Dave's update: 

It’s not us versus them. They are us!

As my colleague, Charissa Terranova, notes in her post for this week, we truly are symbiotes. Bacteria on us and in us contribute to our well being in so many ways.
Yes, the staphylococcus currently infecting Charissa’s finger can be classified as a pathogen. And yes, I’m sure Charissa will be happier when these bacteria are eliminated. An “us versus them” attitude toward microbes, however, presents an overly simplistic, and false, binary. Our relationship with microbes is so much more nuanced.
 
Gut Instinct, our upcoming online exhibition, will allow viewers to consider the importance of our gut microbiota. Increasingly, researchers are revealing important “jobs” played by these intestinal partners of ours. But our relationship with these intestinal partners is only part of the story. As I described in an earlier post, bacterial ancestors reside within every one of our cells. The endosymbiotic theory, first articulated by the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis nearly 50 years ago, states that the mitochondria inside the cells of nearly every eukaryote and the chloroplasts inside the photosynthesizing cells of plants originated when previously free-living bacteria invaded or were engulfed by a developing eukaryal cell. Rather than being destroyed, however, these internalized bacteria became essential intracellular organelles.
 
These specialized intracellular machines certainly represent obvious examples of the intimate relationship between microbes and us. But the extent of our relationship extends well beyond mitochondria and chloroplasts. As Charissa notes, lateral, or horizontal, gene transfer probably has contributed significantly to who we are. We know that bacteria share genetic material via horizontal gene transfer. Genes can move not only between cells of a given species, but also between cells of different species. The story, however, doesn’t end there. Increasing evidence shows that DNA can travel not only between different bacterial species, but also between species in different domains. Our DNA, in other words, may contain bacterial DNA.
 
And let’s not forget viruses.
 
During the infection process, some viruses, most notably viruses like HIV in the retrovirus family, insert their genome into our DNA. If this retroviral DNA winds up in a sperm or egg cell, then it can be passed on to future generations. So, what’s our relationship with retroviruses? By some estimates, retroviral DNA may make up nearly 8% of our genome. Perhaps, it exists in our genome merely as junk. Alternatively, it may make us who we are.
 
Yes, some microbes cause horrific diseases. From the bubonic plague to smallpox to HIV/AIDS, human history is intricately linked with pathogenic microbes. But humans are linked with microbes in a very different ways, too. From the bacteria in our gut to the mitochondria in every one of our cells to our very DNA, microbes make us who we are.

Charissa's update:

Ouch! My finger hurts! Or, thoughts on symbiogenesis
 
My finger hurts. The nail bed of the ring finger on my right hand has a staph infection, and while I thought it might be interesting to send my readers off on the winds of imaginations congruent with my next book, I have chosen to keep it focused and the topic near. I will riff on bacteria and the microbiome as it connects back to Gut Instinct, Dave Wessner’s and my exhibition on the gut-brain axis and the interrelationship of the intestinal microbiota and cognition – that goes live online via the SciArt Center’s website in about two weeks! Please stay tuned.
 
So, I cut my finger while cleaning the house a little over a week ago, and the open splice got infected with the bacteria staphylococcus. There are many kinds of staph: the genus includes up to 40 species. I am not sure which one exactly is giving me trouble, but staph does not always cause problems for organisms. In fact, many of us – all kinds of mammals and birds – host them on our skin and in our mucous membranes on a regular basis. While my finger is a bit out of kilter, our relationship with staph is usually matter of symbiosis. We are often symbionts: two different organisms, living in very close proximity, usually for propitious reasons and under advantageous circumstances.
 
Which brings me to symbiogenesis.
 
In the 2002 book, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan make the provocative argument that the prime mover of evolution is not random heritable variations arising from mutation over millions of years but symbiogenesis happening laterally and according to acquired inheritance. Symbiogenesis, they explain, is “long-term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change.” (12) By definition, symbiogenesis is the evolutionary theory that eukaryotic cells come from prokaryotes. Margulis and Sagan argue that reframing the focus of evolutionary theory away from mammals, or in addition to the preoccupation with mammals, on microbes (bacteria, prokaryotes) and the unseen world of microbiological “life” reveals evolution and speciation according to a different logic and temporality. Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the French scientist who came up with a theory of evolution just prior to Charles Darwin, “was correct,” they argue. “Acquired traits can be inherited not as traits but as genomes.” (41) Bacteria and other microbes are often busy at work sharing genetic information. “Microbes are champions at passing their DNA to others in the form of entire functional genes.” (41) And this is the root of speciation, they argue.
 
What does all this mean? How does this impact my work as a humanist?
 
Traditionally, humanists have cared about the idea and thing called the “individual.” Similarly, the definition of this term has been within the bailiwick of humanism. Margulis and Sagan’s re-inscription of evolution in terms of symbiogenesis – speciation through lateral gene sharing, or what Stefan Helmreich calls “lateral gene transfer,” rather than sex and procreation – introduces a new concept of “life” rooted potentially in the inorganic. In the same vein, the person is never singly “individual” but always already collective – made up of an array of symbionts. As I wrote a few weeks back, we are “super-individuals” instead of “individuals.” The shift from life defined according to sex and procreation, among other forces, to lateral gene transfer has an emancipatory value in that it removes gender-based ideologies long clouding the theory of evolution and related fields, such as behavioral genetics.
 
