies deeply influenced the human life. In ancient Greece the average lifespan was 30 years, in the Roman era it was about the same, and by the end of the nineteenth century it reached 40 years. Today, in roughly one century, in the so-called “technological world”, lifespan expectation has doubled. Humans also developed a wide range of artefacts, machines, entities that are quickly becoming more and more powerful, complex, autonomous, and independent. They could be defined to a certain extent as “living entities”, expanding the idea of life and of life forms. All these processes seem pushing forward the human biological, cultural, technical boundaries. How do they happen? What are technologies based on? Can these processes give any glimpses of a possible evolution?vii
Figure 1. Pier Luigi Capucci, chart presented in the lecture “Towards the third life”. “Soft control: art, science and the technological unconscious”, “Maribor2012. European Capital of Culture”
Also interactivity is an ancient phenomenon, dramatically implicated in the mutations and changes related to the advancing of sciences and technologies.
In the human communication - Capucci says - as well as in the communication of the living organisms, interactivity is the norm and not the exception, as the media would often claim. And, more, interactivity is neither an issue, which pertains only the technological media, nor it is necessarily technology-based. Before the use of adornments, images, and, later, writings, the human symbolic communication was direct and interactive. With adornments, images and writings humans register the knowledge outside the body for the first time, and invent the non-interactive mediated communication. Hence, in the history of the human communication, the mediated communication is the exception, while the interactive communication is the norm. But, since the interactive communication is preeminent and more effective, in the present era we devised technologies to render interactive also the mediated communication (with the interactive media), bringing it back to the main realm of the interactive communication.viii
However - as Karafyllis observes – “What biologists regard as life is neither identical with natural entities nor with technical artefacts. Rather, biologically constructed entities are something in-between: Biofacts.”
In light of the changes introduced by technosciences, what is the relationship between artefacts and nature? To what extent does it make sense to identify the latter with the physical world? The Karafyllis reflection does not appear at all obvious:
In the practice of the life world, in our everyday experiences, we seem to be sure of what nature is and is not. Aristotle said that whatever grows is natural and hence life is identified with nature. By contrast, whatever is moved externally does not grow, but is considered techne. This contrast corresponds to our common sense intuitions: trees, children and hair grow, whereas machines and automatons do not. But does this distinction still hold today in light of recent advances in biological and medical technologies? For instance: is a tissue grown in tissue culture still ”natural” or, reversely, is it overall technical? What about transgenic plants? How can the public still find traces of the manufacturing of life - when living objects are designed behind the walls of laboratories and afterwards released into the public sphere where they seem to be as familiar as “old friends”? Here, epistemological and anthropological questions intermingle. Experimental and medical science can stimulate biological growth so that only the abstract starting point of genesis remains as “nature”.ix
The redefinition of the living is one of the fundamental topics of our times and put down also a reflection on the concept of environment, considered not yet as the area in which something exists or lives but as a flux.
The environment, for the North American artist and philosopher Paul Ziff, is the one in which the organism implements its behaviour. A reflection on the living involves one on death. Relevant are Ziff’s words: “Death is the dissolution of the relation between an organism and its environment”, therefore death “pluralizes me”, it’s the conversion from one to many, essentially: “... I amalgamate with my environment...”x Should the body only overcome its environment, disease and pollution without forcing back death's limits?
Today regenerative medicine tries to fortify qualities, which the body already has to resist the processes of mortification. The philosopher Bernard Andrieu notices: “It is less a post-mortal society than a trans-living community that uses technobiologies for actualizing new living potentialities (…) the body agent always hopes to find a technological solution for a better life”. xi The notion of environment is strictly connected with that of embodiment and also to that of hybridity. Against Cartesian mechanism – Andrieu says - the prosthesis is an alternative of disembodiment with the possibility to neuromute the conception of the living and the composition of body (…) The body agency in pluripotentiality affirms that the boundaries are illusory, because " the body
resurfaces as a discrete entity as it articulates a new space, a revitalized subject". So “the distinction between the body and embodiment disappears in the condition of the constant engagement of our embodied interactions with the environment.xii Neuromutation is a conceptual and practical possibility because the development of Life Sciences authorizes now, with the epigenist development of genetic modification in vitro, and brain visualization, a new representational and action on the body; one which is active at the interface of brain-body-mind. (Bernard Andrieu) The interfaces between humans and machines, which have come out of their historic “frontal” relation, motivate a reflection that spans from hybridation to the brain-machine interfaces, right up to the brainmachine-brain interface technology. “Technology – Miguel Nicoleis maintains – will allow the brain to act independently form the body”.xiii The disintegration of the body defines a hybrid frontier at the intersection of biotechnology and nanotechnology. (…) Cyborgs, without the hybridological interaction is still used to argue for the mechanization and the dehumanization of the living. The biological body is repaired, dissected and implanted. Hybrids exist, they are among, with and in us, with our pace makers, our transplants, our hip prosthesis, our choler implants, our glasses, our wheelchairs... Professionals are trained for this and the ethical foundations of their practices are linked to bioethics: charity, non-maleficence, common good, social justice and responsibility in the respect of human dignity. (Bernard Andrieu)
In this complex scenario, we have to re-consider our boundaries, both of the brain and of the body.
