DISCUSSING THE EMERGENCE OF A METHODOLOGY
Towards the end of the 20th Century, digital tools suitable for probing the world around us became easily available, owing to their economical pricing and accessibility for the sub-expert skill level. The appearance of these tools in artistic practices opened up a capability to discover some of the underlying meanings, information systems and functionality of the environment, and to tie those into digital 'multi-media' scenarios and projects. The material generated from these probings became manifest in artworks that presented processes as experiments and understanding as a pragmatic engagement with information systems and their meaning. It became possible to simultaneously offer an expression of the experimental processes with which we find out about the world and how we assimilate the new knowledge produced by such methodologies. Directly making or collaboratively engaging with experimental forays into the natural world became truly established as an artistic approach.
Such an embracing of scientific concepts, strategies and methodologies became foregrounded in the majority of the author's works developed since that subtle paradigm shift in methodology. Whether this has been through directly engaging with experimental processes or through collaborations with scientists and laboratories, the intention has been the same. Through certain focussed approaches, to highlight how we go about connecting ourselves with new knowledge and how that creates and lends meaning and significance to our existence as an organic planetary entity. This perspective accepts that science is a human means for producing and communicating knowledge, having identified what new knowledge it wishes to gain. The precise communication of this new knowledge and the techniques for acquiring it and testing it is one of the cornerstones on which this cultural phenomena is built.
Humans beings are creatures driven by curiosity, a desire for knowledge that has driven their development into the dominant, planet changing species. Humans also ascribe significance to things; to objects and to events. The subtle and shifting balance between knowledge, understanding and significance is played out across the arts and wider expressions of culture. Our investigations and experiments lead us ever closer to an unattainable complete theory of everything. Casting the notion of disciplines aside, whatever it is that we are studying, we are studying the universe. Every facet of our existence and every reflection we make is a factor of the coming into existence of the universe.
Art and science are the principle cultural tools that humans employ to scrutinise the nature of things. Science uses a methodology which is specific, empirical and focused, while art does so in a manner which is more indeterminate and pragmatic, with combined narratives and leaps of logic. Taking a point of inquiry as a starting point – 'the question' – we can apply all the tools at our disposal to assess, analyse and gain knowledge and meaning from the subject. Creative experiment across disciplines forms the hub of such an approach. However, an inevitable point of separation, tension and ambiguity between methodologies, where intention is blurred and metaphors become more loaded, is a charged and potent locus within which to carry out work as an artist. Such works are truly experiments, inspired and informed by science, but carried out in the field of art. Each work being an experiment in one way or another in how to understand a little more how things work - their properties, their compositions, their information systems, their possibilities, their meaning. They are a process of generating systems to look for ways to ask questions, as speculative proposals rather than definitive empirical constructs.
These works begin to explore ways of how to ask questions from an artistic perspective, therefore siting themselves within the realm of experiment. This is not the experiment of experimental art however, but the experiment of the tangible system within which questions are posed of the universe. Nature is the oracle which is consulted in the practice of science, and the only entity to which we can truly pose questions.
This text will tease out how such general considerations underpin an artistic investigative process that has come to position itself amongst the ways in which we understand our position and significance in space, both as a life form and as a material entity. A catalogue of work has built up which began with experiments into the 'next-nature' interactions of life and non-life in strictly non-human environments and led to current considerations of the material of the solar system itself and how we relate to it. This current work is charged by the reality of our current predicament, finely poised between being space-faring and post-terrestrial, and being extinct.
A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF HYBRID ENVIRONMENTS
This artistic process behind the making of these works has been and is always very much research and theory led; the artworks that appear from time to time being illustrations of these interlinked narratives and the corresponding lines of questioning. Much as a mushroom is the visible fruiting body of the rhizome that permeates the substrate, the works are characteristic of and inseparable from a larger body of research and exploration.