I part once again with a refrain, borrowed from Karl Marx and tweaked for symbiogenesis in the present: Symbiotes unite!

Dave's update:

The Messiness of Intellectual Pursuits

Some time ago, I saw a cartoon that poked fun at perceived versus actual scientific progress. The first panel showed a graph with “Time” on the x-axis and “Progress” on the y-axis. The line on the graph was perfectly straight and, of course, had a positive slope. The caption stated that this graph showed how scientists present their work. The second panel contained a similar graph. The line in this graph started and ended at the same points as the line in the first graph. The same amount of “progress” occurred. This line, however, was far from straight. It went up and down. It was horizontal for a significant period of time. As I recall, it even contained a few loops. The caption for this panel indicated that this graph better represented the actual scientific process.
 
This cartoon couldn’t be more accurate. Despite the very neat, very linear scientific process that students learn in middle school, science is messy. When conducting experiments, we don’t know where we will end up. A surprising result may cause us to modify our original hypothesis. A surprising result may cause us to scrap our original hypothesis entirely and develop a new hypothesis. A surprising result may cause us to consider myriad new questions and our research focus may bifurcate into many new areas. This messiness is a necessary part of the process. This messiness makes science fun.
 
This messiness also typically doesn’t appear in the scientific literature. When scientists write about their research, they present it in a very linear fashion. A clear hypothesis is stated in the Introduction. The results from a series of experiments are presented. Each experiment follows very logically from the previous experiment and leads, logically and linearly, to the conclusion. We tell a story. The major journals expect us to present our work in this fashion. Journals generally don’t publish negative results. Journals generally don’t publish rambling accounts that detail every misstep in the process.
 
As Charissa and I have been planning Gut Instinct, our online exhibition for the SciArt Center of New York, I’ve been contemplating this process. When looking at a piece of art, it’s easy to imagine that the artistic process is linear and logical; the artist starts with a fully formed idea and simply creates it. Of course, the artistic process, like the scientific process, probably is very messy. I’m sure that the initial idea changes throughout the process. It may be transformed or reimagined. For the artist, like the scientist, progress isn’t linear.
 
Charissa and I currently are looking at submissions to be included in Gut Instinct. Over the next few weeks, we will need to consider the various pieces. We will need to explore how to present them. We will need to carefully consider what we want this exhibition to say to the audience. We will need to tell a story. Hopefully, the story will be compelling. The process, however, will be messy.

Charissa's update:

Guts to Embryology – The Intellectual Messiness of a Scholar in Pursuit

My collaborator Dave Wessner writes deftly about the nonlinear messiness of intellectual production. With reference to our exhibition Gut Instinct, the on-line exhibition about art and the micriobiota of the gut, he muses, “for the artist, like the scientist, progress isn’t linear.” Today’s blog will be an exercise in such nonlinear scholarly scrappiness.
 
Like so many of us, I am juggling several projects. My book Art as Organism: Biology and the Digital Image comes out in March; I submitted the files two weeks ago for the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, an anthology I am coediting; Wessner and I are co-curating Gut Instinct; I am punching through application deadlines for various conferences and visiting professorships; and tomorrow I will sit down to rewrite an essay for Technoetic Arts, “Learning from Embryology: Situating Bioart in Complexism.” Today’s blog is devoted to the last – what it means in art to ‘learn from embryology.’
                                                 
The essay emerges from a double panel I put together for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Vancouver in August, 2015. It was titled
COMPLEXISM: Art + Architecture + Biology + Computation, A New Axis in Critical Theory? It unfolds around the premise that a new hybrid paradigm fusing art, science, and technology is afoot within the humanities. My colleague and friend Philip Galanter coined the term “complexism” to identify this shift, which in the most basic sense is “the application of a scientific understanding of complex systems to the subject matter of the arts and humanities.”[1]
 
By way of complexism, Galanter and the rest of us are attempting to see distributed organization, emergence, coevolution, chaos, connectionist networks, feedback, statistical truth which is known to be incomplete, generative networks, etc. as a means to collectively define a new way of understanding cultural expression and intellectual production beyond modernism and postmodernism. Instead of the binaries set in place by modernism and postmodernism (absolute versus relative, hierarchy versus collapse, truth versus no truth), complexism proffers a cybernetic paradigm to guide us through the muddle.
 
The question begs, however, where does one find agential footing (viz. a place from which to pose critical analysis) in a system that is multi-vectored, bearing distributed forces, nonlinear, and emergent?
 
And this is where embryology comes into play.
 
In “Learning from Embryology: Situating Bioart in Complexism,” I am writing about the critical function of embryology in two bioart projects, Jill Scott’s Somabook and Adam Zaretsky’s DIY Embryology. By “critical function,” I refer to two primary ways in which complex-systems thinking – framing art practices by way of embryology – can provide a mode, or a platform, if you will, for critical thinking.

