CROSSING WIRES ART + SCIENCE COLLABORATION

Science, Art and Technology Collaborations

Last week Raewyn and Richard returned from SuperHuman:Revolution of the Species Symposium  23-24 November 2009  http://superhuman.anat.org.au/

and ReLive Third International conference on the Histories of Media Art Science and Technology 26-29 November 2009  http://www.mediaarthistory.org

The focus of both SuperHuman symposium and ReLive conference were around art+science+technology, and perfectly timed after the last week of the Crossing Wires lab and its dismantling the day before the opening of the SuperHuman exhibition in Melbourne. Both conferences provided us with loads of info about what’s happening in art and science collaborations internationally.

Inspired by the 150th publication anniversary ofThe Origin of Species, Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turns the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future.

The Superhuman symposium by ANAT (The Australian Network of Art and Technology ) presented “an invigorating and inspiring mix of keynote speakers and collaborative research projects engaging with one or more of the symposium themes: Augmentation, Cognition and Nanoscale Interventions”

Barbara Maria Stafford, in her keynote address in SuperHuman spoke of pondering, selective attention, and small moments… the way in which attention is pulled somewhere, to an inner migration. Barbara suggested a re-introduction of formalism in art…form, formalism, format…works that would ‘bring a crazy quilt of physical phenomena to our notice by constraining, compressing design, and help the viewer coalesce large amounts of novel and taxing information’.

Such works may ‘reveal the significant morphological homologies and dissonances within and between ordered compositions that allows us to deduce significant correspondences between our internal biological mechanisms and the external configurational practices’.

The language of plants

insect track. Raewyn Turner, 2009

(see Ernie Kroeger’s ‘Wild Writing’ http://www.gallery44.org/exhibitions/wildwriting.htm)

What happens when we mow the lawns? The grass sends out ‘I’m wounded’ signals such as methyl jasmonates and hexanol derivatives, those classic grassy smells.

Plants when under attack by pest insects and diseases give off signalling compounds such as methyl salicylate, which other plants can detect and prepare themselves against the impending challenge.  Under attack from herbivores, such as caterpillars, different plants give off characteristic blends of terpeniods that are learned by parasitic wasps that home in on the caterpillars to lay their ‘Alien-like’ embryos.

Can we train ourselves to detect the faint chemical signals such as methyl salicylate, methyl jasmonates, hexanol and terpeniods, that are the language of plant communication?  Would this ability to eavesdrop on plant’s physical condition give us an awareness of their deeper states of being e.g. fear of attack?  If we breed plants for differences in their chemical composition we will impact on their ability to communicate or how they interact with other organisms?

Insects have learnt to listen in on plant to plant conversation.  Herbivorous insects increase their levels of enzymes that help neutralise plant-produced toxins when they smell the plant signalling compounds such as methyl salicyate and methyl jasmonate Everyone seems to be listening in on everyone else.  Did we as humans once have this ability and have now lost it?

In his book Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that plants manipulate animals and humans for their survival. But only now are we learning how to manipulate them.  Plants don’t go anywhere but have learnt to produce many anti-feeding compounds and toxins against pests and pathogens.  We’ve been hitting pest and pathogens with blunt instruments – pesticides – rather than helping the plants to defend themselves.  A newer technology involves spraying elicitor proteins that make the plants alert and ready for attach by pathogens (e.g. harpin technology).

In Visual Analogy Stafford writes: “The analogical universe, like our membraned body, is knit together. It resembles a Mobius strip, a continuous one-sided surface, investigated by topology, the mathematical study of geometric forms that do not change despite bending or stretching”……..mobius strip as a way of connecting the inside with the outside.

The diagram alongside the Mobius strip is how I see the winding, coiling  between inside and outside, the way my Italian grandmother used to wind wool from a skein into a ball—back and forth, side to side, depending on whether you were standing on your head or sitting on a chair in her kitchen, filled with the aroma of burning coal and licorice.

