[-empyre-] October topic: Welcome Tarsh Bates to -empyre-

[Renate Terese Ferro]

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Dear –empyreans,
The warmest welcome to Tarsh Bates (AU), our October moderator. I first met Tarsh in Hong Kong a couple of years ago at the New Media Caucus Conference. I was mesmerized by her presentation on the research and creative, artistic work she was doing with living yeast. Thrilled that she has not only agreed to sit on our newly formed Advisory Board but also excited to introduce her to our list. Tarsh has curated an exhibition in Australia that lies at the heart of this month’s topic. I will let her introduce that to you but I welcome and introduce Tarsh Base to the –empyre- community.
Tarsh Bates is an artist/researcher interested in the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a queer ecology. I have worked variously as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet paper packer, a researcher in compost science and waste management, a honeybee ejaculator, an art gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, a lecturer/tutor in art/science, art history, gender & technology, posthumanism, counter realism and popular culture, an editor, a bookkeeper, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. I was recently awarded a PhD exploring the human as a multi-species ecology and am currently a research associate at SymbioticA, UWA and The Seed Box, an international environmental humanities collaboration based at Linköping University in Sweden and funded by Mistra and Formas. I am particularly enamoured with Candida albicans.
https://tarshbates.com

Happy October to all,
Renate

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Cornell University
-empyre soft-skinned space, curator, managing moderator
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[Tarsh Bates]

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Welcome to the October discussion "This Mess We're In." It is 200 years
since the publication of “Frankenstein,” the first speculative fiction
novel. This month, the –empire- discussion is devoted to reflecting on
the legacies of Mary Shelley’s seminal exploration of life creation and
re-formation from queer, feminist and first nations perspectives. The
guests this month are artists and writers involved in “This Mess We’re
In,” an exhibition that entangles queer feminist ecologies with
“Frankenstein” that is presented as part of SymbioticA’s Unhallowed Arts
Festival in Perth which runs throughout October and November. 26
experimental artworks by first nations, national and international
artists are exhibited in “This Mess We’re In.” These works emerge from
art/science practices that explore the relationships between life and
technology, emerging, resisting, reforming and responding to the
political, ethical and material implications of manipulating life. The
exhibition concept arose out of concern about continuing gender gaps in
art and science, which are even greater for queers and first nations
peoples. The manipulation of and discrimination towards these bodies has
been justified through scientific endeavours and is particularly
disturbing in contemporary biotechnology, where life is increasingly
industrialized and manipulated. We are not all equally affected by this
manipulation. The exhibition explores whose lives are manipulated and
exploited, who can manipulate and who cannot. Check it out at Old
Customs House, Fremantle if you are local or https://thismesswerein.com/
if you are not.

-empyre- provides us with an opportunity to extend the explorations of
the material, conceptual, political and philosophical implications of
the scientific creation and/or manipulation of life. Artists and writers
from “This Mess We’re In” invite you to join us in expressing the untold
legacies of the last 200 years of colonialism, industrialization and
biotechnology, giving voice to the creatures that emerge from and escape
the creation and control of life and drawing on the themes of
fragmentation, emergence, reproduction and ethics that are the
cornerstone of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” We encourage you to
explore the diversity and complexity of life, escape individualism and
undermine utilitarianism and revel in the messiness of life and
technology, our mess-mates and the mess we have made.

I am very honoured to introduce the guests for Week 1 of this mess:

*Hege Tapio*, whose artistic practice has pursued the interest in
emerging media interconnecting art, new technology and science. With a
kitchen bench DIY attitude and through artistic practice she has been
inspired to how apparatuses and new technology opens to renewed
interpretation, creative misuse and critical thinking. Art driven by
curiosity, knowledge, ability to convey and contextualize aspects of
technology and research, both through speculation and critical attitude,
have been the basis for many of the projects. With her latest work
HUMANFUEL, Hege problematizes biofuel as an alternative to fossil fuel,
and she scrutinizes how we humans view ourselves in an ecological
perspective. With the slogan GET THIN – GO FAST, Hege claims that in the
process of searching for new solutions to the energy crisis and for
alternative fuels, we have overlooked how we ourselves may constitute an
invaluable resource. Hege is also the founder and artistic manager of
i/o/lab – Center for Future Art where she has established and curated
Article biennial – a festival for the electronic and unstable art. Art
encompassing and intersecting with technology and science has been the
main objective for the development of projects for i/o/lab. www.tapio.no

