fibersarcoma + naming new realities

Beginning of a 3D print of frame looms for tissue culture: the ground layer.

I've begun to assemble a glossary of new terms related to my creative biotextile work, including the spontaneous contributions of others, towards the development of a new language around the intersection of art + biology. My old friend, artist/comedian, Troy Haines, invented 'fibersarcoma' in response to my work with weaving and osteosarcoma (not to be confused with - or maybe to be confused with - fibrosarcoma). It's a collective effort -- I'm not the only artist engaged in this process of establishing new terminologies to explain philosophical and technical overlaps in science and culture. In fact, it was my colleague Tristan Matheson who suggested I do this, as he is developing his own glossary with regards to his work with cancer culture from an ethnographic standpoint. Artists and philosophers/ writers have long invented and established new terms to explain their expanding cultural realities. In contemporary culture, we have an ever-broadening reach of artistic and cultural practice as interdisciplinary values encourage experimentation between fields. Part of my work as a BioArtist has been to learn the language of biology/science so that I can thoroughly understand the materials I work with and the technical applications enough to manipulate them to my own ends. This involves not only learning a new language AND practice, but also becoming fascinated with how the various languages (artspeak, biospeak, communications theory, educational theory, material philosophies, etc) influence cross-disciplinary work being done, as much as the work can influence languages. This represents the beginning of accessibility to previously closed or tightly restricted, exclusive realms of knowledge--similar to the "Word of God" no longer being spoken in Latin in churches. <--my analogy using religion in comparison to science is no accident here, either.

Pure caffeine used in the Pelling Lab to 'excite' cells.

 
The Internet and coding culture (thanks, coders!) have done much to promote this sense of open, collaborative development and exchange, simply in the push for open source programming, which has bled into other facets of our worldly interactions and knowledge industries.

Here I am holding a 3D-printed hollow form used as a mold for casting HeLa cells in agar. Dan Modulevsky printed this for our experiments with growing cells in sculptural forms. I greased the entire inside of the cube with vacuum grease, which is, as it was explained to me, hydrophobic and therefore will not contaminate a cell culture (because it won't mix with liquid).

The agar is melted and dissolved in fetal bovine serum (FBS), and then the HeLa cells and media are added. We had to work quickly, before the agar hardened again.

This shows the HeLa/agar/culture media mix in the cube mold before it has completely hardened.

Ladies and gentlemen, here we have a cervical cancer culture cube (C4)! This is a beautiful image that Dan sent me of the cube form after being removed from the mold - my idea for using the vacuum grease (based on my experience with art mold-making + cement pouring, and using Vaseline) worked very well--we weren't sure how else to get the cube out of the mold. Dan's maintenance of the C4 has shown us that the HeLas can grow and thrive just fine in the agar for a time. We're not sure about longer term yet. Dan also injected some 3T3s (connective tissue cells) into the cube to see what would happen. So far, they are all growing together and the colour of the cube is gone as the media has been consumed by the cells.

Another term I'm including in my glossary is one I invented last year: haptic epistemology. I wrote about this a bit in my other two related research blogs, here and here. This is a term to explain knowledge generation through hands-on making, particularly as it relates to materiality and craft-based practices (I include both textiles and tissue engineering in the category of "craft-based practice"). Craft: process-oriented work with a technical focus, deep aesthetic consideration and functional (or semi-functional) outcomes. Also, this doesn't preclude philosophical outcomes or conceptual development... those are variable (e.g. material feminism). Easy enough definition?

The final term I'll elucidate today is a word I invented for a blog post I wrote a few posts ago (on this blog): omniphilic. Omniphilic is used specifically to refer to a cancer cell culture (for now)—meaning, a microorganism that thrives indiscriminately in all manner of host bodies regardless of age, gender, species, etc.    

Meta-material: In this case, it's a micrograph of my last tissue culture on weaving, which I've imported into a program called Pointcarre, and which I've used to reduce the image to 6 or 8 greys. I've assigned weave structures to each grey: a different density of satin weave per colour. This will become a physical jacquard weaving that I'll be working on at Hexagram at the end of the month. My miniature weaving and tissue/material growth will become a large-scale weaving about a weaving and the haptic intelligence of cells to 'weave' themselves into structured material. I might have to include meta-material in my glossary, even though metamaterial has been used as a term in a different context already. For my weaving, the contact with the body and its use as a covering for skin is also important in its meshy meta-ness.