Artists and scientists under the microscope

Conceived and led by artist Andy Gracie, ‘Laboratory Life’ placed a group of internationally known artists, each experienced in art-science projects, in an immersive collaborative environment with young doctors, research scientists and emerging artists. The aim was to create from scratch, in just nine days, five new art projects exploring the interplay of biology and technology. The title of the project was taken from the title of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s book of the same name, an anthropological study of a scientific laboratory

The project was organised by The Arts Catalyst, an agency whose primary focus is the commissioning and presentation of new artists’ projects that engage critically or experimentally with science, in partnership with Lighthouse, the Brighton-based digital culture agency which provided the venue for the laboratory. The idea of Laboratory Life was to allow an interdisciplinary ‘sideways’ exchange of information and inspiration. What was radical about the project was its open nature, the public being invited to come into the laboratory and engage with the production and prototyping of the projects. The groups created five new art projects, which manifested in a striking exhibition as part of Brighton Science Festival in March 2011.

The projects included Andy Gracie’s ambitious astrobiological-oriented experiment, The Quest for Drosophila Titanus, with Kuaishen Auson, Janine Fenton, and Meredith Walsh, in which the group attempted to breed a strain of fruit fly able to survive on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. They used various phenotypes of fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, one of the most important organisms used in developmental biology and genetics. By exposing the fruit flies to conditions similar to those found on the moon of Titan (including low temperatures, high pressures, and radioactivity), they selected and bred a strain of drosophila more likely to be able to survive on Titan, which they named ‘Drosophila Titanus’. In the exhibition, the group displayed the breeding colony itself, the experimental chamber, video documentation of the experiments, a manual describing the experimental process, and a memorial to failed individuals.

In Adam Zaretsky’s project Tattoo Traits, the artist and his collaborators Zack Denfield, Helen Bullard and Simon Hall set out to examine the feasibility of a new notion: DNA Tattooing. They explored the ethical, legal and health issues raised by such a process. Their work involved the creation of a ‘new medium’ of mixed biological substances and the extraction of hybrid DNA from this medium. They then adapted a tattoo gun with the intention of tattooing a novel sequence of hybrid DNA into the nucleus of a living cell; something that is statistically improbable, but conceptually possible.

The group working with Bruce Gilchrist – namely Kate Genevieve, Simona Casonato, David Louwrier, and Daksha Patel – spent several days testing the public’s understanding of science. Visitors to the laboratory were invited to draw and illustrate their understandings of scientific information and protocol, while listening to an expert discussing synthetic biology in scientific language. The exhibited work, Public Misunderstanding of Science, was an animated film, which featured the drawings sound-tracked with the original discourse and field recordings made on-site at a medical laboratory.

The other projects were The Garden Shed Lab, led by Kira O’Reilly with Valerie Furnham, Columba Quigley, Genevieve Maxwell, and Infective Textiles led by Anna Dumitriu with Rosie Sedgwick, Sarah Roberts, Brian Degger, Melissa Grant. The group’s projects were mentored by scientists Dr John Paul and Dr Tom Shakespeare.

Laboratory Life was supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award and by Arts Council England. It was conceived by artist Andy Gracie based on the Interactivos? model developed by Media Lab Prado in Madrid.