First, when bioart imparts basic scientific knowledge it offers a mode of critical thinking. Thus, basic scientific literacy provides individual agency: knowledge of evolution, for example, is empowering. Scott’s Somabook and Zaretsky’s DIY Embryology provide the viewer with a sense of how embryos are used in laboratories and the basic function of embryology.
 
Scott F. Gilbert and Marion Faber argue that one arrives at such basic knowledge often through awe and yügen, both of which one experiences, they argue, while looking at embryos. In the last term, yügen, Scott and Faber extend their aesthetic rubric into an Eastern vocabulary, as the term names the Japanese concept connoting “cloudy impenetrability…exceptional elegance or gracefulness.”[2] It describes any shape or form that is in the process of change, characterizing “movement in stillness” and “the embodiment of form in changing substance.”[3]
 
Second, embryology occupies an important position in the history of biology. The politics of embryological aesthetic come from deeper within the discourses of genetics and evolution. They are inscribed by the deep grooves of binary thinking rooted in the split between embryology and genetics that emerged with neo-Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis, unfolding over the forty years from roughly 1890 to 1940 that continue to influence scientists and science writing in the present. The Modern Synthesis combines population genetics, Mendelian genetics, and evolution by natural selection.[4] For Neo-Darwinists and scientists practicing according to the Modern Synthesis, “heritable variations have small effects, and evolution is typically gradual,” and unlike epigenetic relations, “evolutionary divergence is…tree-like, not web-like.”[5] Shifting from the visual to the conceptual aspects of the aesthetics of embryology, Gilbert and Faber compare embryology to genetics, unpacking the commanding political resonances within each field of expertise.

Based on the above diagram from Gilbert and Faber’s essay, we can deduce that if embryology celebrates diversity, acknowledges complexity, emphasizes organicist models, is interested in interaction and epigenesist, bears multiple analytic methods, humility before problems, and an emphasis on becoming, then genetics celebrates underlying uniformity, assumes simplicity, emphasizes reductionist models, is interested in information flow and preformation, bears a single major analytical method, great confidence before problems, and an emphasis on being.[6]
 
FOOTNOTES
[1] Galanter, Philip, “Complexism and the Role of Evolutionary Art,” in The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music, eds. Juan Romero and Penousal Machado (New York: Springer Books, 2007) 311.
[2] Scott F. Gilbert and Marion Faber, “Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form,” in The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, Alfred I. Tauber, ed. (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996) 133.
[3] Gilbert and Faber, 133.
[4] Schrey, Richards, Meller, Sollars, and Ruden, 1. See also Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Boston, MA: Belknap Press, 1985).
[5] Jablonka, Eva and Marion J. Lamb. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic,
Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2005) 389-390.
[6] Gilbert and Faber, 135.
​

Dave's update:

A Sense of WONDER

Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to visit the exhibition currently on display in the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. The Renwick building, located across the street from the White House, was built as a museum in the mid-1800s. In 1972, it became part of the Smithsonian Institution and serves as home to a collection of contemporary craft and decorative art.
 
Following a two-year renovation, the Renwick reopened in November of 2015. The inaugural exhibition in the refurbished space is WONDER. For this exhibition, nine artists were invited to create installation pieces that, in some way, connect with the building itself. As a docent remarked to us, it was hoped that each piece would create in the viewer a sense of wonder. It was hoped that each viewer, as he or she moved from room to room, would go, “Wow!”

As Charissa and I have noted in several of our posts, the fields of art and science too often are perceived as separate. They aren’t. Each field informs the other. And an appreciation of both fields is necessary.
 ​

Charissa's update:

Affectivity in Science:
Gut Instinct, the Bacterial Sublime, Embryology, and Toll Gene Family

If there is one binding theme at work in The Bridge residency program it is “affectivity in science.” In coupling scientists and artists, not only does the SciArt Center develop new space for expression and problem-solving rooted in the collaboration between the all-too bifurcated fields of science and the humanities, it also reinforces the necessary role of affectivity within science. By “affectivity,” I mean intuition and visceral emotional response.
 
Our exhibition Gut Instinct teases out the relationship between affectivity and science in a layered manner. First, in its contents, the show will examine the relationship between brain activity and the gastrointestinal tract, with the linchpin being bacteria. Similar to the fundamental union of emotion and ratiocination that is at work in affectivity in science, the exhibition points out that healthy brain activity is not ex nihilo but situational, viz. corporeal. It is a matter not so much of the silent ruminating individual, but the individual as a collective of symbionts: a mind the workings of which depend on millions of bacteria. Second, in its very construction as a hybrid art-science communiqué, the exhibition underscores the world of possibility opened up within science when affectivity is made agential – i.e. overt, driven and directed – in the form of art. Let us say, thus, that art fused to science opens up a unique form of affectivity that is neither wholly one nor the other but succinctly a matter of both. That is, the strain of affectivity that is struck in uniting art and science offers a special form of non-reductive functionalism borne of guttural emotional response. It is a biofunctionalism in which art becomes a disinterested vehicle of scientific literacy and science offers new platforms of creative expression within art.
 