Quoting Hauser: “The skin is visually a surface and a hybrid containing the self, but psychologically it is a semi-permeable active membrane.” Polona Tratnikxiv interviewed by Alan N. Shapiro says that: It is only one layer of ourselves. It is inhabited with thousands of microorganisms. (…) They cocompose our bodies, the complexity of our organism. I believe we should change the notion of the biological identity of ourselves being subsumed in the DNA of one organism; we should comprehend the whole complexity of the organisms co-composing this living system. (…) Thus speaking about the boundaries of bodies and transparent stable biological identities becomes very unreliable from this perspective. As Shapiro says, questioning Polona Tratnik, “the idea of technological extensions of the body which was very popular in the nineteenth century, for example, in cyborg theory and in the performances of the Australian artist Stelarc, affords to be now obsolete”.
Stelarc’s biological body is being extended in the sensorial sense, thus enabling other people to plug themselves into it. It is about networking the hepatic, sensorial body. However, if we consider tissue engineering, we are at a very basic stage of the possibilities of body manipulations. – Tratnik says – (…) Science is today far from cultivating an artificial muscle, which would be functional in the way that the one in the body is. We have a concept of a project in this direction. It truly means working in a transdisciplinary mode.xv
We are beyond the interlacing between Life Sciences, cognitive sciences, representation systems, and even beyond Stelarc’s merciless and sensational analysis, anyhow very acute. As Boris Groys would say, in this biopolitical age it’s life itself, which has become the subject of technical and artistic intervention.
Transdisciplinary means that several disciplines really traverse into one another. Art is maybe the first field where this could be immanently accomplished. Although it also has its own qualities and in a certain sense it stays autonomous. But if it transmits methods, knowledge, and technologies (…) from the field of bio-technology, and it also behaves as a philosophy-in-action, then it becomes a transdisciplinary field. (Polona Tratnik)
Methodology Would it be correct to define as a fuzzy kind of approach the one trying to find a path among the mutations going on in our era? May be it would be, or at least it could be intended as a methodology of either interpreting all kind of mutations, or to survive extreme challenges of/on our attitude to adapt to the world. How to go on, being stressed and balanced but, more frequently, stressed and unbalanced, "in a state of imbalance", as Louis Bec says proposing - with elusive and subtle irony...- a Tribute to Uncertaintyxvi? In fact, innovative collaborations have been based since years on cross resources, metaphors, and coproductions. May be now, the crisis and the perception of it is so dramatically entered in our everyday life that 'old and new tools' have to be experimented differently. Our continuously mutating expanded and enhanced body is a flux. Merleau-Ponty gave the notion of its immersion in the world... But, in Joseph Margolis's terms, "The world is a flux and our thought about is also a flux". It's a doubt there: where are our frontiers, where are the frontiers? Fuzzy ones, states Louis Bec, elusive fuzzy boundaries, fuzzy because we have to forget the principle of ambivalence "...in favour of degrees of truth". Also perfect to say that 'complexity' is the main way - the only one left? - to approach the mutations in all their consequences of the last fifty years. The previous ones we assume will be considered by historians. How to explore Uncertainty... and its origins, mix, horrors, effects? The methodology of researches, practices, visions, looks after concrete experiments of inter-disciplinary collaborations, taking in account as much as possible different sensibilities and peculiar creativities. Doubt is a complex set of thoughts and attitudes, not to far away from an almost archaic scepticism. It is the Latin dubitare, also to vibratexvii. Hopes and fears coexist in the becoming hybrid in our de-modern scenario, cultural/creative practices have to induce a reflection on a neuromutation as a conceptual and practical possibility (Andrieu). We are 'all mutalogues' (Bec), billions of more or less inter-connected mutalogues (7 billions of human beings and billions of related animals...), immerged in a world in a dreadful crisis. Humans resist to changes: as a paradox, we look for invariants in the middle of the mutation(s). In this miscellaneous cultural panorama, Alan Shapiro says that:
It is necessary to have a classification system of knowledge. But I don’t think that the classification system that we have now is appropriate to the world and the society that we are now living in. It is based on separation, on assumptions of binary oppositions like social and individual, mind and body, natural and artificial, nature and culture, living and non-living, psychology and physiology, form and content, media and message, critical and affirmative, real and fake, reality and fiction, etc.xviii
Considering this coexistence between potentially conflicting elements, probably we should talk about new cultural learning policies, based on whatever can provide 'learning' on a given reality and, hopefully, to provide 'tools' to mutate by using creativeness, at the same time, as a pattern of thought and as a set of skills and capacities. The relation between art and cognition, is fundamental either in understanding and pushing humans creative capabilities, or - says Becxix - “to go further beyond the previous notion of the inspired creators, to the ones concerning the present arts, technologies, sciences inter-relations and cross-researches and productions potential possibilities.”