In the early 2000s there was a dedication to exploring various ways in which reasonably intelligent robotic and associated technological systems can be incorporated into simple 'hybrid ecologies'. By reasonably intelligent, the intention is to say that the neural-net style AI system employed by the robots enabled them to learn and recognise patterns and to compose and test responses to those inputs. These hybrid ecologies were formed of both organic and synthetic elements, the 'natural' and the 'artificial', and examined how the cycling of information, behaviours and relationships can be stimulated or encouraged to emerge. As such, the work has also embodied, to a degree, the characteristics of the notion of 'next nature' or 'post nature'; a meditation on ecosystems in which nature is produced by or mediated by technology. The contemporary and ubiquitous presence of human influence in all things previously considered natural. In this sense we are also forced to consider what exactly it means to be natural, what is artificial and where the boundaries of such states and definitions might lie. This course of investigation has led to an extrapolation of these ideas to their logical limits and to include notions of extreme ecosystems, the extents and limits of nature, the boundaries of life and sensory networks, and thus to ideas around space exploration and astrobiology.
In the context of these works, the natural was usually embodied by living organisms such as insects, fish, plants, or bacteria; and the artificial usually embodied by robotics, mechatronics and software systems incorporating elements of artificial intelligence or artificial life. Their relationships and intercommunications were expedited by intermediaries in the form of wires, sensors, audio systems and various other forms of exploiting the information carrying capacities of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the information generating characteristics of organic matter. Robots of various kinds became both data gathering platforms and performers within the nexus and would develop ways in which to mutate and contribute this data back to the system. Human interactivity in terms of direct input was excluded, but emergent relationships and behaviours between whatever combination of natural and artificial agents present in the work were promoted and facilitated. The act of making these works, therefore, was an investigation into the potentials of collaboration and emergence between technology and nature in hermetic environments; the interdependence that prevails between agents within a structured environment. Thus, the intention was never to teach a robot to converse with crickets, or for a fish to control a hydroponic system, for example, but to explore ways in which the perceived barriers between organic and synthetic entities and information systems could be stripped away to allow for the emergence of a new encompassing framework. The works also presented the notion of the human belief in technology as a form of improving and even saving nature while further bending it to our own purposes.
CONTEXTUALISING SIMULATION
There are innumerable circumstances where for reasons of economy, health and safety or accessibility, and so on, it is not possible to place an organism (human or otherwise) in a situation in order to ascertain how it can react to or control said situation. The concept of not going where we can't go, and the acceptance of an inability to adequately function in a real-world and/or real-time scenario gives rise to the idea of simulation. In 'In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy vol.1', the theorist Eugene Tacker talks of the 'world-for-us' and the 'world-without-us'. The world without us is a space indifferent and inaccessible to us, beyond the pragmatism of the world in its own essence. Simulation allows us to pose questions to the world-without-us, and to speculate about how this space and organic aspects of the world-for-us may interact. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. A virtual space where hyperreality serves as a proxy for a real-world tangible entity or scenario.
The act of simulating something first requires that a model is developed which represents the key characteristics, behaviours and functions of the selected system or process. The model represents the system itself, and the simulation represents the operation of the system over time. There are non-immersive simulations in which an experiment is carried out by modelling conditions of that experiment via computer or analog means. There are also immersive simulations, in which the sensory apparatus of conscious organisms are stimulated into believing that they are actually in another situation.
Simulation of environments for organic consciousnesses is dependent on a successful implementation of certain notions of biosemiotics. Biosemiotics attempts to deal not with just a simple transfer of information between organic agents, but to study the scope of generation, content and meaning within that information and how it affects the interaction between organisms and their environment. Organisms respond to stimuli that correspond with their experience of reality. They look for signifiers of meaning. For a simulation to be effective, a minimum of these conditions need to be met; a replication of what can be semiotically perceived as habitual reality. However, certain of these parameters can be altered, or new ones added, to provide experimental frameworks for growth under foreign conditions while maintaining the satisfactory illusion of authenticity. Such frameworks are within the scope of what Baudrillard and Eco's spoke of as hyperreality.
Commensurate with the notion of boundaries and limits and their mobile and enigmatic nature, we again might find interest in taking this notion to its extreme. The organic matter lives in the virtual, in hyperreality and in a state of transcendental empiricism. If these conditions, illusions and hallucinations were not met then the organism or organic matter would quite simply fail to grow. Its functional circle, as described by von Uexkull, would be incomplete and therefore the semiotic system of sign and sign process would cause the organism to fail to function in the necessary way in which to maintain itself.