I subsequently used the Mobius and coiling diagrams to redraw Richard’s diagram of the signal transduction pathways, tracing the passage of the olfactory molecule from the outside to the inside.

Signal Transduction Pathways —the way that the signal of smell passes across the olfactory receptor to the olfactory bulb.

The capture of an olfactory molecule initiates a complex cascade of chemical reactions that pass across the membrane of the receptor cell, transmitting signals that animates the kick inside — feelings of love, dislike, shame, longing, joy, anger.

Through our drawings we realised the similarity in our imaginings and diagrams. Richard’s work explores the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the natural world while Raewyn’s practice explores inner experiences.

Thanks to Dawn Hutchesson and CoLab for providing equipment so we can run the video projection at night. Its responsive to the people and traffic moving past the window.

I have a hundred points of view, of reception and emission: the world and I combine.

We’ve had some great dialogues with visitors around the inclusion of ethics within all disciplines, multidisciplinary discourse, the difficulty that people find in describing taste sensations never before encountered, synesthetic sculptural number forms and the ability to sing drawings, geo-reality, and a blind friend’s description of a tree.

Where? Who? When? What? Crossing Wires

WHERE

Tuatara House

295 K’Rd, (opposite ArtSpace)

Newton, Auckland

WHO

Raewyn Turner and Dr Richard Newcomb

Scientist, Dr Richard Newcomb has research interests in olfaction in both humans and insects, and in ways of comparing these different biological systems to address how they have evolved. Raewyn Turner is a practicing artist exploring sensory perception through alternative expression, including extrasensory and subsensory plant-animal-human communication.

Raewyn Turner: r.turner@orcon.net.nz

Richard Newcomb: richard.newcomb@plantandfood.co.nz

WHEN

2-20 November 2009

Moday-Friday 9am-5pm

Saturday 10am-1pm

WHAT

It  is envisaged that the final piece of installation and/or performance art will be synesthetic in nature, and multimedia in practicality, to produce an art experience that will challenge how we perceive and cooperate with our environment and each other.

Back and front of the flyer for Crossing Wires

Co-drawing : the ocean of signals, receptors.

What happens when smells reach the acorn cup by Raewyn

The molecules float into cups, which send a little expression which excites the brain to sing the colour, texture, taste, weight of the odour. It produces a wave of sensation which leaves the body in a plume— streaming out behind—-a trail of scent —sillage.

I’m drawing the receptors, hollow acorn cups, and Richard has drawn transmembrane domains.

Neither of us has seen an actual one with our eyes, so they’re both imaginative diagrams.

The ocean of chemical signals

The environment is an ocean of olfactory communications between all living beings…what do the receptors look like?

We’re sharing knowledge about receptors : Richard’s bio world and Raewyn’s imagined shapes and mechanisms.  We’re both asking questions about the invisible.

We’re shaped by the things that we like.  We’re talking about the word ‘like’—as in finding agreeable, enjoyable or satisfactory. We’re distilling the smell of used socks, placing them into a machine that releases the odours for our visitors. We ask them to colour code the smells.

Perhaps we don’t have much choice in the things that we like and dislike— as illustrated in the smelly t-shirt experiment.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7630893

Olfactory receptors and human emotion

This circuit was made with the notion of communication between plants and light.( with thanks to Diana Burgoyne and Brian Harris).  The plant will grow up and over the circuit and make it sing. Are there plant/insect/animal receptors that catch the emanations of human emotion? What of human to human signaling?

We’re finding differences and sameness in science and art: creativity and repetition.

Are receptors bound up with time? What will this period smell of in 50 years time? If we look back on us would our signals be imbued with anxiety or woud they be similar as those from all ages—we have the same concerns of finding and making food and shelter.

What would we preserve from this era that would indicate the signals that humans are emitting through skin and respiration.

Are we laying down trails of information for each other like ants—the ribbons and plumes of information that are taken up into receptors?