Life Sciences need an approach that go beyond the art and cognition relationships, the theories of complexity are the adequate even if not an easy tool.
One of the main issues is when and how far in practices, artists and creative practioners may substantially contribute to the treatment of handicaps, major disease and pain. From Robotics to Nanotechnology to VR, various disciplines have contributed together to very interesting results. One of the cases more appealing by proceeding with this research is the one concerning chronic pain. Differently to the 'pain distraction' experiences in immersive virtual reality, it is very interesting the case of an interdisciplinary team, which works on a VR system that "...not simply seek to 'distract' users from pain, but to arm them with a learned capacity to modulate it" (D.Gromala, C.Shaw. M.Song)xx [See also in references]
Findings In these last few years those that Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr point out as “biological art phenomena”, often connected with different manipulation levels of the living systems, produce conflicting effects and various art expressions. Referring to the dissolution of life’s continuum’s borders, to cite the authors, and to this need that arises, as Capucci supports, to refocus on what converges on the threshold where the living acts, “A growing number of artists are engaged at various levels in the manipulation of living systems...” xxi. What unites them is the transdisciplinary nature of their works, even though not all of them can be defined bio-engineers or bio-artists. Gwenn Aël-Lynn, for example, is a French-American artist, also a ”botanist” - as he calls himself - that points out the relationship between our culture and its own ecosystem of odours, sounds and food. Moving among these elements and associating them in his site-specific installations Gwenn, not only gives rise to trans-disciplinary artworks, but he also tries to investigate the complex phenomena of our perception and also the relationship between identity and cultural roots. A theme, that of mixed cultures, which is also that of uncertainty about our place in the world and our identity. Gwenn says: There is one thing too, that I have to be honest about. I think there is a difference between artists that make art about technology, or about science, and artist like me, who use technology, or applied science, to address political questions, cultural problems, identity, etc… I do not directly address scientific or technological questions; I just responsibly apply these fields to my projects. Even though, one could argue that using technology implies a discourse around it…xxii Actually, the debate on the technologies that are being applied to the living, give life to a rigid and intolerant opposition.
Catts, Zurr as many other artists, researchers and theoreticians, starting from their colleagues from SymbioticAxxiii, reflect with attention on the criticisms, but warn against misinformation and confusion. Eduardo Kac, emblematic artist for his ‘transgenic works’ (his researches on the relationship between bioart, Life Sciences, robotics are uncountable and extensive), calls for a precise focus on new man-made living beings, therefore not only produced by ‘nature’. In Life Extreme. An Illustrated Guide to New Life, written with Avital Ronell, who is playing a leading role in the new American philosophical scene, deals with “unique plants and animals”, telling “... another story about life on our planet.” If the twenty-first century is the one in which, the greatest number of these subjects of extreme life were born, some specimen have been found in the seventeenth century! According to Kac, “... it’s a matter of shifting the laboratory’s private space to the centre of the social one, transforming the object into subject”. The dialogue between the artist and philosopher unwinds on very disputed matters, from the human limits to
the new technically possible frontiers, from biotechnologies to basic distinctions: natural and artificial, man and machine, nature and technology. An outlook onto these hyper-living forms, as Avital Ronell, calls them, result “... neither really of Nature, nor of technology...” focuses its interest towards the phobias which it “... can provoke in the so called humans...” His question, after all, is the one that returns: what is the living? And Ronell doesn't fail to acutely relate it with technologies and machines, “... which are rather on the death’s side...”xxiv Catts and others from SymbioticA, very much involved in their artistic practice of tissue culture, nowadays a rather hot and disconcerting argument of consolidated values’ systems, for over ten years have been working at a research program aiming at creating “semi-living entities”. A new category of “... beings/objects built of living and non-living materials, (...) built on that fluid frontier which separates living and non-living, growth and construction, birth and manufacturing, subject and object...”xxv
Polona Tratnik also works on these subjects, for example Hair In Vitro (2010–11), and some of her other artworks, “take a part - Alan Shapiro says interviewing her - or an element of the human body (…), hair or cell tissues, and give them conditions of life independent of the human body. Hair, for example, is provided with conditions to live on its own.” Shapiro asks her if her intention is to decrease the separation between the human body and the outside of the body and what is she trying to demonstrate with this artistic practice. She answers: My work is about the presence. We strive to get somebody else’s presence. (...) With tissue engineering, you could have a piece of someone else on a table, next to your bed. And this element of the other person is still alive. For the Hair (2005) and Hair In Vitro (2010–11) projects, I’ve used hair. I like hair since it ensures the presence of someone else. It invokes strong affections. And it also has strong cultural connotations. I started working with skin tissue, skin cells and then with microorganisms and hair. I was reflecting upon the question, where are the boundaries of our bodies.