In addition to our forthcoming exhibition Gut Instinct, I would like to quickly cite three other pithy discussions of “affectivity in science.”
 

• Anna Dumitriu, a bioartist who generously has agreed to show work in the exhibition, has written about the “bacterial sublime.” Based on the writings of eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke, Dumitriu develops an idea of reasoning driven by passion and terror to explain her own bacteria-based art practice in her essay “Confronting the Bacterial Sublime.” http://annadumitriu.tumblr.com/BacterialSublime

 

• Scott F. Gilbert and Marion Faber’s “Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form” (in The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, Alfred I. Tauber, ed.) is another great source for understanding “affectivity in science.” The authors underscore the connection between awe and various politics of alterity (feminism to name one) channeled through embryology.

 

• And, Mike Fortun’s “What Toll Pursuit: Affective Assemblages in Genomics and Postgenomics” (in Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome, Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens, eds.) riffs on the discovery of the toll gene family and the German term “toll,” which variously translates into English as amazing or weird. The name of the gene comes from German biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard's  exclamation "Das ist ja toll!" – “That is amazing!” –when she discovered in 1985 that the gene controlled “dorsal-ventral polarity in the fruit fly embryo.”

 
Happy reading about affectivity in science!!

Dave's update:

It’s that time of the year again. Time to prepare for the new semester. This spring, I’ll be teaching an introductory microbiology course designed for sophomore and junior biology majors. Even though I taught the course last spring, I’ll be making significant changes. I need to make changes. A lot has happened in the field of microbiology during the past year.

Over the past twelve months, we have seen significant progress in our battle with infectious diseases. The Ebola outbreak that has affected West Africa since the spring of 2014 finally, thankfully, seems to have ended. During the last week of 2015, no new cases were reported in the region and Guinea was declared free of Ebola transmission. Another pathogen, poliovirus, soon may be completely eliminated from Earth. The virus remains endemic in only two countries – Afghanistan and Pakistan – and only 70 wild type infections were reported in these two countries.

Despite this progress, challenges with infectious diseases remain. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a major, and growing, concern. In countries like the United States, the reluctance of some parents to vaccinate their children has led to a dramatic increase in preventable diseases like measles. Because of climate change, infectious diseases spread by mosquitoes are spreading to historically more temperate climates.

Recent developments in the field of microbiology, of course, are not limited to the study of infectious diseases. Since I taught microbiology a year ago, we have learned much more about CRISPR, the so-called bacterial immune system. Indeed, discussions of gene editing, a powerful and controversial genetic engineering technique based on CRISPR, have dominated the field of biology over the past twelve months.

I’ll add all of these exciting new developments to my course this spring. Probably most faculty members teaching undergraduate microbiology courses will address these topics. I’ll also add something less obvious – the intersection of microbiology and art. As Charissa and I continue to develop Gut Instinct, our online art exhibition that examines art associated with the human gut microbiome, I am looking for ways to incorporate this exhibition specifically, and art more generally, into my course. At this point, I’m still not sure how this incorporation will occur. But I do know that it will be a valuable addition. Throughout The Bridge residency, I have been reminded again and again that science and art do not, and cannot, exist in silos. To fully understand and appreciate the complexities of life, we need to bridge the artificial 
gulf between these disciplines.

Charissa's update:

Microbiota, Microbiome, and Everyday Life: Pop Art Renewed!

During the middle of the holiday rush, my collaborator Dave Wessner sent me an interesting article, “Bacterial Exchange In Household Washing Machines” (Callewaert, Nevel, Kerckhof, Granitsiotis, Boon, Dec. 2015). Scientists compared the microbial exchange in five household washing machines. They discovered that “the number of living bacteria was generally not lower in washing machine effluent water as compared to the influent water” (my emphasis) and that “the bacteria on the ingoing textiles contributed…to the microbiome found in the textiles after laundering.”

What are we to deduce from this? Without a doubt, bacteria are robust and determined little creatures.    In reading the article (to my best ability – it was very technical!), I was also struck by the union of sophistication and banality: the use of extraordinarily advanced technology, such as amplicon pyrosequencing, electrophoresis, and statistical analyses, to read the DNA of the bacteria in the water – clean and dirty – from the washing process. Lesson learned: biological complexity sits at the core of seeming simplicity and banal, everyday life activities.
 
It was not the first time that I made the connection between microbiota, the microbiome, and the plain old stuff of everyday life, which, on the whole, made me think of Pop Art.  
 
In researching the bacteria of the gut and its DNA, and organizing our exhibition Gut Instinct, I keep coming back to the collision of “high and low.” In the history of art, this usually means high and low culture. While the colliding of the two was something avant-garde artists did as early as 1863, its apotheosis was with Pop Art in the early 1960s. The most prominent artists of the moment were Dick Hamilton, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, and Yayoi Kusama.
 