Working in the kitchen, *Lindsay Kelley* explores how the experience of
eating changes when technologies are being eaten. Her art practice works
at the intersection of food and technoscience to produce sculpture and
performance that incorporate tasting and eating. She has performed and
exhibited internationally. Her published work can be found in journals
including parallax, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Angelaki, and
Environmental Humanities. Her first book is Bioart Kitchen: Art,
Feminism and Technoscience (London: IB Tauris, 2016). Bioart Kitchen
emerges from her work at the University of California Santa Cruz (Ph.D
in the History of Consciousness and MFA in Digital Art and New Media).
Kelley is a Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design in Sydney as well as a
Co-Investigator with the KIAS funded Research-Creation and Social
Justice CoLABoratory: Arts and the Anthropocene (University of Alberta,
Canada).

*Laura Barendregt* is a researcher-in-the-making from Sydney via the
Netherlands, now in Perth to complete a research internship at
SymbioticA, University of Western Australia. She is currently enrolled
in the MSc Arts and Culture (Culture of Arts, Science and Technology) at
Maastricht University, Netherlands, and graduated with a BA (Performance
Studies) in 2016 from the University of Sydney. While her research
interests are ever evolving, today they include; relationships of art
and science, sociology and ethnography of the arts, alternative
knowledge cultures, public engagement with the arts, ethics of
speculative design, auto-ethnography, situated learning and artistic
research.

and myself as curator of the exhibition.

Future weeks:
October 8 to 14        Week 2:  Alize Zorlutuna, Rachel Mayeri, Špela Petrič
October 15 to 21      Week 3:  Abhishek Hazra, Kathy High, Sue
Hauri-Downing, Svenja Kratz, WhiteFeather Hunter
October 22 to 29      Week 4: Helen Pynor, Marietta Radomska, Mary
Maggic, Mike Bianco, Sarah Hermanutz

Jump in!


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Tarsh Bates

PhD (Biological Art) Survivor

SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia

w: tarshbates.com <http://tarshbates.com/>


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[Theresa Ramseyer]

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[Barendregt, Laura (Stud. FASoS)]

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Thanks for the introduction Tarsh and for inviting me and all the artists to contribute to the discussion this month. My involvement with This Mess We're In started two months ago when arrived to complete a student placement at SymbioticA. I was quickly taken in by Tarsh to help pull together the exhibition and learn, through and with her, what is required to make such a show a reality.

I first encountered Frankenstein and Mary Shelley in my final year of high school. We studied it in a unit called "Text and Context - Text and Time". We were required to read the novel, learn about it's context, piece together how it was a product of it's time, place and author, and then compare this with the film Bladerunner, a contemporary telling of the same tale. While we were taught there are multiple ways to read a text (I recall one or two lessons on post-modern theory that baffled me at the time), being high school, we were told which readings were important for our purposes, and what quotes to memories for our final exam. Re-reading the same copy I studied a mere seven years ago, I see those lines I was told to underline, and remember how we removed them from their neighbouring text to make one sheet to memorise. Like Victor, we sliced the segments we deemed necessary for our purposes, and discarded the rest. Shelley's text was reduced to twenty or so, three to seven
word lines that we held these up as representing it as a whole.

My experience today, re-reading the text and learning about all the works in this exhibition, has been quite different. As I have worked my way through the story, new ideas and readings jump out at me, many of which are being taken up and extended upon by the artists in TMWI. One obvious one is the binary relationship between the masculine and feminine (something that was also highlighted to us in school). This time around I am struck by just how head-strong, self-absorbed and arrogant Victor is, and so really appreciate how Mike Bianco's work has played with the hyper-masculine energy Victor embodies. Over the weekend Tarsh and I were discussing Katie West's piece, how it explores what counts as technology and asks the viewer to consider themselves, specifically their hands, as a technological instrument. Currently completing a Masters heavy in Science and Technology Studies (STS) theory, I found the idea that our bodies are the origin point of everything that we have create
d, and we are simply expanding on ourselves, really refreshing. Although I also see the other side of this sword and how this line of argumentation could lead down the path of transhumanism and the discarding of the body as an outdated artefact, like a iPhone 8. If Victor's tale tells us anything, I think it is that some things are better left to the body, and to be wary when we begin to usurp or expand upon it.