Hair (2005-2007), Polona Tratnik
Hair in Vitro (2010-11), Polona Tratnik
In the project 37°C (2001), I was cultivating skin cells and tissues (…) I found it intriguing that the experience which we have of skin in our everyday life, and what we encounter in the laboratories, is something totally different. We experience skin as part of a whole complex system of the human body. But in the laboratory, you deal with living cells, which you cannot see with the naked eye. You multiply them in greater quantities and you don’t get skin. You don’t have a layer of dead cells, you don’t have pigment cells, you don’t have veins and capillaries, any blood. It’s just cells in a Petri dish. Something is growing, a part of another person, you know it, but you cannot experience it directly, you cannot experience the life of it, the growing of the cells. Can this be brought back into the context or environment of everyday life? How can this be related back to skin? If we don’t do this, then there is no difference between human cells and frog cells, it all becomes a mere experimental material, a complete decontextualization, the work of the bio-tissue laboratory becoming totally removed from the human condition and human experience.
37°C (2001-2003), Polona Tratnik
Recollecting another one of her artworks, called In Vitro and Transspecies Shapiro asks her about the meaning of transspecies. The artist, in fact, also works on “the idea of a transspecies, made of a mouse and a human being.” She explains that:
I was never enthusiastic about working with animals. I don’t want to instrumentalize other living beings. But we did stem cell research in relation to the research of hair. There was a striking idea that came to my mind in this regard. Nude mice are an example of living beings designed by humans for bare instrumental purposes. In fact, nobody cares about them, we don’t really consider them living beings. I don’t like this. By inserting the human stem cells into them one could build the immune system of the mouse. I like this because it means to reverse the logic of who is helping whom. Instrumentalize the human being to work for the good of the mouse. So if you do this, you are working on building a transspecies, you don’t only get a nude mouse with human tissue, but a mouse with a human immune system, you truly get a mouse-human hybrid. Since Life Sciences have continuously altered the thresholds that define the existence of the living, Dario Neira's artistic practices are at the crossroads between life, symbolic realm and nature, exploring changes induced by technologies on the perception of the human body, inside and outside. In his video and installations, artistic and technoscientific relationships refer to the continuum of life and to the basic rules body cannot escape in its functioning, neither as a carbon based unity, or as person behaving in an environment. By using clinical practices such as endoscope and nuclear magnetic resonance, the presence of the human body is dramatically proposing its bare reality, its physical state, its precarious energy. In Redxxvi he explores the intriguing state of a flux of blood with its substance, information, symbols. In Dario's metonymically oriented works, nature, even if its limen is as fluid as ever, is the ultimate winner. So, to such fundamental topics as nature, humans, life the artist adds that of human disease, caused by the technological invasion of his body. For example, in his Diseasexxvii (this is) video, Neira explores a man’s reaction to a medical examination, that of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. The subject experiences it through the discomfort of physical and noise constraint, of a relationship with the sickness, and of further environmental discomfort (disease). Is a scientifically intimate observation that concerns a man who simultaneously lives through a physical ad internal experience, interweave in a voyage which is partly inside and outside the body, with an acoustic content which, however it is processed, repeats the dull sound heard inside the appliance.
Discussion Without reaching the technology induced catastrophism, by the way not without renowned interpreters, what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “the current revolutions in biology and computers, and their implications for ethics and politics, raise a host of new questions for which the arts, traditional humanistic disciplines and Enlightenment modes of rationality may seem ill-prepared”. Further than this dull perspective, honestly not lacking of drive to reflect, for example, on our approach to death, the notion of “biocybernetic reproduction age” he introduces is captivating. On one side, the control (‘cybernetics’), on the other “the sphere of living organisms (‘bios’) which are to be subjected to control, but which may in one way or another resist that control, insisting on 'a life of their own”. A model that, in its disenchantment, has the merit of being realistically complex and full of tension...
