Sitting on a small round latch-hook rug made from hand-spun laboratory llama and alpaca wool layers of sounds from a biotech laboratory echo through our bodies. The pose of reflection we fold ourselves into to sit on the rug prepares us to think about the animals whose bodies are used to produce nanobodies used in vaccines and antiviral treatments and who produced the wool on which we now sit. We are asked to perform a ritual of folding our own bodies to enact the folding of a protein in the lumen, the interior part of a cell where a protein is folded and modified. This sound sculpture heard through a parabolic speaker, Chaperone (2019), and latch- hook rug, Lumen (2019), arose from Splan’s collaboration with biomedical researchers at Integral Molecular, a Philadelphia-based biotechnology company. Chaperone, a term loaded with the cultural significance of gendered surveillance, refers to a protein that assists in protein folding. Its name comes from its ability to prevent non-specific aggregation by binding to non-native proteins and in the context of this piece invites thoughts about the artist’s role in inviting visitors to fold themselves onto the wool rug. The rug was made materially possible by the providential gift of two biological laboratories, who, learning of Splan’s interests, agreed to donate the wool as a medium for artwork. It seems to me as an observer, facilitator, and analyst of artists and scientists in collaboration, that this is the best type of artist-scientist interaction. In a world of competing knowledge, tensions around resources and practices, and fraught disciplinary negotiations, neither party sought to control or explain their position, techniques, or approaches. An opportunity for a contribution from a scientist to an artist arose, and through that kindness and the patience of an artist in ritually untangling and repurposing the wool, an artwork that exceeds both art and biology was created.
Brooklyn-based artist Laura Splan investigates biology as a practice and a subject of art through residencies and collaborations, bringing her into contact with laboratories, researchers and scientists. Splan’s work shows a fondness for paradoxes in representations, a preference for play as a mode of exploration and a collaborative spirit for the possibility of artists and scientists working together. In this exhibition, Splan’s wide-ranging art explores the tools, places, outcomes, and possibilities of contemporary biotechnology and biological science. But she always humanizes this intersection with serendipity, mystery, and suggestion. The intersection of art and science is, of course, at least as old as the categories themselves. However, the past 20 years have seen a marked increase in the interest that humanities, visual studies, and science studies scholars have taken in theorizing the relationship between art and science. The practices and products variously referred to as art-science, sciart, artsci, or simply art and science are many and appear across time and context. They include nineteenth-century natural history models and range from botanical drawings to contemporary theatrical productions about the history of science to experimental bioart. Such works refer to all manner of science using all kinds of art mediums: sculptures, speculative designs, performances, installations, films, and theatrical productions. In a broad sense, most of these artworks are related to science communication simply by virtue of their orientation toward public audiences.[1]
We might speculate that just as the Early Modern system of patronage yielded artworks representing social relations so that arts took as a subject the organizations under which they worked and which created the cultures they lived in, so too are contemporary artists responding to the power of science. A more pointed comparison might be the centrality of the church in this system resulted in the support of Renaissance art and gave the artists of the day their create subject: the praise, commentary, and critique of religious activities and hierarchies. As we are grasped by the power of science and technology and its attendant bureaucracies, particularly in this moment of the COVID-19 medical and social policy crisis, it may be expected that artists would manifest a desire to investigate the tools of technical and scientific trades. There is a feminist and class politics at work in Splan’s approach to science as a trade with tools that might be directed in innovative and aesthetic directions. Further, the descriptions of her work note of the individuals whose labor was involved in her pieces. In works like Unraveling (2021) and Remote Entanglements (2019), Splan conducts these aesthetic investigations to great effect through her personal and curious approach. Even as the dark edge that frames the viewer’s experience comes into focus, that is the knowledge that this specialized software is used to study viruses like COVID-19, her approach highlights the pleasures of movement, distinguishing her in a world of critiques and celebrations.
Unraveling explodes the purposes of molecular visualization software as a tool for modeling unseen biological structures into a joyful twist and fold of colors and form that reads like a performance of what is possible for a seemingly dry and specific digital tool in the hands of an artist. Splan has worked extensively with image-rendering software and exhibits the results which offer us screens onto the laboratory and its ways of seeing the world. Rather than building a representation of a real-world molecular structure, the artist works against this impulse by complicating, confusing, and disrupting the patterns in sequence. Splan records this series of movements and offers a film of what is possible when this program reacts to and works with her doodle marks and gestures. Watching this performance of the micro rendered as a wall-sized monumental triptych that invites reverence, the visitor is prompted to think less about a final alignment of molecules and more about the movement of living structures. Molecular bonds are reformed and new relations are created, if only in a representational way, with a focus on the Feldenkraisian possibility of movement as a defining characteristic of life itself. Despite its digital representation, the sense of this white strand in the gallery is that of a ribbon in water or space, a gravity-less environment of unencumbered movement.
Remote Entanglements (2019) continues this tone of play and experimentation. This work gives rise to further interaction in the true sense of bodily experience and creates the potential for viewers to question animal-human relations and what all living things have in common. It offers viewers an incantation: our distance allows our intimacy. A fan blows air onto the bodies of viewers who by metaphorical proxy engage with the same sensory environment as llamas living at a biological laboratory vivarium. The fans adjust to reflect the wind speed present on the laboratory-farm in rural Pennsylvania. By transporting the llama environment into the gallery, Splan creates a turn on what it means to experience science. While we can never visit this scientific llama farm, we can imagine a shared moment of mammal sensory circumstance. Our attention is refocused away from protocols or spectacular moments of discovery and toward the pedestrian pace of life in the lab. Through this her fan makes the far-off vivarium into an everyday experience. And yet it is not quite every day: the equipment and networked technologies mediate the viewer's bodily experience. Viewers are left to meditate on ways of controlling and replicating environments in and out of scientific places and their corresponding effects on people and animals.
