±BSL1: Plausible Deniability Art vs. Explicit Art - Hearsay and the Uncontained

https://incubatorartlab.com/bioartcamp/

We were in a Biological Safety Level One (BSL1) laboratory outside in Banff National Park in the Canadian Rockies. I slipped into BSL2 without a license and got thrown out of Bioart Camp. I wasn’t supposed to use human subjects or human tissues and I took a needle punch biopsy from a willing person. That broke the rules of the camp’s permits and I was terminated, evicted and given an hour to leave the island.

If I allowed to feel a form of sorrow without any shame, it is for the minor bruise I may have left on the future of art and science collaboration. In particular, I am very supportive of the type of immersive biological experiment that Bioart camp instills. Self-control is advised and deemed appropriate if one’s goal is to leave the door more open (as opposed to more closed) for others in the art and biology milieu to continue to infiltrate. Good art can be considerate and loving, thinking of others, up to a point. Tee-totaling alone should not be the color of ones actions in either the arts or sciences. But restraint is often called for in experimental situations. I want Bioart Camp to succeed as an event and a future model. I was not subtle or controlled, I was ‘in the zone’, a romantic place but not a place of bureaucratic conduct. Therefore I accept my expulsion.

We still have to ask, what is the realm of frenzy in a situation rife with potential dangers to human health, environmental degradation and paralyzed funding body relations? Is there room to be drunk with ecstatic romp, Dionysian glee, consenting core sample sacrifice of youthful flesh under the Banff park sun? Both artists and scientists buy freedom with their choice practices. They both play with the mind at the end of its tether… imagining and testing… risking madness for insight. One plays soft and untrustworthy; the other plays hard with trust and security investments from Lockheed Martin and their ilk.

And lets face it, this was no murder, not even more than a prick occurred. In many ways the act was as lame and disheartening a gesture as many other bioart expressions. The same exposure risks are to be found in many of Canada’s public bathrooms with their dirty needle waste disposal units next to the sinks. A punch biopsy is medical fetishism but it is not anything more than a mediocre delving into the realm of sex, blood and biopolitics. Compared to the techno-aberrational potential of our species, the biotechnical application was glib, heterosexist and passé. Will this Bioart fad end without any masterpieces?

How unlike war

Is this middle class too-late modernism,

How distant the kinship

To genocide’s sweet and temporary glory,

How far from the Nuremburg trials

Are these clunky aberrations?

Atrophied rebellions.

Sure,

I was not just following orders,

I presently have no job to lose,

I was in a passionelle play with my fellows,

It went a little long and deep

into the end zone

and I fumbled

and I will take the heat.

So, there is sometimes a time to tell stories and half-truths to protect yourself without implicating your fellow agents. So… I don’t know if we were growing human tissues in the incubator next to the kitchen. I don’t know if we were bringing into the living quarters dangerous biologicals every night to prevent bear raids on our lab tents outside. I don’t know if we were collecting industrial run-off swamp water from outside the park for onsite work. I don’t know if human buccal and human oral microflora samples were permitted to be cultured in the park. I don’t know if human pathogens prefer fresh meat to aged placenta. There is a lot I don’t know. Risks often get taken in stride when they appear merely as tubes of liquid instead of blood and flesh. Apparent danger is not always what needs to be diminished. Playing at working with Biomedia, our intention is to demystify, not overreact. So, instead of confirming these grey areas we choose a sidewinder’s path through fiction:

“Is it ok to use dried placental tissue in the DNA Isolation?”

“For all I know that is paprika.”

Wan and walking away in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude.

“What if we took a core sample from someone?”

“Parsley, Paisley.”

Back turned and cryptic.

Did this really happen? What does “Parsley, Paisley” mean, legally? Is cryptic bioethical leadership not properly responsible or is it the most sensible ethico-artistic responsiveness. What is important is that any tacit approval of either the human placental tissue or the fresh sample into the hybrid DNA isolation lab is hearsay, fiction, myth, rumor alone. As is the late night UV-DNA group nano-tattooing into the nuclei of the giant daikon that was later found in the women’s bunk beds. The left over placenta tissue was disappeared in the morning after, before I could snort the evidence. I am fairly sure that the photos and videos will and should be delicate (censored) around these acts. All I am certain of is that the one fertile pine tree seed, mutated randomly through intranuclear UV-DNA nano-tattooing was on my person as I left the park before being planted in the area. Oh yes and I have this list of DNA sources:

Tomato

Juniper Berry

Potato

Indian Paintbrush Flower

Onion

Ox Eye Daisy

Elk Poop

Green Pepper

Human Placenta

Zucchini

Raw Pumpkin Seed

XXXX’s Upper Hind Quarter (right side)

Really, I was excised for the lack of plausible deniability. The rude obvious explicit brokenness of a vertebrate skin played into the hungry video eye. It is not that the skin was ruled merely by the voice of the father, the Law, instead of being self-determined. We are all now, nearly always, cornered by our own multi-media-net-web: documentary explicitness. Punishing those who go past the grey area of plausible deniability is basically a sign of Victorian or middle class prudery requiring hypocrisy and non-transparency to be infused in the art. But, Real-TV and the voluntary panopticon of videography or ‘documentation’ is what makes porno out of art as research. Perhaps, keeping a secret is the last access point to the sacred in a media over-satiated world. Simply, pretending it didn’t happen is easier without multimedia netting of undeniable… but the untenable image is that which is merely too profane, too materialist, too reductionist or matter of fact? As a member of the black arts, I am not sure what I think about the grey arts.