This concept of “biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Walter Benjamin's mechanical reproduction as the fundamental technical determinant of our age”. As some authors believe, maybe the “post-digital paradigm is not yet completely clear xxviii?
It’s not since yesterday, that many scholars have observed “the traffic”- it’s a definition by Eve Keller between computer science and biology. Roberta Buiani writes that “... biology and other Life Sciences – carbon based – have borrowed from computer science characteristics and connotations by means of a variety of metaphoric versions...”Lily Kay dates back to the fifties the connection between biology and computer science. When “... computer science was described as a system of representations”.
Buiani’s essay, hinged on viruses and the ‘dark side of the digital culture’, connects, among other things, these simple parasites (the viruses) which of the living have the only faculty of breeding, to Thierry Bardini’s considerations, that is “... the viruses are redefining the post-modern culture as a viral ecology...” The Hypervirus, set off with the arrival of AIDS (at the beginning of the eighties), “... materialises the cybernetic convergence of carbon and silicon...” As a consequence, computers and humans are infected at levels unseen of.xxix
So Michel Bret writes citing Descartes (in relation to the living), repurposing questions in turmoil, among others on the distinction between ‘living’ and ‘artificial’. It seems that Descartes may have said that “... if we were masters of biology we would be gods” (Avital Ronell)xxx
The brilliant neologism Biofakte, “... is referred to a being which is both natural and artificial, one and the other...” A neutral term, in the intentions of the German philosopher and biologist, “... which confines an ample spectrum within two poles: the natural living entities and the technical artefacts”. A term therefore, considered less complicated to be used than others such as: chimeras, clones, androids, cyborgs, just to mention a few. A sort of third way between ‘naturalness’ and ‘artificiality’ and, maybe forcing a little her thought, the biofacts influence that production of hybridity, which has important anthropological consequences. A hybrid as Hauser writes citing this neologism, “...between an epistemic thing and a living being, or system, where (...) growth is induced by a technical treatment" xxxi The elegant analysis which Karafyllis carries out between ‘biofacticity’ and ‘hybridism’ explicitly refers, recalling to Latour, to the humans as hybrids, having “... both a natural essence and a technical one...”
Another reference to Bruno Latour is the one, notable in respect to the artistic practices, to what subject and object may be. The former, the subject, according to Latour is the one “that resists to the naturalization...”or rather to the acclimatization, the latter, the object resists to a subjectivation. I believe it doesn't exclude some element of submission. Convinced that “... a boundary ‘to the human’ doesn't exist and of how much Aristotle’s ontological categories have become fluid...” Karafylllis, in line with many artists who work with the technologies deriving from Life Sciences, is “... for a wide approach to the idea of life...” The aim is of, by means of experience, a personal growth “... without reducing life to biological processes or to the functions of the genetic code”xxxii Is a new order in the relation between humans and the environment imposing itself?
Louis Bec has raised the question, drawing on a similar question placed, time back, by Kafka and after that by the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Bec makes a serious, and at the same time upsetting connection on how to connect the above to the ‘animal metamorphoses’, the one which goes in the opposite direction, that is “... the timeless return to the animal nature...”
As many ethical questions, some probably new arise, Bec sincerely wonders: “... which is the ethics we are dealing with?” And continues on the need which can be shared to “... go beyond the previous biblical and philosophical moral standards, which seem not to work anymore...” His question on this matter is not of little importance: “Will it be necessary to explore new kinds of evolutionary ethics, more connected with ‘the very nature’ of the problems to be solved?” xxxiii
Melentie Pandilovski puts forward this matter without any periphrases, after observing that, most likely, “... many would disapprove actions to modify the human form, considering the idea repugnant.”xxxiv For her the expansion of knowledge and “human consciousness” seem to give rise to far less objections. The matter of the body is argued by Bernard Andrieu proposing a new method for a new conception of the body, in relation to our performative action on it by our technological expertise.
