mani-festation/ materialization

manifest/materialize:

mani - manus - hand
                                 we manifest reality by hand/ manipulate material
we embody
a process of creation, through our own external efforts + those of our internal microorganisms
materialize
tissus - tissage = flesh + weaving

These are thought and concept fragments.

Staring into a microscope and watching and waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waaaaaaaiting for otherbeings to do their work in order to complete my work, makes me insane. !

so I wove a thing and manifested a tissu/tissage - the 'act' and the 'thing' are the same word (tissage/ weaving) + tissu translates to both 'cloth' and 'flesh'
Materiality
Digiterial
digits - fingers - digital handmade - jacquard=machine/woman/computer
This hybrid birth by a cyborg artist

The cloth will only actually be birthed off the front roll bar of the loom early next week when the warp is cut and the full length unrolled, but here is the view of the object on the loom during and after I finished weaving, FOR 12 HOURS STRAIGHT. I was in a manic flow and did not disrupt it because when a creative wave hits like that, you ride it to the very end. I was possessed.

The beginning.

I wound and wove about 20+ of these yarn-filled bobbins.

I wove sitting down until my bum wouldn't let me sit anymore on that horrid wooden bench. Then I wove standing up and rocking back and forth with the shuttle shots, for approximately 5 hours. I danced this cloth into being, wearing the devil's shoes, blasting vintage hits and chill dub throughout the industrial room that overlooks the Saint Lawrence river and entire (Montreal) south-facing city scape that lay out 10 floors below. I still cannot comfortably sit down (a health and safety hazard referred to as "weaver's bottom"). It was bliss.

Next I must repair the broken threads post cut-off from the loom.
Repair - mend - it is in our nature to repair, regenerate.
Knot magic.
More here on "white witches who cast knot magic" using horse hair.
More on horse hair in a minute.

The weaving specs, where each thread equals 1 pixel of an image:
1700 pixels wide x 2400 pixels long @ 40 dpi (or threads per inch) - each thread intersection makes a dot in the image... meaning, the weaving is theoretically 42.5" x 60" but I can guarantee it's longer than that due to my 'hand'. Digitally, the dimensions are what they are, but digits/hand variances in my beat, speed, tension (all those things that determine the resultant cloth density) alter those dimensions. My signature weaving style/make are referred to as my 'hand', as is the drape and feel of the cloth post-finishing. Sometimes the digital design has to be altered to account for the hand of the weaver.

The fully woven item, which wraps a number of times around the lower beam seen here. Also note the bench from hell.

The image is constructed of 12 different twill type cloth structures which blend together to render the image, each one of the 12 representing a different shade of grey in the image, meaning I had to reduce the original image down to 12 shades. This reduction is a labourious part of the computer-assisted design process and took about 2 hours to accomplish. Here is the original image (which was around 200 different colours and shades), of connective tissue cell growth on my miniature handwoven collagen surgical sutures:

This image was captured for me by Guy Ben-Ary.

It is meta-material.

There's something else about this weaving. 
There was a threading mistake in the warp, which I had the option to have fixed or to leave as it was. I decided to *not* fix the threading mistake, which existed prior to my taking up the weaving shuttle. This odd thread out is visible in some parts of the cloth, disrupting the wonderful illusion of the image. This intentional leaving-in of a 'mistake' is a nod to the ancient weavers who intentionally wove mistakes into their cloths in order to avoid angering the gods, because they believed that only the gods can create perfection. Other than this found/intended threading mistake, the weaving is perfect. This is also my nod to the notion of meddling in biotechnology as 'playing god' with living forms/ life and the many things that can go wrong.


To conclude, the knot magic and the white horse hair I'm manipulating in the lab:

u-2 os (osteosarcoma) cells on woven horse hair after 1.5 weeks

And the same horse hair weaving with u-2 os after 2 weeks.

Now,

This is crocheted horse hair with a new batch of u-2 os (only a few days old here)

Also,

I did this with silk organza to create miniature cloth scaffolds and enculturated them with both u-2 os and saos cells.

Micrograph of the above image. Only a few days old here, and just a few adhered to the silk fibres. It'll be interesting to see how the cells react to the silk, given the natural indicators contained in silk for healthy bone growth.

Lastly, I want to share some of my observations of the cells in culture. Both U-2 OS and SAOS-2 behave in uncharacteristic ways, cellularly-speaking. They don't simply adhere to a surface and proliferate through mitosis and forming a monolayer. They are in constant rapid mitosis and spitting cells into the suspension media (the liquid they're in), almost like pollination. They spread to other parts of the flask this way, without having to use motility to crawl along and spread. They simply land somewhere else and begin a new colony there. We can see why cancer spreads so quickly in some cases - because it uses both cell motility AND some kind of cellular pollination method.

Another observation: my massively confluent cultures (which I've decided to allow to overgrow the flasks instead of splitting them into new flasks) have begun to form the most interesting channels of cells, like wide branchy root systems almost like lace patterns, or knit bones. I think this is the tumour tissue itself. See below.

u-2 os cell culture allowed to grow past confluency for more than a month.

What I've discovered about the osteosarcomas is that they seem to grow both horizontally and vertically at competing rates - in some cases, especially with the SAOS, they actually grow vertically faster (which is unusual behavior for cells).

In my next post, I'll include some of my new protocols, like for prepping silk for cell culture, etc.