I'll leave it here for now, and look forward to reading what everyone contributes this month.

Thanks,

Laura

Laura Barendregt
Student Research Masters Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology, Maastricht University
Research Intern, SymbioticA, University of Western Australia
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[Lindsay Kelley]

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Tarsh and Laura, how wonderful to join you in this space.

I am grateful to both of you for your care and kindness putting this ambitious exhibition together.

The work I've sent over is called Dysphagiac, and it's about tube feeding. It's a speculative kitchen appliance and a performance prop, meant to give you a cute, clean/laminar flow space in your kitchen to prepare tube food. It also looks like a mouth/esophagus, and fails at laminar flow because it has all these fiddly folds. I do a cleaning bit when I perform with it.

I made it while reflecting on my grandfather's dying process, which was aided/precipitated by a GI tube. At that time (2008), most people on tubes consumed shelf stable canned liquids--my grandfather's were made by Nestle--and people who created their own "real food" for the tube in the kitchen were very brave and rebellious (lucysrealfood.com was the most prolific web community about this). Not thinking about it as art, I made a bunch of this food for my grandfather. I froze it, put it in my suitcase, and brought it from California to Denver. I put it in my grandparents' fridge at their assisted living apartment. I showed my grandma how to heat it up. At some point after I dropped it off, my grandmother threw it away, and it became an art project.

I realised my grandfather was never going to "eat" this because it wasn't endorsed by his doctor and it was in Ziploc bags and everyone felt anxious and weird about him putting actual carrots through a tube into his stomach, but somehow felt really comfortable putting shelf stable canned crap through there. So, that was weird, and required some art making to think about the weirdness. I wondered what might make it OK to prepare this food.

Some years later I had an opportunity to be an artist in residence for a few days (the vacation allowance I had from my day job). I made this appliance during that residency (at the Jackman Humanities Institute University of Toronto). I was honoured to work alongside Joshna Maharaj preparing and serving liquid food and non-liquid versions of the same food for a lovely group of people attached to UT and the JHI.

Now, there are more professional, medically valid, not-amateur options for "real food" for the tube. I'm happy to see that, and I like that this object marks a specific moment.

I appreciate Laura's reflection on her education in Frankenstein. I can't remember when I first read it. I suspect I saw movies before reading, and "Young Frankenstein" was of my cultural moment. Reading it again for Quite Frankly, I find myself interested in the monster as an embodiment of the affective experience of birth, living, and care. I want to know more about the monster's death. Victor is indeed such a dick, so I'm excited for Mike's work too. I rewatched Twilight while prepping some of this work, and I think Victor and Edward deserve some kind of crossover universe encounter. Or maybe Bella and the monster should join forces and create a healing retreat center, after Bella's divorce.

I'm looking forward to this month's conversation, and thanks as ever to Renate for her work keeping this list alive.

Take care,

Lindsay


------------
Dr. Lindsay Kelley
Lecturer

UNSW Art & Design
UNSW Sydney

Paddington Campus
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd,
Paddington, NSW 2021
Australia

T: [phone]
E: ***@unsw.edu.au

Bioart Kitchen http://goo.gl/SJRdFn
@bioartkitchen
@extremebaking

https://www.hr.unsw.edu.au/diversity/athena-swan/sat-members.html

CRICOS PROVIDER CODE 00098G

I pay my respects and acknowledgments to all Traditional Custodians on whose land I live, work and travel through.








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[Hege Tapio]

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Dear Tarsh, Laura and Kelly
Looking much forward to this wonderfully assembled exhibition, and following this discussion is a great opportunity to warm up the topic while getting a closer introduction to the artworks.

I find it interesting that Shelley is mentioning «galvanism» as an influence for her creation of «Frankenstein» Luigi Galvani`s nephew, Giovanni Aldini must indeed have caused an impact while performing the public electro stimulation on the body of the recently executed murder George Forster in 1803. So the fascination and potential horror of science may indeed serve as an inspiration for great art.
The race towards mastering of technologies - to understand as well as manipulate/control life has brought us to tremendous achievements. We find ourselves in a time where science is not longer performed as a spectacle in public squares, but performed by closed specialized research facilities.
So discovering artists engaging themselves with contemporary science by raising issues of how it may implicate our lives makes me excited.