The reactive model is different from the performative model: the enhancement of the body, even if a new body-shop appears, is not the same project of post-humans disembodiment because pluripotentiality implies and supposes not only the deconstruction of the body but also its reconfiguration. Enhancing me is a hybrid solution and not a new eugenics for the production of better people. (…) Becoming hybrid induces a new ontological body agency. The patient becomes an
agent of her self-health. This bio subjective norm is in conflict with bioethical advice because the body agent always hopes to find a technological solution for a better life. The redefinition of a conception of the disabled will be realized only if the pluripotential condition is a common reference point for the technical use of the self.xxxv
According to Pier Luigi Capucci (Autonomous Extensions and Expanded living entities):
The artefacts and machines that we have invented derive from the use the symbolic intelligence and often, as for artificial intelligence, are born from the attempt to simulate or emulate it. (...) The symbolic intelligence has sprung from the organic dimension, its interruption has generated the explosion of instruments, prosthesis, artefacts, it has deeply changed the human interaction with the environment, has produced the anthropised world we know and forebodes the next evolutionary step. My hypothesis is that the machines, the devices, the artefacts, will become autonomous extensions (…), and it’s what we define -living”, thanks the pressure of the anthropic environment, it will develop beyond the organic dimension, hybridising with it or basing itself entirely on the organic following a path that after all summarizes the birth of life on Earth - further diversifying life and the living entities, claiming the complementarily between organic and inorganic. And we are godfathers of this, totally natural, new genesis.
“Man has not learned to “construct” living organisms – as the genetist Lorenzo Silengo says - but (he) has developed the technology to make use of them.”
Bec suggests: “The main goal is to work not only through intentional modifications of the living subject, but more importantly to promote the manipulation of evolution in the animal world.”
The “artificial proliferation of animality”, as Bec says, provides for the biohybridsxxxvi, the living that enters into the artefacts. With life-as-it-could-be by Langton, Mark Bedau confronts the mechanisms of life-as-weknow-it. These mechanisms are at the roots of that “symbolic realm” that Capucci suggests, and I would also add of the creative process, and also the foundation of a baseline trend aimed at re-materialization, at the presence, at a substitution of the metaphor with the metonymy. It’s the direct action on the organic, on carbon, on a hyperbolic “creation of the living”, or at least of its substantial manipulation.xxxvii The confrontation, probably osmotic, between the programs (the impressive role of the Artificial Life) and the action on the living will continue. The latter, as Nicole Karafyllis would say, is more and more biofactual, a hybrid in continuous mutation between life, bios, and artefact. But, the Robo Sapiensxxxviii exists? Being the old ethics in crisis, the uncomfortable focusing provided by a philosopher such as Peter Singer is far from being negligible, the increase of the symbolic dimension’s crises is foreseeable.
References Bec, Louis & Bec, Virginie (2006). Mobile/ immobilisé. Art - Handicap - Technologies - Sciences Cognitives. Avant- projet, from http://mobileimmobilise.uqam.ca/pdf/projet_mobile_louis.pdf
Bec, Louis (2012). Introduction to the international conference MutaMorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty, 6th – 8th December 2012, Prague, from http://mutamorphosis.org/2012/tribute-to-uncertainty/
Bec, Louis (2008).“Horto-nature/Para-nature”, lecture during the Piemonte Share Festival 2008 conferences. Bernard, Andrieu. “Toward a Pluripotent Hybridity: A new body agency of self?” published in Shifter Magazine 16 special issue on Pluripotential. Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath & Warren Neidich, from http://www.artbrain.org/toward-a-pluripotent-hybridity-a-new-body-agency-of-self/
Capucci, Pier Luigi (2010). "Media Education, Education and Media", in Limina, No. 2, July 2012.
Gromala, Diane (2011). “Metaplasticity & Inner Body Schemas: VR for Chronic Pain”, in ISEA, Istanbul. Gromala, Diane - Shaw, Chris - Song, Meehae (2011). “Chronic Pain and the Modulation of Self in Immersive Virtual Reality”, in Biologically lnspired Cognitive Architectures II: Papers from the Proceedings of the Fall Symposium (FS-09-01) from http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/FSS/FSS09/paper/download/953/1287
Karafyllis, Nicole C. (2003). “Biofakte-Versuch ueber den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen”. Mentis, Paderborn, Germany.
Kac, Eduardo & Ronell Avital (2007) Life Extreme. An Illustrated Guide to New Life. Ed. Dis Voir
Shapiro, Alan & Tratnik, Polona. (2011). “I Bring Philosophy and Biotechnology into the Sphere of Art”, from http://www.alan-shapiro.com/polona-tratnik-interviewed-by-alan-n-shapiro/
Notes i
The quotation is taken from an intriguing writing by Paul Ziff, "The Feelings of Robots", in Analysis, vol.19, Nbr.3, January 1959.