I noticed a similar hi-lo blending in the PBS documentary In Defense of Food, based on American journalist Michael Pollan’s 2008 book of the same title. The gist of the show unfolds around Pollan’s rightful critique of “nutritionism,” which is the substitution of holistic food with bits of nutrition, vitamins, and chemical components. Through nutritionism, marketing, science, and the mass media have conjoined to overcome everyday eating habits. Nutritionism is the substitute for consuming a simple balanced diet made up of fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains (viz. unprocessed food).
 
A grocery cart rolls down an aisle amid a blitzkrieg of colorful labels. Narrator Pollan tells his viewers that the healthiest foods in the grocery store are the quietest, the fresh fruits and vegetables located along the periphery of the story far away from the packaged, processed robotfood at the center. Scenes of Western grocery stores cut away to those of the wild: panoramas of the Tanzanian Hadza tribe, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world, foraging and eating roots, baobobs, and cooked freshly killed meat. Members of the Hadza tribe live long healthy lives not eating processed foods – and the microbiome of their microbiota is far more diverse than ours. Lesson learned again: biological complexity sits at the core of seeming simplicity and banal, everyday life activities.
 
In a similar vein, the quotidian is the wellspring of bacterial phenomena in the art of our upcoming online exhibition Gut Instinct. Canadian scientist-artist François-Joseph Lapointe probes everyday activities, such as handshaking at academic conferences, eating, and sex with his wife, for shifts in the microbiome. Lapointe’s art is richly hybrid, a strain of performance art, science, and Pop Art all in one. British artist-scientist Anna Dumitriu focuses on the communication of bacteria through clothing. In Dumitriu’s Communicating Bacteria Project, the artist stained textiles with dyes made from bacteria that change color dependent on the behavior and communication of bacteria. A dress lights up with a crisscrossing network of lines, revealing the communication of microbiota. Lesson learned again: biological complexity sits at the core of seeming simplicity and banal, everyday life activities.

Dave's update: 

Symbiotes Unite!
From Star Wars to Endosymbiosis to the Microbiome
 
“May the Force be with you.” Yoda
 
In her accompanying blog post, Charissa describes our goals for Gut Instincts, the online exhibition about the human gut microbiome that she and I are developing. As she notes, we wish to explore through various artistic interpretations how our microbiota – the bacteria living in us and on us – shape who we are. Increasingly, researchers are observing that these microscopic partners are, in fact, partners, contributing to who we are in many ways. The interactions between our microbiota and us are so essential that, as Charissa notes, it might be more appropriate to think of ourselves as symbiotes, not individuals.
 
With the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens only days away, we should note that this idea that we are symbiotes, working in concert with microscopic partners, was articulated a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. In the latest film, once again, the Jedi and the Sith will engage in an epic struggle between good and evil. Once again, we will witness the amazing power of the Force and hope that this power is used for the betterment of all members of the galaxy.
 
The Force, as all Star Wars aficionados probably know, derives from midichlorians, microscopic organisms that reside within the cells of all living things. Higher levels of midichlorians in the cells of an individual correspond with a stronger Force. Anakin Skywalker, for example, had over 20,000 midichlorians per cell, the highest level ever recorded.1 According to the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, “Without the midichlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force.”1
 
For humans, and plants and fish and insects and almost every other organism within the domain Eukarya, life could not exist without a similarly named intracellular entity - mitochondria. Often referred to as the power plants of the cell, mitochondria generate ATP, which our cells then use as an energy source to drive all sorts of biochemical processes. Extensive evidence suggests that mitochondria, and chloroplasts in photosynthetic organisms, evolved from a free-living bacterium that entered a developing eukaryal cell roughly 2 billion years ago, eventually becoming an essential organelle. Although several biologists throughout the 20th century espoused some form of this idea, the biologist Lynn Margulis most clearly defined this endosymbiotic theory in her landmark 1967 paper entitled, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.”2 This theory that at least some of the essential organelles in our cells originated as endosymbiotic partners has transformed our understanding of cell biology. And it clearly piqued the imagination of filmmaker George Lucas as he developed the fantastical world of Star Wars.
 
As we learn more and more about the human microbiome, it is becoming more and more clear that the microbes living in us help determine who we are in myriad ways. The microbes within our gut are integral parts of who we are. Charissa and I hope that Gut Instincts will encourage the audience to consider more deeply this partnership. Our gut microbes, however, are not our only partners. Essential components of our cells, like the mitochondria that generate the ATP we rely on continuously, began as microbial partners. And in a galaxy far, far away, microscopic intracellular partners may help determine the outcome of the epic struggle between good and evil.
 
We truly are symbiotes.

1Source: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Midi-chlorian
2 Sagan, Lynn (1967). "On the origin of mitosing cells." Journal of Theoretical Biology 14: 225–274.

