A performance/installation featuring live ‘wet biology’ practices

Performance and text by Catherine Fargher with live sound mix by Terumi Narushima

FCA Gallery, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, August 2006

Blurring the lines between home and laboratory

www.biohomeproject.com

Philament LIMINAL – December 2006

BioHomeThe Chromosome Knitting Project

BioHome: The Chromosome Knitting Project is a hybrid performance/installation incorporating live ‘wet biology’ practices in a contemporary biotech display home. The installation features video, interactive sound, live performance and text.

‘Wet biology’ procedures such as plant DNA extraction and live insect cell culturing are used to explore reproductive futures and biotechnologies.

Before entering the installation space audience members are introduced to laboratory safety procedures and biohazards, and they are invited to undertake safety training and wear ‘PC2’ lab safety clothing.

Welcome to BioHome

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Upon entering the gallery the audience sees several domestic spaces: a kitchen tabletop, a bassinette, a chair with knitting and a bed with a screen. It is only when they inspect more closely that this domesticity is disrupted by the intriguing and uncomfortable presence of biotech products, including live caterpillar cell cultures, salmon DNA fibres, pea seedling DNA and IVF hormone products.

The blurring of lines between laboratory and domestic procedures aims to heighten the awareness and discomfort the audience may feel about incorporation of biotech products in our daily lives. They are encouraged to investigate and interrogate these technologies and their impact on human, social and environmental futures and contemporary kinship systems.

Knitting is a central metaphor in the performance, highlighting similarities between the use of patterns and stitches in knitting to the basic techniques of biotechnology or genetic engineering, i.e. working with DNA as the ‘building blocks of life’. Knitting is also a metaphor for human reproduction. The performance includes a demonstration of knitting fibres extracted from salmon DNA.

For the music, a number of standard pattern stitches used in knitting are represented as patterns in sound. These sequences are realised using inharmonic timbres based on band patterns that result from a technique used by molecular biologists to analyse DNA known as gel electrophoresis.

The biological collaborations were developed as a result of the artists’ participation in the SymbioticA Wet Biology Workshop, School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia, and continued with the School of Biology, University of Wollongong.

The Woman Who Knitted Herself A Child

A Bioethical Fable by Catherine Fargher

Once there was a woman microbiologist named Cecilia Moon. Every day she worked hard in a laboratory with twenty other scientists and sometimes she stayed late into the night. She was not married and she had no children. There was nothing stopping her from her experiments.

One night she was in the laboratory alone. She was sitting beside her Petri dishes with her teat pipette in hand, completing the days work. Sometimes, like tonight, she cloned cells of animal viruses and waited for them to multiply.

Then came the part she didn’t like. The part when she, like any other scientist, had to sit and wait. How she hated waiting.

The reason that Cecilia Moon hated waiting was that it gave her time to think. She thought about many things, especially the fact that while all the other microbiologists and geneticists or plasma-wave specialists had gone home to their families, she had no child at all.

What did she do? She walked. She tapped her feet, tra-ta-ta. She twiddled her thumbs, trum-te-tum. But no amount of twiddling and tapping made the cells divide any faster, or the chromosomes rush their splitting, or her thoughts disappear. Finally, she decided to sit. And that’s when it dawned on her. She needed to find something to do to pass the time.

Then she remembered the hobby she loved as a child. She would start to knit.

She found an old cloth bag at home, the one that her grandma had given her. She brought this old bag to the laboratory. Did she mind what her colleagues thought? No! After all, she was the one sitting up night after night, minding the babies, so to speak.

The next time those cells were doing their thing (oh so slowly); she began to cast on a few stitches.

She began to knit. Clickety-clack.

Let’s put it plainly. She wasn’t bored any more. Instead she found this occupation of her fingers was creating a calming effect on her mind. In her reveries she dreamed up all sorts of possibilities. She imagined herself as Marie Curie discovering radium, or Edison with his light bulb, or Crick and Watson with their DNA double helix. But most of all, the more she rocked and knitted and dreamed about the future, the more she imagined she might create her own child.

One night, when the full moon was gleaming through the plate glass windows, she was possessed by a strange whim, and decided to knit a baby doll. She cast on two, four, six, eight, ten stitches, beginning with the hands.

Have you ever stayed up knitting, night after moonlit night? Have you watched strange shapes appear, out of the corners of your eyes? Have you heard noises or seen shadows or smelt strange smells? This is what started to happen to our microbiologist, Cecilia Moon. The whole laboratory seemed to dance to a strange beat. The Petri dishes on the bench started to float and glow.

The knitting seemed to have a life of its own. The wool curled around the needle and her arm, it snaked through the air and twisted towards her Petri dishes, scooping up the cells, forming shapes that she didn’t recognize. Tiny blobs that resembled the buds of limbs. A long chain stitch like the glimmer of a spine. Her breathing was getting faster. Her heart was thumping loudly.

