Biomateria: Biotextile Craft: 3T3 cells in vitro

Monday, March 2, 2015

3T3 cells in vitro

Below is a video of a 24-hour time lapse of live cell imaging at the Pelling Lab. My trusty lab partner, Tristan Matheson, helped me capture two similar videos--the one shown here was the best result. This video is exciting because it captures mitosis (two cells dividing) as well as displays cell motility (the ways cells move across the bottom of a petri dish). This is a beginning experiment, with the hopes that I can use the same technique to effectively capture video of osteosarcoma cell motility and other processes on my weavings, once they are well developed tissue samples.

*Please note: the video quality isn't conducive to fullscreen viewing, unfortunately - but for a better version of the video that can be viewed fullscreen, you can see it on Vimeo here.

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

WhiteFeather is currently working to engineer new biotextile forms, beginning with miniature textiles that she has handwoven with individual horse hairs, in a tissue culture lab environment on 3D-printed looms. The (sterile) miniature textiles are left on the looms and immersed in cell culture media in petri dishes in the lab, and then seeded with human bone cancer cells. The bone cancer cells (SAOS-2 and U-2 OS osteosarcomas) are growing into new cancer tissue on the weavings and are in particular attracted to the material nature of the horse hair. Other scaffold materials are experimented with as well, such as silk, watercolour paper, and more. These biotextile forms represent new ways of growing human cancer tissue in vitro. The work is supported by and carried out through a joint artist residency at Concordia University and the University of Ottawa.

Part of WhiteFeather's biotextile work also includes producing Jacquard weavings that she calls 'meta- material', or larger-scale image-based cloths that represent the microscopic biotextile ecologies she has created in the lab. WhiteFeather is working to design and produce weavings that talk about haptic intelligence - both human material fluency through the hands-on making of textile art forms and the haptic intelligence of nonhuman agents (cells) to reach towards each other, make membranous contact and connect to intersecting fibres in order to build living tissue on them.

The underlying premise of the work is to explore the areas of overlap between technologies that manipulate bodies, life and material existence, as well as digital interpretations of those relationships. This project comments on the use of new technologies to alter our physical experience of the world, our sensory understanding of reality and to create a new materiality.

This project will be presented in an exhibition at the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal in November 2015 as part of the 10th Annual International Media Arts Histories conference, “RE-CREATE: Theories, Methods and Practices of Research and Creation in the Histories of Media Arts and Sciences”. The conference will address "the issue of how material based practices within technical culture create new knowledge has been explicit and central to the historical roots of media art, design, science and technology."