The scope and character of a simulation in interdisciplinary applications is open to manipulations and interpretations. Experiments can be made into the fidelity of the simulation. Simulation Fidelity is used to describe the accuracy of a simulation and how closely it imitates the real-life counterpart, ranging from 'low' or the minimum simulation required for a system to respond to accept inputs and provide outputs through to 'high' or being nearly indistinguishable or as close as possible to the real system.
In the works that will be described later in this text, the experiments employ low fidelity simulations of a world-without-us. The test subjects are placed in environments where a minimum of novel stimuli will elicit behaviours and growth patterns which are different from the norm. Where the simulation aspects of the works are recreating space or non-terrestrial environments, they are not rebuilding the universe but re-contextualizing elements of space phenomena within functioning and targeting systems.
ASTROBIOLOGY AND DEEP DATA
The extension of a line of thinking from the aforementioned hybrid environments leads us to scenarios of considering how we will be able to get what we need from nature once we have fully removed ourselves from it. For instance, if for political, social, military, cultural or even scientific reasons we develop the means and the necessity or the motivation to extend humanity into the universe around us we will probably need to spend long times traveling in completely enclosed artificial ecosystems. In order to effectively and rigorously consider such eventualities it is important to raise the issue of the necessary forms of biological experimentation that would be essential to achieve an understanding of the reactions and requirements of the body in the space environment. This includes issues such as prolonged exposure to zero gravity, altered circadian rhythms, changes in atmospheric composition and pressure, exposure to radiation and harmful particles and even the necessity of some form of cryptobiosis in order to endure incredibly long journeys.
Real world science and entrepreneurial ideologues increasingly present us with ideas of Martian and Lunar bases while science fiction has thrilled us with enormous world ships and deep space stations – the O'Neill cylinders and Stanford Torii of so much 1970s space art - that would contain complete artificial ecosystem and provide a sustainable and agreeable habitat for tens of thousands of people for generations. These artificial ecosystem escape pods are extreme scenarios that are still short of the realms of possibility, but their contexts and functionalities are being explored in myriad small and large scale simulation experiments. In many ways these ideas, and other science fiction future technological utopianism, reflect a kind of techno-euphoria whereby we celebrate technological solutions to problems mainly caused by misuse of technology. There is a poignant symbolism of our utter belief in the ultimate discovery of the technologically achieved paradise.
As we turn our scientific minds to how we might realise such magnificent ends, we have developed new fields of research within which to discover new knowledge about life in space. While advances in engineering edge us closer towards building solutions, the science of astrobiology asks pertinent questions about where life could be and where life could go. Astrobiology is a relatively new branch on the scientific evolutionary tree (NASA's first exobiology project was staged in 1959) and brings together a host of disciplines including biology, astronomy, geology, chemistry and physics. Interdisciplinary research is key to its methodology. The central questions of the field are based around how, and under what conditions, life appeared on earth and what the extremes of environment are that life will tolerate. The more we understand about this - the breadth of conditions and circumstances that allow life to flourish - the more we can make meaningful conjecture about the possibilities and possible forms of life elsewhere.
For terrestrial astrobiological research it makes sense to focus on organisms which can live in, or are able to tolerate, extreme conditions on Earth. Therefore a subset of organisms known as extremophiles are employed in the majority of experiments. The extremophiles occupy just about every ecological niche on the edge of survivability, from acid or alkali loving, to pressure or radiation loving, and even polyextremophiles such as the tardigrade which can endure a range of extreme conditions. A key question for astrobiology is whether such organisms have evolved to be able to survive and flourish under these conditions, or whether life is able to come about in such environments.
A discovery that we until very recently considered as exotic is proving to be actually quite mundane, and that is the existence of exoplanets; planetary bodies outside of this solar system. Advances in detection technologies allow us to find more and more rocky 'terrestrial' planets, and even more excitingly we are beginning to find them within the habitable zones of their stars. We are only a few years away from being able to analyse atmospheres of these planets to look for telltale signs of organic activity.
Over the last 40 years we have been sending a large number of probes, orbiters and landers to the Moon, the Sun, other planets and their moons, and onwards to the very edge of the solar system. and this has - following the thinking behind telerobotics - effectively pushed our perceptual and cognitive boundaries to a distance of some 21,702,476,000km (as of late February 2019 and increasing by 17km every second).
