This body of work results from several years working as an artist/researcher and founding member of collaborative artist group BIOTEKNICA. As a member of BIOTEKNICA I worked in a number of laboratories producing biological artworks. For example, during 2004 and 2006 I served as an Honorary Research Fellow researching and producing artworks utilizing tissue culture and tissue engineering technologies at SymbioticA the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at The University of Western Australia. It was at this time, with this instance of interdisciplinary incursion, that I conceived of the concept of a laboratory ecology – at the edge of life-altering, art denaturing, instances of real hands-on knowledge of biotechnological protocols from a non-specialist perspective. At SymbioticA, I experienced for myself the instrumentalization of life as a scientific and technological tool – and simultaneously the object of scrutiny. I often look back at that time as an induction – or a disillusionment – as the moment when the biosciences became a real embodied knowledge set – rather then a textual topic of study for myself. As my collaborator and I are concluding and wrapping up BIOTEKNICA research, I wish to continue with biological art production in a solo context – exploring aspects of my experiences working in the lab that fall outside of the BIOTEKNICA mandate. Specifically, I am interested in pursuing representational, performative, and installation strategies for revealing the bodies in biotechnology – and thus laboratory ecologies – to viewers and participants. I am proposing several courses of action that will mobilize this strategy successfully. 1. I wish to conduct a series of performances and photo shoots in laboratory settings that will draw a connection between the scientist's body and the specimen body. I wish to recruit scientists and artists to perform regular biotechnological protocols, but to do so in ways that will incorporate their body into the biotechnological circuit. I imagine utilizing a variety of performance strategies, costumes, lighting design, to create a series of interventions and high-resolution digital photographs for exhibition.
2. Second, I wish to develop a series of performances that experiment with taking laboratory specimens outside of the confines of the lab. I see the laboratory as a closed specialized environment, both preventing outside scrutiny and contamination, but also as site of confinement where scientists and specimens are kept from external interaction – engagement in external discourses and ecologies. I wish to enact a series of 'cell breaks.' Breaking mammalian tissue culture samples out of the lab – on day trips. I would like to take them for a walk. Ideally a hike in the outdoors! And offer them a breath of 'fresh air' before returning to the lab. 3. To continue with this action of bringing specimens outside of the lab, I wish to bring the lab itself outside of it's specialized environment as well, into public display – and further into natural environments. I see InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies culminating in an installation building a small portable lab in a natural environment. I am interested in building a portable laboratory tent to be pitched in a outdoor environment, and conduct ongoing laboratory research, performances and workshops – bringing the laboratory ecology in direct contact with external or 'natural' ecologies. InsideOut: Laboratory Ecologies will be conducted at a number of international institutions within the next year. I have received invitations to teach, lecture, and conduct research at The Art and Genomics Centre at The University of Leiden in The Netherlands, The University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and Ectopia an art and science centre hosted by the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, in Portugal. |
Jennifer Willet Bioplay Performance and Digital Photographs 2007 Photography Credit: Adam Zaretsky |