ii
Bernard, Andrieu. “Toward a Pluripotent Hybridity: A new body agency of self?” in Shifter Magazine 16 special issue on
Pluripotential. Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath & Warren Neidich, from http://www.artbrain.org/toward-a-pluripotent-hybridity-a-newbody-agency-of-self/ iii
shown
Jeans Hauser & Ivana Mulatero, interview on the exhibition Sk-interfaces, first staged in Liverpool and further enlarged to be at
Casino
–
Forum
d’Art
Contemporain
in
the
City
of
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/mulatero_inerview_skinterfaces.html
Luxembourg
(2009-2010),
from
iv
Nicole C. Karafyllis, Biofakte-Versuch ueber den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen, Mentis, Paderborn, Germany, 2003.
v
P. L. Capucci, "From life to life. The multiplicity of the living”, paper originally presented at the International Conference
Consciousness Reframed 9 - New Realities: Being Syncretic, Vienna, Universität Für Angewandte Kunst, July 3 - 5, 2008. It was published in the volume R. Ascott, G. Bast, W. Fiel. M. Jahrmann, R. Schnell (eds.), New Realities: Being Syncretic, Wien, Springer-Verlag, 2008 vi
Louis Bec, “Horto-nature/Para-nature”, lecture during the Piemonte Share Festival 2008 conferences.
vii
Pier Luigi Capucci, "Media Education. Education and Media", proceedings of the International Conference Always Already New
viii
Ibidem.
ix
Nicole C. Karafyllis, Biofakte-Versuch ueber den Menschen zwischen Artefakt, op. cit.
x
Paul Ziff, "The Feelings of Robots", op. cit.
xi
Bernard Andrieu, “Toward a Pluripotent Hybridity: A new body agency of self?” op. cit.
xii
Ibidem.
xiii
Quotation from an interview given by Miguel Nicoleis, teacher at Duke University, North Carolina, in the article by James Geary, "I,
xiv
Quotation from the interview of Alan Shapiro with the Slovenian artist and media culture-cultural studies professor Polona
2010 - 16/18 Dicembre, Milano - in Limina, n.2, July 2012.
robot", in The Guardian Weekly, 8th August 2008.
Tratnik “I Bring Philosophy and Biotechnology into the Sphere of Art”, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on December 17, 2011, from http://www.alanshapiro.com/polona-tratnik-interviewed-by-alan-n-shapiro/ xv
Ibidem
xvi
Louis Bec, introduction to the international conference MutaMorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty, 6th – 8th December 2012, Prague,
xvii
The Vibrancy Effect - ebook by Chris Salter, Harry Smoak, Michel van Dartel, Erik Adigard, NAi Uitgevers, V2_. The e-book
from http://mutamorphosis.org/2012/tribute-to-uncertainty/
originates from The Vibrancy Effect-Expert Meeting, curated by Chris Salter, discussed the fundamental theoretical discussion between 'living' and 'non-living', April 2011, V2_ Rotterdam, The Netherlands. xviii
From the Alan Shapiro interview to Polona Tratnik “I Bring Philosophy and Biotechnology into the Sphere of Art”, op.cit.
xix
Louis Bec, Compte-rendu, in Art/Cognition – Pratiques artistiques et sciences cognitives, edited by Louis Bec and Ysabel de Roquette,
Cyprès/Ecole d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence.
xx
Gromala, Diane – Shaw, Chris - Song, Meehae (2011). “Chronic Pain and the Modulation of Self in Immersive Virtual Reality”, in
Biologically
lnspired
Cognitive
Architectures
II:
Papers
from
the
http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/FSS/FSS09/paper/download/953/1287
Proceedings
of
the
Fall
Symposium
(FS-09-01)
xxi
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, "The Ethics of Phenomenological Engagement with the Manipulation of Life", in Tactical Biopolitics. Art,
xxii
Quotation from the “Interview to Gwenn-Aël Lynn” by Laura Capuozzo, on Noema.lab, from http://noemalab.eu/ideas/intervista-
xxiii
SymbioticA is a laboratory devoted to the relationship between arts and science, particularly in reference to the Life Sciences.