By extending the boundaries of our global network to include robotic sensing machines, not only is the nature of the network medium changed but the scale of our perception is also dramatically altered. The bounds of our information network and thus our global sensory cortex, are now tens of billions of kilometres and approaching 20 light hours distant. Therefore our deepest, space-bound data mining node is not just inconceivably distant but also exists in the past. In many ways the limits of our sensory nexus being an unimaginable distance away could cause a perceptual shock. However, maybe the notion of the network shrinks rather than expands our world view and our sense of where we are. If everything is connected to everything else then getting from one point of the nexus to another is a relatively short conceptual hop.
The exploration by proxy extends our cognitive boundary to the current position of the last data transmission from the furthest out probe. As remote senses and sensors these robots are physically present in a place millions upon millions of kilometres distant and, due to the discrepancies brought about by light speed, are almost 20 hours in the past. Thus we can place our cognitive boundaries in a locus, not a location, and we can try to understand, and to envisage, the notion of that boundary extending outwards at 17km per second. While the limits of the boundary are pushed outwards, we enrich pockets of data space at critical points within that new scope - around Saturn, around Titan, around Mars, and towards Pluto.
The 'Deep Data' project is evolved from such considerations about simultaneously collapsing distance and looking outwards. On the one hand is an obvious juxtaposition of scales - from the microscopic to the interplanetary, from the slow motion of the organisms to the blistering velocity of the space probes, from the short lifespans of the organisms to the 30 plus year voyages and nearly 20 hour light time delays at the limits of the solar system. While collapsing these differences there was an objective to analyse and intensify an awareness of our cognitive boundaries, to incorporate the robotic experience of the universe around us with our own.
'Deep Data' proposes to create a series of real-time experiments in which organisms destined for space research will undergo experimentation without travel. Their experience of space by proxy collapses into our own experience of space by proxy, mediated for us by myriad robotic probes at various points in the Solar System. Further than a perhaps impossible understanding, they undergo an enhanced level of the experience of space conditions without being there, without being launched into orbit aboard a biosatellite, aboard a Voyager probe, or even a Martian rover. Their experience of elements of the deep space environment takes place within a purely simulated framework.
The binding narrative thread of the project arc encapsulates the subtext of the search for life, and the conditions under which life can flourish. Deep Data is an astrobiological proposition, testing often boundary defying organisms against new boundaries from exotic worlds or interplanetary locations. The questions that underpin who and what we are as terrestrial organisms, is brought into sharp focus against the machinery which makes it possible to begin to speculate about the answers.
To date, three instances of Deep Data experiments are in existence, named sequentially; Prototype 1, Prototype 2 and Prototype 3. Prototype 1 places the terrestrial polyextremophile tardigrade Hypsibius dusjardini in the magnetic fields of the gas giant planets as recorded by the Voyager probes on their 'grand tour' through the Solar System. Prototype 2 examines how photomorphogenic mutants of the plant Arabadopsis thalania respond to growing under the light spectrums of our neighbouring rocky planets. Prototype 3 scans for new terrestrial exoplanet discoveries and simulates their gravity in cultures of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Each of these organisms has been a common passenger on space missions since the 1960s and are thus seen as ideal test subjects for further experimentation. These organisms are pioneers, venturing into parts of the space environment that no other organism has sensed or witnessed. As with the robotic platforms that inform them, they become our space explorers by proxy.
The making of cultural experiments into the science of astrobiology, as with the earlier hybrid ecosystem works, is a test of the significance of notions around life itself. They test the significance of interspecies relationships, the amalgam of organic and synthetic matter, the significance of the presence of life in universe.
DROSOPHILA TITANUS
As we improve our technology for discovering new planets orbiting distant stars, and as we realise that planets are a common occurrence in the galaxy, we still know that the most 'Earth-like' world discovered so far is much closer to home. Saturn's giant moon Titan, larger than the planet Mercury, has a thick atmosphere, continents displaying tectonic activity and a liquid cycle. Within its hydrocarbon lakes it is vaguely possible that exotic life could exist. Within the narratives of post-terrestrial futures and a life rich cosmos, Titan serves as a functioning metaphor for the ancient Earth.