Charissa's update:

Symbiotes Unite!
How We Exist in Collective Union with our Microbiome

​As Dave and I home in on the organization of our on-line exhibition about the microbiome, Gut Instinct, I would like to develop further our goal. We seek to explore, through scientific and artistic modes of visualization, how the bacteria in the human gut shapes subjective mood, and thus contributes to how we think. I am exhilarated foremost by the philosophical repercussions of this basic and necessary biofunctionalism, namely as it sets in relief how cognition works in symbiosis with the microbiota in the gut and as it is cause for a redefinition of the “individual” as a “symbiote.”
 
First, as I have articulated in an earlier blog, I am fascinated by how the workings of the brain and gut reveal the distribution of mind: the idea that full brain function – putative mind, consciousness, and ratiocination – unfolds across the body. In my forthcoming book, Art as Organism: Biology and the Digital Image, I trace a similar idea at work in the pedagogy and aesthetic philosophies of Hungarian light artist and Bauhausler László Moholy-Nagy. His thinking was built not only on German biocentrism, but also, and by connection, an idea of the mind working across space, through a field of interconnection with organic and inorganic matter. Our curatorial collaboration in Gut Instinct is an exercise in Moholy-Nagy’s ideas in that it brings together art and science in the interrogation of precisely this kind of brain-body-environment functionalism, or what my colleagues and I are calling “Bauhaus biofunctionalism.”
 
Second, the brain-gut axis also catalyzes a rethinking of the individual as an embodied collective instead of a standalone entity. We are “super-individuals” instead of “individuals.” My thinking here is informed by one of our invited scientist-artists, François-Joseph Lapointe, who will show artwork in Gut Instinct based on his analysis of the microbiome in three different contexts, after a series of handshakes, eating a variety of food, and having sex with his wife. In the article “Being Human is a Gut Feeling” [Microbiome, 3:9 (2015)] co-written by Lapointe, T. Hutter, C. Gimbert, and F. Bouchard, the microbiome is the basis for rethinking human individuality. The authors write, “Our claim is that, with respect to most biological research projects, human beings are so well integrated with their microbiomes that the individuality of human beings is better conceived as a symbiotic entity. Insofar as biological research is concerned, to be human is to be multispecies.”
 
Their thinking contributes to the twofold fact that 1.) existence is fundamentally coexistence and 2.) thinking is always multifarious and heterochronic. As such, it builds on the philosophical writings of Gilbert Simondon, who famously argued that individuation is an effect rather than cause of individual formation. This means, the wellspring of individualism is a collective force field of otherness: being an individual is preceded by a groundwork of individuals. With respect to temporality, it builds on Benjamin Lebet’s .5 second theory, or the neuroscience of free will. The choices that are considered the manifestation of free will do not well up wholly formed in single instances as rationally considered thoughts, but rather form over time across the space-time of the unconscious.
 
I place the functioning of the brain-gut axis – the “we” that “I” am with my microbiota – alongside Simondon’s philosophical ideas about the collective origins of individuation and Libet’s neuroscience debunking free will. And so it follows that Descartes’ famous dictum Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” gives way to Relationes usurpandi sui, “Relations overtake the self.”
 
Symbiotes Unite! 

Dave's update:

Considering the art and science of HIV/AIDS

Today, December 1, 2015, marks the 27th annual World AIDS Day. Today also marks the 26th observance of Day With(out) Art, Because my entrée into the intersection between science and art began with my work on HIV/AIDS, I thought it would be fitting for me to focus on these two important events and explore the vital role art has played, and continues to play, in the pandemic.
 
Originally organized in 1988 by the World Health Organization as a day to increase awareness about HIV/AIDS, World AIDS Day has grown into an international day of education and remembrance, with various events scheduled throughout the world. In the United States, numerous schools and community organizations will be hosting activities, ranging from lectures to fund raisers to safer sex campaigns. At the federal level, the White House again will be adorned with a giant red ribbon, as it has been for every World AIDS Day since 2007 (see figure). More importantly, federal agencies will be organizing outreach programs, providing information on HIV testing sites, and offering information about health care options for people living with HIV. And, of course, researchers funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health will continue their tireless efforts to better understand the basic biology of the virus and develop new treatment options. With a theme of “The Time to Act is Now,” officials from President Barak Obama to Ambassador Deborah Birx, U. S. Global AIDS Coordinator, will remind us about the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the National HIV/AIDS Strategy. Of course, a single day of speeches can’t bring an end to the pandemic. No one expects that it will. What World AIDS Day can do, however, is remind us that HIV/AIDS has not ended. And it will not end unless various people, from various walks of life, work together.
 
Likewise, Day With(out) Art will not end the pandemic. However, it does serve as a very poignant reminder of the impact HIV/AIDS continues to have on all of us. It also serves as a very visceral reminder of the value of art. Originally organized by members of Visual AIDS in 1989 as Day Without Art, the event was designed to underscore the contributions of so many members of the arts community affected by HIV/AIDS. Galleries and museums shrouded works of art, dimmed their lights, or closed their doors. At Davidson College, we continue this tradition (see figure). The effects can be striking. We all walk by the sculpture by Jaume Plensa on our campus on a daily basis, rarely giving it more than a passing glance. When shrouded in black, however, it suddenly becomes more visible.
 