She cleared a corner of the bench and started to assemble six jars, one for the buds of tiny hands, one for the blinks of the eyes, one for the downy hair of her baby’s head... She decided to put this in a corner where her colleagues were unlikely to look.

Finally she grew tired, but when she thought about going home, she felt afraid that the cells might stop dividing if she was not there with them and decided to stay the night in the laboratory.

When Cecilia woke in the morning she remembered nothing at first. Then she remembered the strange incidents that occurred the night before.

When she walked around the laboratory, her regular experiments were just as she left them, no longer the ghoulish visions she had seen in the night. But there in the corner were the glass vials, strings hanging down, with the small clusters of cells that had started to grow and take shape. A spine, a hand, a face.

Her colleagues entered the laboratory one by one. None of them realized she had not returned home. No one saw her small gathering of limbs.

In the nights that followed the frenzy continued. She no longer returned home and every night she knitted. As she cast on each set of stitches, the knitting on her needles took on a life of its own, twisting and snaking towards the limbs in the large standing containers which seemed to animate and grow.

One night when her co-workers had gone, Cecilia Moon went to the corner to see how her experiment was growing. She saw that it was nearing completion. Hanging in the glass vials were all the full limbs with which one could fashion a body. Two small arms, a rather sweet face and head, two legs and a torso and bottom of plump proportions.

Cecilia Moon lifted the limbs from the vials, gathering them together in her arms. She placed each of them lovingly on the bench, she felt their trembling aliveness. All of a sudden she had no doubts, no fears. She took the same needle she used to assemble the pieces of her knitting and commenced assembling the body parts she found in front of her.

She moved almost like a woman possessed. With nimble fingers she pierced the skin with the needle and started to join the limbs to the torso, the ears to the head, the head to the body and so on. As she squinted and rethreaded her needle, her work almost done, she looked out of the window and saw the sun rising. She was nearly finished. She was making herself a child.

She stopped her concentrated efforts and placed what was in her arms on the ground. There before her stood a little child, quite perfect, with dark hair and eyes, immediately giggling and laughing as it ran about the laboratory, chasing and hiding.

She only half heard the door open as her colleague entered the room.

“Cecilia, you didn’t get home at all last night?” her workmate said, smiling. “What have you knitted up this time?”

Cecilia raised her eyes, surprised. “Not knitted this time,” she said, beaming, “look at my beautiful baby!”

She proudly gathered up the body with her hands, and saw that dangling on two woollen arms was the body of a knitted doll, lovingly stitched together.

CreditsWriter, performer, devisor, producer: Catherine Fargher

Sound design: Terumi Narushima

Direction and corporeal dramaturgy: Nikki Heywood

Textual dramaturgy: Noelle Janascewska, Merlinda Bobis

Visual dramaturgy: Brogan Bunt, Virginia Hilyard

Plasma screen performers: Catherine Fargher, Dennise Cepeda, Terumi Narushima

Composition: Terumi Narushima, Matthew Fargher, Ian Moorehead, Catherine Oates

Video footage: Catherine Fargher, Virginia Hilyard, Cominos Zervos, Tim Watts

Live camera operation: Jessica Ellis

Sound recording and editing: Catherine Fargher

Video editing: Catherine Fargher, Virginia Hilyard, Peter Oldham

Video documentation: Peter Oldham

Stills photography: Russell Emerson

Web design, plasma screen design, branding: Jessica Ellis, Vincent Bicego, Greg Clout, Robert Dinnerville

Design and technical support: Russell Emerson (University of Sydney, Centre for Performance Studies), Didier Balez, Alistair Davies, Aaron Hull, Virginia Hilyard, Brogan Bunt

Installation space design: Greg Clout, Jessica Ellis

Knitted elements: Pamela Drysdale

Production management: Jessica Ellis

Biological elements and collaborations:

SymbioticA, University of Western Australia: Gary Cass, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Guy Ben-Ary, Jane Coakley

University of Wollongong, School of Biological Sciences: Dr Ren Zhang, Suresh Bhat, Sharon Robinson (Plant Biology), Associate Professor Mark Wilson (cell culturing) Pamela Morgan, Marie Dwarte; School of Biomedical Science: Melissa Errey

University of Sydney, School of Agricultural Science: Pia Smith, Ivan Desailly, Colin Bailey

Technical and academic assistance: Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong: Brogan Bunt, Merlinda Bobis, Aaron Hull, Dale Dumpleton, Olena Cullen, Craig O'Brien, Marius Foley, Grant Ellmers, Didier Balez, Jacqui Redgate, Alistair Davies

Sponsorship: John Lee - Eppendorf, Hanna Lampinen - Invitrogen, Sigma Aldrich, Playworks Writers Workshop

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