Splan’s art does more than communicate or comment on science. It reveals the processes and techniques involved in biology by taking the tools and materials of science in imaginative directions that reveal how these technical means might be used in “otherwise” ways which would lead to different kinds of knowledge production: sometimes purely aesthetic, sometimes diversionary or other times provocative, and universally reflective. It seems clear that Splan draws here on the conventions of interactive art as established by art theorist Nathaniel Stern, who argues that the role of interactive art is to establish and practice conceptual-material relationships.[2] Embodied relations are imperative: we cannot stand outside of Splan’s art looking in or flying 6,000 feet above it taking in only a distant image of the work. There is no seeing, but, rather, the issuing of an invitation to enter physical and cognitive ambit of these works. There is no simplicity of pressing a button in a science center or clicking a digital gallery interface to make a choice to consume art media. The experience offered is one’s own forms of play, thought, and reflection. The artist shares affordances to access these possibilities through the documentation of her own explorations and offers methods of relation.
Even when Splan’s comments on cultural and social attitudes toward science and technology are more direct, there is something fun about Splan’s pieces. In Contested Territories (2019), that fun takes on an ick factor that is sure to capture imaginations and offer us what Sherry Turkle might call an evocative object, that is, an object to think with.[3] Splan presents a lab mixer that gives a machine body to the internet’s unseen reactions to science. The contested status of science in our society is directly treated as individual mixers are activated when a particular Twitter hashtag is used. The hashtags Splan has selected are terms that the Trump administration has suggested might be omitted from funding proposals. When these words which refer to the status of science are tweeted, tubes containing laboratory animal feces are agitated upon the use of hashtags like #evidencebased and #sciencebased. This work would be understood by Art, Science, and Technology Studies scholars as referencing the context of science, thus exposing the way science as a system of knowledge production fits into our wider society.[4] Such works remain less numerous than those that convey or contribute scientific ideas but they are of growing importance as the potential roles artists might choose to inhabit with regard to science are further probed.
If there is a temple of science in the world of contested facts, an inner sanctum of what we now understand to be an access to our interiority, it is surely the biomedical laboratory where lab-coated authorities stand ready to show us wonders: the multiplicity of ourselves in Petri dishes and our identities through nucleotides. The movement from altar to plinth and lab bench is more ether than a straight line, but the reverence and ritual surrounding these performance spaces have not been diminished by time even if its symbols and values have been reinterpreted again and again. Rituals are all over laboratories, and Splan has spent time in several. If one of the things artworks can offer is the democratization of science, as documentary photographer Berenice Abbott suggested, Splan’s artworks offer access to the play and reflection that scientific tools make possible when brought into public space. At the same time, Splan offers generous collaboration to the scientists she works with and learns from. Scientists whose everyday practices are often eliminated from our sense of their work are placed in conversation with an outsider who is in a position to make new observations. She is also in a position to offer the countervailing and perhaps tantalizing suggestion that many of the mundane tools and ways of working might be renewed and made unfamiliar through being used in new ways. In Termination Sequence (Into the Void) (2020), Splan collaborates with lab instrumentation engineer Frank Masciocchi of Integral Molecular who is also a musician to create an improvised audio recording. This recorded collaboration loops on. Ambient in the space, it focuses attention away from interdisciplinary boundaries and toward what might be created together, using the tools of art, science, or both.
Splan’s work repeatedly returns to ritual, often through the modes and metaphors of textiles. Splan uses the methods of weaving, folding, and playful unraveling to repurpose scientific ritual in aesthetic ways. Perhaps this return to textiles, with all of their textual baggage from Ovid’s Athenian artisan Arachne and her epic narrative weaving to Manchester's Jacquard loom and its programmable pattern system which is a precursor to modern computing,[5] could be framed as inevitable as Splan has worked extensively with textiles. But I suspect the textile references across the exhibition are inspired by her subject and materials. Her background in textiles prepared her to see what is omnipresent in laboratory life: the repetition of an action according to an ordained pattern which makes a predetermined phenomenon visible, detectable, and meaningful. These are the anticipated actions of both the studio and the laboratory. Splan’s work, particularly her Unraveling animations, explore how things might be otherwise. Viewers see how the tool-hands of scientific labor may depart their origins for related pastures. We are invited to explore how, in other hands, the aesthete devotee makes other knowledges.
[1] Megan Halpern and Hannah Star Rogers, “Art-Science Collaborations, Complexities, and Challenges,” in Routledge Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, 3rd edition, eds. Massimiano Bucchi and Brain Trench (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2022).
[2] Stern, Nathaniel. Interactive Art And Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. Canterbury: Gylphi Limited, 2013.
[3] Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects:Things We Think With. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.
[4] Hannah Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, and Dehlia Hannah, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. London: Routledge, 2021.
[5] Essinger, James. Jacquard's Web : How a hand-loom led to the birth of the information age. (2004).
*****
laurasplan-galleryguide.pdf |