In 1998, this event became Day With(out) Art. According to the Visual AIDS website, the parentheses were added, “to highlight the ongoing inclusion of art projects focused on the AIDS pandemic, and to encourage programming of artists living with HIV.” In other words, the day has become more than merely a remembrance of lives lost. It also is a day to recognize the value of the arts and the meaningful contributions that artists make to our understanding of the pandemic. This year for Day With(out) Art, Visual AIDS presents Radiant Presence, a slideshow of works by HIV-positive artists in the Visual AIDS HIV+ Registry. Included in the presentation will be works by, among others, Shan Kelley, Max Greenberg, and Albert Winn.
 
I’m proud that Davidson College has been selected as one of the sites to premiere this important online exhibition. It reflects our institution’s continued commitment to combatting HIV/AIDS. It also reflects our institution’s continued commitment to the liberal arts. By hosting events like Radiant Presence, we remind our students that their education should not be siloed. Both scientists and artists have contributed to our understanding of HIV/AIDS. Future contributions of both scientists and artists will be needed to end the pandemic. 

Charissa's update:

Art and the Constructedness of Science
 
Dave Wessner’s blog entry commemorates the 27th annual World AIDS Day and the 26th observance of Day With(out) Art. It bears meaning at so many different levels: it has personal meaning for Wessner as it is through the interstices of art and AIDS that he entered the realm of art-and-science; and it has collective meaning for those who have suffered, died or lost family members to the disease.
 
As a professor of the history of modern and contemporary art, I lecture on AIDS and art each semester that I teach the survey of the history of contemporary art, 1945-present. Usually, the topic of AIDS and art comes up as part of identity politics in the 1980s. We focus on the work of Keith Haring, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, LGBT rights, queer theory, and the rise of the Moral Majority and the fundamentalist Christian right wing. But, I have never framed this period in terms of biology and disease, but now I will.
 
            How could I have missed this opportunity?
 
While the number of gay men dying in New York and San Francisco from the “gay cancer” in the early 1980s steadily rose, city, state, and federal governments ignored the problem. Though indeed very real in its ravaging of a significant demography (many of whom were creatives), AIDS did not exist as a “real” problem until institutionally recognized by the government and the National Institutes of Health.
 
I began lecturing on the topic 15 years, well after the fearful hysteria connected to the disease subsided and at a time when AIDS had become common knowledge in the US. I never teased out the role of the disease – science – in constructing the era’s art, perhaps because of the leftover residues of benighted ignorance and fear from the early 1980s, or perhaps because of the shadows of political correctness in the new millennium. What is clear to me is the way in which science – the disease of AIDS – constructed art in the early 1980s creating an entire cultural field.
 
            Which begs a few questions: How reciprocally does art help set in relief the constructedness of science? Does art craft science, and if so, how? I am currently reading Evelyn Fox Keller’s Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), in which the biophysicist writes about the construction of the gender binary within science from antiquity to recent times. Her goal is to set in relief how science became coded as rational, cool, mechanistic and male, while nature became coded as irrational, hot, organismic, and female.
 
Science is constructed through vistas and means that are all around us – in the laboratory work, research, and writing of scientists, as well as the multifaceted cultural realm. Keller’s more recent writing about the gene is all about the construction (and mis-construction) of “the gene” over the last century – in science, science writing, and the mass media writ large. Art’s role in the construction of science fits squarely within the aforementioned cultural realm, where science is crafted as both good and bad.

How will Wessner and I help fabricate science in our upcoming online exhibition, Gut Instinct, which focuses on art that is about the microbiota and microbiome in the intestinal tract? While I can only begin to answer by recognizing that, in our interpretation of the microbiome, we bring art to bear on science in order to potentially tweak its greater path, the crafting of science by art is truly in the hands of the artists who will freely interpret the concept for our exhibition.
 
 

Dave's update:

The Case for Scientific Literacy

In the accompanying blog post, my colleague Charissa explores the related, though distinct, concepts of biology in art and bioart. She describes the latter as, “contemporary art in which artists use living matter to make performative objects and installations.” We explored some examples of bioart in an earlier post, when we examined the agar art contest sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology. In this contest, as you may recall, microbiologists were challenged to create a piece of art with “microbes as the paint and agar as the canvas.” The results were stunning and illustrate both the creativity of the microbiologists and the metabolic diversity of the microbes.
 
This type of art, however, does not fulfill Charissa’s entire definition of bioart. In her entry, she further states that bioart pieces “comment upon genetics and the genome project,” and provide a form of political critique. As much as I admire the agar art pieces created by my fellow microbiologists, I would be hard-pressed to impart on them any deeper cultural or political meaning. Other examples of bioart, however, certainly meet this part of her definition.
 
To examine bioart that meets the entire definition offered by Charissa, let’s looks at the work of Eduardo Kac. He has termed his work transgenic art, which he defines as, “a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings.” (From: http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html) Perhaps his most famous creation was Alba, the fluorescent bunny. To create Alba, the gene for green fluorescent protein was inserted into the genome of an albino rabbit, resulting in a bunny that glows.