However wonderful technology and scientific advancement is - I do find myself bit disturbed to how we seem to be disconnected from the intricate balance that makes up our biological habitat. A narrow-minded goal oriented quest for achievements seem to have numbed our humbleness to life.

While working on my HUMANFUEL project I had some profound discussions with my oldest daughter. After all, I had to go through the process of explaining her about my work and the making process. It was important to me as her role model that she understood why I wanted to go through the invasive process of extracting fat from my own body to make fuel. We also talked about how we never really question our use of other living material. After a long reflection in silence my daughter said:
« we cannot really admit to ourselves what we are doing - because we would have to realize how horrible we are»

So having this in mind I am tempted to say that in our time, all though we have the technology at hand to create monstrosities, we ourselves has become monstrous.

Best greetings from the land of Vikings, black gold and Trolls

Hege


Hege Tapio
Managing director /Artist /Curator

i/o/lab Senter for Framtidskunst
Postboks 308 sentrum / 4004 Stavanger / Norway
Mob# [phone]
www.iolab.no



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[Tarsh Bates]

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Thanks so much to Hege, Laura and Lindsay for your fascinating
reflections on Frankenstein, monstrosity, art and science last week. I
was particularly interested in how your personal experiences with
monstrosity and technology inform your art practices and vice versa and
the complexity of the responses to them.

I have recently found myself entangled in an interspecies
onto-ethico-emotional quandry. The cat that cohabits my home is old as
cats go - 18 now and very much a senior. Until recently, he has been
cheery enough, still eating and spending his days outside. He is my
sundial: I look up intermittently during the day and, seemingly in his
sleep, he has moved south to north across the garden. He recently and
somewhat unexpectedly went into heart failure and was desperately trying
to draw breath. I rushed him to the vet, who grabbed him and disappeared
through the doors, leaving me stranded in the waiting room. She appeared
10 minutes later and informed me that he had fluid on his lungs and
would probably not last the day. She would try to remove the fluid but
warned me that he would likely die during the procedure. A bit dazed, I
wandered down to the coffee shop. Two hours later he was still alive,
although 10% lighter due to the fluid that was removed. I was shown into
an operating room and the vet opened up the black plastic bag acting as
a make-shift oxygen tent. I peered in to see him looking very bedraggled
and lethargic. A measuring cup with the 300millilitres of fluid
extracted from his lungs and chest was on the floor next to him. After
spending the day in the tent, we were sent home with anti-fluid tablets
and a caution that he would likely not survive the next couple of weeks.
I was to count his breaths and wait...The first two weeks were touch and
go. He didnt leave the house and barely moved from his favorite chair.
Although invasive and painful, this was a relatively minor technological
intervention. However minor, it brought him back from the brink. He has
spectacularly recovered - a reanimation if you will. He is old and more
tired, he drinks a lot more and pees a lot more but seems pretty
content. He is back to being a cat about town - very much the catty
flaneur of the street.

So where is the quandry? Well, I grew up on a farm and if my cat had
gone into heart failure we probably wouldnt have known because she would
have hidden herself off somewhere to die - or we would have considered
it part of the whole life/death thing and not intervened. Back to now -
I am still not sure if the intervention or resurrection was worth it.
Dont get me wrong. I care about him and would miss his chats and warmth
but he has had a good life. How much better (or worse) is it going to
get in the next few months? Although I am no longer counting his
breaths, we are still waiting...

Tarsh
--
Co-Convenor Quite Frankly: Its a Monster Conference 18-19 October 2018

Curator This Mess We're In 13 October - 2 November 2018 Unhallowed Arts
Festival 2018

Postdoctoral Research Associate • SymbioticA • School of Human Sciences
• The University of Western Australia • M309, 35 Stirling Hwy Crawley WA
6009 Australia • T [phone] • M [phone] • E
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I acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which I live: The
Whadjuk people of the Noongar Nation. I acknowledge their ancestors and
pay my respects to their elders; past, present and future.

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