As explored in the Deep Data series above, there are a number of terrestrial organisms that serve as test beds for the body's adaptation to space. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been a workhorse of genetic and developmental biology since the 1980s, having its genome sequenced and published in the year 2000. About 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit flies, and 50% of fly protein sequences have mammalian homologs. Owing to these figures the organism lends itself to research into many human diseases, especially neurodegenerative disorders along with ageing, immunity and addiction. Its relatively short life cycle and propensity for mutation has made it an ideal candidate for evolutionary studies and as a model for deeper research into inheritance and chromosome mechanics. It follows, of course, that drosophila has become a regular visitor to space aboard the space shuttle and the ISS. Thus, drosophila becomes a biological metaphor for the human in space.
While embarking on a series of dioramas of the Xanadu area of Titan, where the Huygens probe landed in 2005, the idea to bring these two metaphors together became increasingly apparent. The resulting project 'Drosophila titanus' began in early 2011 and continued until 2017. Drosophila titanus was an embarkation upon a scientific process towards the impossible, a new species of drosophila that could potentially live on Titan. Despite the impossibility of organic life surviving on Titan, the project found meaning and purpose in a number of other loci and intertwined narratives. Partly to decipher the ways in which the artistic gesture can be found or interpreted in the scientific process, a process which has to eradicate the ambiguity, metaphor and poetry that art demands. And partly to explore the implications of artificial selection and prescriptive breeding, processes which have traditionally resulted in dark notions of superiority such as eugenics and designer babies or the creation of new chimera and monsters that satisfy economic or aesthetic demand.
The search for biological perfection and the notion of the ideal genome are deeply implicated in the practice of artificial selection. During the peak of space race astronaut training during the 1960s US space program the term 'the right stuff' was used to describe a quality desired in the ideal astronaut candidate. This term suggested not just a good military record, high levels of physical fitness and intelligence, but also the appropriate political and moral codes of practice. It is interesting to consider what form of 'the right stuff' successful individuals of drosophila would need to display as the project progresses and selection pressures and thus competition intensify.
Through an iterative process of simulation, adaptation, selection and breeding that spanned over 150 generations, a population of the vestigial wing mutant of drosophila was moved closer towards suitability for life on Titan. Experiments, processes and apparatus were designed and implemented which step by step and over many generations adjusted the conditions in which the flies were living, and in which aesthetic considerations were given equal standing as those relating to scientific rigour. Drosophila Titanus is a conceptual work, but one rooted in research, carefully designed experiments and scientific rigour. For all intents and purposes the project is a scientific one, but with an intention that is patently ridiculous and an expression that is often superfluous to its functionality. As with Deep Data, the work is a performative, durational and observational experiment in which our own attitudes to science and knowledge acquisition are challenged. The work faces the challenge of the delicate operation of discovering the artistic gesture within scientific frameworks.
Whether a new species can be attained or not is uncertain, but what is maybe more interesting is the ongoing disagreement and multiple opinions about what and where the species boundary actually is. And how do we perceive the change? Close to the heart of the project is the study of the relationship between genotype and phenotype, a relationship which more and more is seen as being at the core of evolutionary biology. The complex relationships between genome and environment and how they become physically expressed as an organism seeks to adapt and survive form the scientific foundation of the ongoing exploration within this work. As genotype and phenotype begin to mutate and adapt we enter the area of speciation, an important issue in evolutionary terms, and another issue where little is agreed on. Just when one species splits into two separate and distinguishable species is under intense study and drosophila are at the forefront of this science. Furthermore we enter the realm of the monster, the artificially created animal with no evolutionary purpose. A fly created with the same procedures that have produced poodles, featherless chickens, puffy eyed goldfish and corn on the cob. Weighing up the scientific, economic, ethical and aesthetic values of these creatures against each other, and attempting to locate them within the concept of nature is a moral and philosophical challenge.