​Green fluorescent protein, or GFP, first was isolated from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in the 1960s. When excited with light in the blue to ultraviolet range, it emits light in the green range. Since the 1990s, molecular biologists have been using GFP to “tag” proteins of interest. The technique actually is quite simple. In a test tube, the GFP gene is fused to the gene encoding a protein of interest. This recombinant DNA then is inserted into a cell. Within the cell, a fused, or chimeric, protein is produced from the recombinant DNA. The protein of interest has attached to it the green fluorescent protein. By exposing the cell to blue or ultraviolet light, the researcher can determine the location of the protein of interest based on the appearance of the green fluorescence. To create Alba, Kac engineered a rabbit to express GFP in all of its cells.
 
The creation of Alba in 2000 was met with much public interest and many questions. Was the creation of Alba ethical? Should we be allowed to altered life in this fashion? Is it art? Was Kac playing God?
 
Perhaps, critics should have asked other questions. Has Kac created something substantively different from the recombinant cells and organisms “created” by countless researchers in laboratories throughout the world? Does Alba differ from the GFP-containing cells generated and used by scientists? Was Alba worthy of the hype?
 
In her post on bioart, Charissa notes that critical thinking and awareness “arise as much, if not in a better and more powerful fashion, from basic scientific literacy, which is rooted in a passion for scientific thinking, ideas, and facts.” I couldn’t agree more.

Charissa's update:

Biology in Art and Bioart: A Study in Elective Affinities

Biology and bioart are bound together by materials and definition. Coined in the late 1990s, the term bioart names the cutting-edge field of contemporary art in which artists use living matter to make performative objects and installations that comment upon genetics and the genome project. Here, cells, flesh, and living organisms are the stuff of artistic form-making and political critique.
 
Biology in art is the much broader field that encompasses bioart, foregrounding this avant-gardism in the capacious expanse of history. In situating bioart under the greater rubric of biology in art, I seek to expand the political agency of the greater hybrid interaction of art-and-science by making the following argument: awe, wonder, and basic scientific literacy constitute a form of critical thinking – in addition to bioart’s interrogation of genetic engineering.
 
In Bioart and the Vitality of Media, Robert Mitchell argues that there are two basic types of bioart: prophylactic and vitalist. For Mitchell, the “prophylactic tactic” within bioart is more conventionally representational and uses distance as a mode of critique. He says that the prophylactic in bioart “seeks to protect spectators of art from what are understood as unhealthy excesses of the problematic of biotechnology.” (Mitchell, 12) Vitalist bioart, by contrast, “endeavors to transform this problematic by involving spectators more closely within it.” (Mitchell, 12) If the one offers critique from without and from afar, the other does from within and by way of full immersion. While spatially and materially distinct, both strains of bioart claim to bear a negative political critique on bioengineering and, to a greater degree, science.
 
By opening up the discussion of contemporary bioart practices to the greater historical-and-theoretical gambit of biology in art, I would like to argue for a critical impact rooted in the positive force of basic scientific literacy. So, to the prophylactic and vitalist modes of criticism coursing through bioart, I add the awe and wonder of scientific literacy.
 
While bioart is scintillating and topical, it is often daunting in its opacity and abstruse to art spectators. What goes lost sometimes on its talented creators is the fact that before being critical of science, the genome project, and bioengineering, the art-loving/art-going public must know what they are. It would be helpful if people understood evolution, embryology, the rise of genetics, the functions of the gene, the role of forces in morphology, etc. when they entered into the vibrant if not ominous fray that a work of bioart can instantiate.
 
My work in the field of biology in art brings to bear a broader, more multifaceted sense of politics to both the humanities and science. My thinking is informed by the history and philosophy of biology, in particular the split within the field that occurred roughly a century ago between embryology, evolutionary development, and genetics. In their essay about this caesura, titled “Looking at Embryos: The Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form,” Scott F. Gilbert and Marion Faber write about the role of awe, wonder, and Yügen in watching life unfold through scientific visualization. The last term, Yügen, is a “concept connoting cloudy impenetrability,” which “is attached to the mood or atmosphere generated by an object of exception elegance or gracefulness.” (Gilbert and Faber, 133) The word also bears a “feeling of mutability.” (Gilbert and Faber, 133) While the authors unpack the aesthetic, intuitive, and irreducible side of biological science in action, their thinking opens up new ways of being conscious – political and otherwise – to bioart practices.
 
Critical thinking and awareness do not always manifest easily, much less correctly, in a monolithic takedown or deconstruction of Science (the miscommunication that Science is all bad). They arise as much, if not in a better and more powerful fashion, from basic scientific literacy, which is rooted in a passion for scientific thinking, ideas, and facts. A critical positioning of resistance to the politics of ignorance and hate emerge from the deep, body-borne pleasure of biology: from the awe, wonder, and Yügen that are invariably attached to scientific truth.