This afternoon we concluded a week-long workshop in the so-called bioarts (go here for a nuanced discussion of the term) at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India. The workshop, conducted by Symbiotica and organized through a collaboration between NCBS, The Arts Catalyst and the Center for Experimental Media Art at the Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, brought together both Indian and international artists to engage with the tools of biotechnology as a way of investigating opportunities for research at the intersections of biology and art practice.

The capstone to the week was a community discussion among the participants and graduate students and faculty from NCBS. The conversation wa quite lively as it had been all week beginning with a opening keynote from Oron Catts about bioart and its role in cultural and scientific discourse.

Mukund Thattai moderated the discussion and acted as a provocateur by highlighting the potential for artists to become long-term interlocutors within the NCBS community. He particularly asked for skeptics of this art/biology engagement to share their concerns. Some of questions and concerns raised were:

* How does the arts research percolate 'down' into culture given that these are two "ivory towers" largely speaking to each other?
* Why is it that artists seem to be so vague in their proposals, seemingly lacking the precision of language to communicate ideas?
* That the sciences practiced in institutions like NCBS are not intended for the average person and that possibly they shouldn't be involved in it's production because of the responsibility involved.
* That the artworks produced appear to be superficial.
* That the ideas or concepts presented through the work are already known and aren't progressive enough to indicate value.
* That biological research is drawing on ancient and traditional ways of knowing that largely obviate the need for any questioning of its categories and ways of understanding life.
* That biologists just need to become better communicators and all of the problems associated with, e.g. acceptance of evolution, will disappear (this was actually raised during our first day's interaction with the NCBS community).

These questions were sincere and engaging, and I was happy that there was such a good turnout to discuss these issues. People shared many different perspectives that varied widely in their desire for further such engagements, different models of engagement, and skepticism for the value of the kinds of activities that we were engaged in.

I was somewhat restrained from entering the fray directly because one of my main goals is to elicit the widest possible display of concerns from a community like this. Sometimes I feel it is better to just listen and use the issues raised as areas for getting tactically involved.

This brings me to a rationale for art/science engagement that I think deals with many of the concerns raised. Art, when engaged with biology, performs a social function of 'witnessing.' Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (Leviathan and the Air Pump, 1985) highlights this process in their analysis of Robert Boyle's experiments with pneumatics and Thomas Hobbes's critiques of his experimental program. They describe three processes that effectively multiply witnesses to experimentation and the resulting production of scientific knowledge: 1) facilitating replication–so that users can perform experiments themselves, 2) performance of experiments in a social space–i.e. sharing in the embodied experience, and (perhaps most importantly) 3)virtual witnessing–i.e. production in a user's mind an image of the experimental scene such that it obviate the need for direct witness.

In the context of the workshop, I think this process of witnessing is increasingly relevant for the production of the biological program and its social contract with society. On the one hand, by teaching artists to use the tools of biology, Symbiotica creates an expectation that non-specialists could theoretically repeat experiments for themselves and verify their validity. Indeed, simple hypothesis testing was performed using environmental sampling of microorganisms and transformation of E. coli with a green fluorescent protein marker. Another example where replication of an experimental program is facilitated comes from the Critical Art Ensemble's Marching Plague in which US military experiments in biowarfare were replicated with a critical eye for how the results did or did not support defense practice and the politicization of biotechnology. Each of these examples demonstrate how the practices of biology can be effectively replicated to allow for a wider social engagement of science and it's relationship to other social groups and cultural concerns.

The second aspect of witnessing in shared spaces is perhaps the easiest to show. There were twenty residents at NCBS during the week, engaging in shared processes, visiting labs, and discussing the methods and implications of biological research in India. There's a worldwide trend of artists working in labs with organizations. Kevin Kelly has a nice list of these residencies here.

What follows from these forms of replication and shared space is the dissemination of a virtual reality of the experimental program. I think that what comes out of artists' engagement is a type of circumstantial evidence for scientifically-produced knowledge. It relies not on fact or even certainty but solely the residue of artistic engagement. Shapin and Schaffer point to these as circumstantial, stylized, accounts that do not exist as pure forms but instead as publicly acknowledged moves towards or away from "the reporting of contingencies." Contingencies here means events or things that might jeopardize the validity of the experiment. By allowing the full spectrum of the experimental 'scene'–perhaps through the inclusion of additional perspectives, political persuasions, or ideas–a better picture of experimentation and its context can be understood. The CEMA blog this week documented the workshop in detail. How often do you see that level of detail in the daily working of, say, a genetics lab? Consider also how art exports knowledge into other spaces and disciplines, either though its images or simply through the engagement itself.

Reflecting on all of this (and I'm tired now), I think one of the interesting questions to pursue is to ask what difference artistic engagement makes along each of these three axes. Does it differ from other methods of communication, and if so what are the behaviors and practices that make it so?

http://www.semeiotica.com/2008/03/biology-art-and-witnessing.html