ONGOING ENQUIRIES INTO SPACE
Several years of considering how terrestrial biology might adapt to post-terrestrial and extra-terrestrial conditions, and how we go about acquiring knowledge from the space environment led to a further enquiry into the materiality of space itself. The history and formation of our own Solar System, our immediate neighbourhood, and probably the logical and practical extent of our explorations, provides a rich territory for artistic inquiry. Fragments of ancient material can tell us much about the formation of the Solar System. They can tell us about how ubiquitous organic chemistry actually is in space, and therefore give us clues about the origins of life on Earth. They can tell also remind us about how our own presence here is the blink of an eye, that we know so little, and that looking up towards the dark is a deep compulsion within us all.
In 2017 I spent a few months working with the scientist Queenie Chan at the Department of Planetary and Space sciences at the Open University of the UK. While assisting with the cataloguing of a collection of Interplanetary Dust Particles collected by NASA we came across a particularly beautiful object that stood out from the rest. You First Saw the Light is a study of this fragment of comet which measures just 50 microns (0.05mm) in length and is older than all the rocks on the Earth. Officially named and catalogued as LAC3B_grain10, the origin of this tiny piece of material is probably in interstellar dust clouds that pre-date the formation of our Sun. Much later in its life, a mere 4 or 5 billion years ago, it would have accreted into a comet and commenced its huge eccentric orbits of the star. It witnessed the formation of our Solar System, becoming a part of it. At some point, as the comet underwent its characteristic loss of material, this fragment would have become detached before becoming captured twice. At some point in its history it was trapped by the Earth's gravity well, then some years later, in 1985, it was collected from the stratosphere by a NASA high altitude research aircraft. Its current stage in its life cycle sees it stored in a glass vial in a clean room in a planetary science research facility. Its current destination and resting place is also questionable. The particle is here on Earth, although denied full contact in order to maintain its scientific importance. It must remain in a certain state of detachment, isolated from the complex webs of material that make Earth what it is and that define comets, asteroids and cosmic dust as something 'other'. It is here, but it is not here. Although this might seem like the end of a journey, the possibilities of further transformations and displacements within a universal timescale are huge. Billions of years hence, the matter that currently constitutes LAC3B_grain10 will some day be ejected back into the universe, as will we all, and will become a part of something else.
Standard laboratory processes for this type of object are usually destructive. Once a dust particle has been catalogued it is flattened, pressed onto a sapphire stub and analysed via spectrometer. The visual aspect is often overlooked. For this project it was necessary to develop an imaging protocol that involved picking up the particle with a static needle and rotating it to various angles while taking series of photographs at micron separated focus levels. These images are recompiled into the four channel video which forms part of the installation.
In a further experiment into simulacra as a visualisation tool, a 100x replica of the dust particle was carved from a piece of the NWA8131 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite discovered in 1985, the same year that the original particle was captured by the silicone wafer traps of a NASA U2 stratospheric research plane.
The project You First Saw the Light demands a considering of the significance and meaning that we place on objects. In the general scheme of things the object LAC3B_grain10 is insignificant, having played a minor role in the development of the Universe as we know it today. However, through the appliance of such focus it achieves significance and becomes the point of attention for considerations of the age and scope of the Solar System and our place and time within it.
TO CONCLUDE
The artistic practice discussed in this text is characterised by an in depth engagement with process, scientific methodologies and the nature of experiment. Here 'experiment' refers both to the act of acquiring knowledge and information through testing scenarios, and to the act of trying out unknown or novel processes. The works described encapsulate the notion of knowledge acquisition in the context of truth, whether that truth refers to an elaboration of fact, or through a manipulation of what is real. The philosopher Catherine Elgin in her book 'True Enough' discusses the idea of cognitively useful fictions, where a scientific or artistic model that diverge from facts can be 'true enough' to serve their epistemological purposes. The core point of this argument being that to achieve a holistic and agile attitude towards how knowledge is produced and assimilated in our society there is a need to be flexible when defining what is true and what is not true. While maintaining a rigorous attitude to fact and to honest research we can employ ambiguous models, metaphors and approximations that allow us to approach a problem with all the tools at our disposal.
When creating art works that embody elements of simulation and forced inter-relationships with a desire to reveal new phenomena this perspective is enriching. While much contemporary art production is beholden to the inspiration and methodology of science, an understanding that its multiple narratives and suggestions contribute significantly to the answering of complex questions allows art to position itself as an important provider of cognitive value.