Activism and Technoscience, Various authors, Publ. By Beatriz Da Costa and Kavita Philip, MitPress, USA, 2008. a-gwenn-ael-lynn-interview-to-gwenn-ael-lynn/
Founded in 2000 by the cell biologist Miranda Grounds, by the neuroscientist Stuart Bunt and by the artist Oron Catts, based in Perth, at The University of Western Australia. xxiv
Eduardo Kac & Avital Ronell: Life Extreme. An Illustrated Guide to New Life. Ed. Dis Voir (2007)
xxv
Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr & Guy Ben-Ary, “What are/Who are the semi-living beings created by Tissue Culture & Art?” in Art Biotech,
xxvi
Dario Neira, Red (2006) - Video - 2’ (http://vimeo.com/18659834)
xxvii
Dario Neira, Disease (2005) – Video DVD - 3’50’’ - (private collection) (http://vimeo.com/18663177)
xxviii
For an essential organization, especially between the nineties and the first years of our century, of technologies of the living,
op.cit
science, nature, artistic creation, cf. Gianna Maria Gatti, The Technological Herbarium, The vegetable nature and the new technologies in art between the second and third millennium. VINUS Verlag/Press of Berlin (http://verlag.avinus.de/). Preface by Alan N. Shapiro. xxix
The essay was written by Roberta Buiani, thanks to the kind authorisation of the author, is published in The Spam Book: On Viruses,
Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Ed. Jussi Parikka & Tony Sampson, Creskill, Hampton Press, New Jersey, USA,
2008. For Lily E. Kay, cf. her book Who wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press,
2000. Buiani recollects how the fifties were the gold age of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, of the DNA structure’s decomposition ... Kay is writing when artificial life is already well established. On this topic, cf. Christoper G. Langton (edited by), Artificial Life, Reading (Mass.),
Addison-Wesley, 1989, and also Domenico Parisi, “Artificial life and human society”, in Intelligent systems nbr.3, December 1995 (picked up by P.L. Capucci, op.cit.). xxx
Michel Bret, "Vie Artificielle et Création Artistique", in Dialogue sur l'Art ..., op.cit. Bret then characterizes the living trough some of
its properties: homeostasis, the ontogenetic evolution (of the individual) and phylogenesis (of the species), "... the living being holds its own description that allows it to self-reproduce". For A. Ronell (with E. Kac), Life Extreme. op.cit. xxxi
Nicole C. Karafyllis, Biofakte-Versuch ueber den Menschen zwischen Artefakt und Lebewesen, Mentis, Paderborn, Germany, 2003. Cf,
also note 20. For J. Hauser, "Forward/Backward ...” op.cit. Hauser talks here about artists who, more than a technomaniacal and anthropocentric statement of cognitive domination on the non human, sceptically consider the current concept of progress. xxxii
Nicole C. Karafyllis, "Cultural Philosophy and History of Productive Life", op. cit. For Latour’s citation, cf. Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature. How to bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, USA, Harvard University Press, USA, 2004. Karafyllis also points out, among the
reference texts, Bruno Latour, Wir sind nie moderne gewesen.Versuch einer symmetrischen Anthropologie, 2, ed. Frankfurt:Fischer, Germany, 2002. xxxiii
Louis Bec, introduction to the international conference MutaMorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences, 8th – 10th November 2007,
Prague. Conference organized by CIANT, International Centre for Arts and New Technologies, with Hexagram, Leonardo and with Pépinières Européennes pour jeunes artistes, during the Enter3 festival, Prague, November 2007.
xxxiv Melentie Pandilovski’s citation, organize of Art of the Biotech Era (during the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts, Adelaide, Australia, 2004).
Cf. G. M. Gatti, op.cit. xxxv
Bernard, Andrieu. “Toward a Pluripotent Hybridity: A new body agency of self?” op. cit.
xxxvi
For the Biohybrids, cf. Louis Bec, "Mobile/Immobilisé", essay prepared for the Artistic Mobility in the twenty-first Century event
Prague, November 2006 (organised by CIANT, Prague). Topics later resumed and studied thoroughly at Montréal (31st October – 3rd November 2007) in the congress Mobile/Immobilisé: Art, Technologies et (In)Capacités. xxxvii
The cursive in Langton’s citation is mine. See Mark Bedeau in”Artificial life’s philosophical content and method”, in The digital
phoenix – how computers are changing philosophy, Various Authors, edited by T. W. Bynum and J. H. Moor, Apogeo, Milan, 2000 (and for C. Langton, "Artificial Life", in Artificial Life, edited by C. Langton, Addison-Wesley. Redwood City, 1989). Cf., F. Torriani, Organic-Inorganic. The
body: the displaced interface, outline of my speech at Generative Art 2001, Milan, 2001 (http://www.generativeart.com). Essay then published in Anomalie, nbr. 3, Interfaces, edited by E. Quinz and M. Aktipi, Paris, 2003.
xxxviii P. Menzel, P. Aluisio, F. D., Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species, The MIT Press (October 1, 2001). (Cited by Jean-Claude Heudin, in Les Créatures Artificielles- Des automats aux mondes virtuelles, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2008).
* This was my basic work for MutaMorphosis II Conference, Prague 6th – 8th December 2012
Laura Capuozzo has contributed to the findings and writing of this text.
