December 29, 2000, Friday

In Massachusetts, Science Gives New Life to Art; Artists Forsake Studios For Labs Where They Manipulate Organisms

Pamela Ferdinand , Special to The Washington Post

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joe Davis records the fluttering sounds of microorganisms as they scoot across microscope slides. Another artist plays nonstop Engelbert Humperdinck to a laboratory dish of E. coli bacteria in a separate facility. And across the river at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where doctors are engineering new organs for transplants, two more artists-in-residence--the first in the hospital's history--use homegrown tissue to create semi-living sculptures.

In a world of sheep clones and fluorescent rabbits, art and science are commingling as never before. Where once artists used traditional media to critique the scientific world, they are now engaging science directly in their art, using the tools of genetic engineering and molecular biology to develop new forms of creative expression on extraordinary palates.

From Natalie Jeremijenko at New York University's Center for Advanced Technology, who has cloned trees, to artist Eduardo Kac, who pleaded for the extradition of Alba, the glowing French bunny that was created with genes from a fluorescent jellyfish, an increasing number of artists are manipulating life forms to challenge thinking and stimulate discussion about where modern science and technology will lead.

Yet it is here in Massachusetts, where Davis is considered the eminence grise of the "bioart" movement, that individual artists actually work in laboratories instead of studios, often side by side with some of the nation's leading scientists and researchers. The collaborations give artists access to technical expertise, sophisticated resources and expensive technology. For scientists, an unorthodox presence in otherwise protocol-ridden environments can lead to new ways of approaching tasks.

"Science and art are both trying to observe and explain the world, in one way or another," said Oron Catts, 33, who works in Joseph P. Vacanti's tissue engineering and organ fabrication laboratory at Massachusetts General. "You really need good science to create good art, and you need good art to create good science."

Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering, agreed, having taught Davis how to sequence DNA.

"Both science and arts are complementary and worthwhile human endeavors," he said. "They will define our activities thousands of years from now."

Davis eschews the art versus science argument, insisting that he speaks both languages and could not possibly tear the two disciplines apart in his own mind. He is best known locally for his $ 1.4 million planetary sculpture that billows steam in Kendall Square, the center of the biotech industry in Cambridge, yet his other work is far less mainstream.

In 1989, he installed 1,679 glass bottles in the basement of MIT's Hayden Memorial Library to represent the 1974 broadcast of a coded message from Earth to outer space by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. (Initially rejected by the university arts council on grounds it was not art, the exhibit's run was extended by 10 weeks due to popular demand).

Another project involved broadcasting tape-recorded samples of vaginal contractions into space (the Air Force shut the transmission down), and Davis won a space shuttle spot in 1993 for a proposal called "Fishing in the Norton Rings," after Ed Norton, Ralph Kramden's sewer worker buddy on television's "The Honeymooners." Davis aimed to install "fishing gear" on the cargo bay to trawl in space for microorganisms amid urine and feces expelled from spacecraft over the years, but the project hasn't received funding.

At a recent international arts festival in Austria, Davis demonstrated his desire to find biological and artistic solutions for communicating with extraterrestrials. He displayed dozens of laboratory dishes containing E. coli bacteria with DNA that he had encoded with special messages. One DNA message, when deciphered, read: "I am the riddle of life. Know me and you will know yourself."

One of his latest projects is an audio microscope that beams lasers onto a special microscope slide holding microorganisms. Their movement alters the light reflecting off them, and the changes are converted into sound. The images are then projected onto a computer video monitor, where they resemble flashes of red lightning.

"It sounds like a herd of buffalo, doesn't it?" Davis said, sitting in his laboratory, where jars of murky specimens are stacked on the shelves. "What's exciting to me is to do things that have never been done before. To experiment with what seems impossible."

To wit, Davis is also working on biomechanical sculptures--namely, a flying machine with flapping wings powered by real frog legs. He has already built two robots controlled by zebra fish at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm.

"All of our dreams are going to come true, the good ones and the bad ones," said Davis, who has dreamed of altering the color of lightning, generating artificial northern lights, and putting a 1957 Chevrolet on the moon. "I just want to make some good ones."

Not everyone is enamored with the effusive artist. One MIT research scientist in biology, who asked not to be identified, called his work "child's play." (Davis was recently transferred to another laboratory where he works alone.)

"In the lab, his presence is really annoying. He's not really educated as being a decent scientist, and he doesn't have any idea about how people need to be in the research lab," said a researcher, who asked not to be identified by name. "Maybe he's doing something worthwhile, but I don't think it's nearly as significant as he claims."

Until the instruments of biotechnology become more accessible, bioartists must depend on the goodwill of universities, government grants and corporate partnerships. Senior scientists with secure reputations and careers such as MIT structural biologist Alexander Rich, with whom Davis is affiliated, appear to be most prepared to take the risk and issue invitations.

Davis has received funding from MIT's Arts Council and the Rhode Island School of Design, and supplies and materials (for instance, specialized molecules) from several biotech firms. But he earns extra money selling sculptures and is so financially strapped he lives with friends. Other artists teach or rely on free-lance work.

Nevertheless, Davis successfully recruited Adam Zaretsky, a 32-year-old Art Institute of Chicago graduate, helping arrange a two-year unpaid research appointment in the industrial microbiology and fermentation lab of MIT biologist Arnold Demain.

His project: to find out whether sound or music can influence the behavior of an E. coli strain engineered to produce antibiotics. The methods included playing the Engelbert Humperdinck greatest hits album for two days to bacteria in an incubator. He hinted at some success, and if he can reproduce the effect, Demain will pursue the experiment with his own team.

"Scientists and artists are both into revealing the invisible world, but scientists want to reveal it in ways that are repeatable," said Zaretsky, "and artists . . . are looking for an isolated instance of amazingness."

Not far away, unusual things are also happening at Massachusetts General in a lab famous for creating grafts for transplant surgery by growing tissue on artificial scaffolds. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, 30, two artists who began growing epidermal tissue over glass figurines at the University of Western Australia in Perth, met Harvard professor Joseph Vacanti at the MIT Media Lab last year. He was taken by what he saw.

"They made beautiful things," Vacanti said. "I thought it would be interesting to the scientists in the lab to be exposed to artists because the process is the same. It's creativity."

The one-year fellowship, which ends in mid-March, has been illuminating, Catts said. They grew different tissues over biodegradable polymers to create sculptures and exhibited polymer-based dolls seeded with mice skin tissue at an arts festival in Austria this fall. Now they want to grow quarter-size steaks using sheep muscle cells and are on the lookout for volunteers willing to eat them as part of a performance.

"We're trying to question our notions of what is alive," Catts said. "We are aware of the fact that we are not scientists, and we are not trying to be."