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Zoot Derks, Jeanette Groenendaal, Adam Zaretsky and Jennifer Willet

Dangerous Liasons
Inside Out
Orange Pheasant performance

These are documents from the Transgenic Pheasant Embryology Art and Science Laboratory taught by Adam Zaretsky at the University of Leiden as a part of an Honors Course called, Vivoarts, Art and Biology Studio. Held by the Arts and Genomics Centre, this hands-on perfomance art wet-lab was documented in order to stimulate debate about the use of new biological methods for permanent alteration of genetic inheritance.

The process and experimental embryos are presented. What you see is the protocol and the results of imaging somatic difference. A pedagogical signature is imbued in these stillborn sculptures. The plasmid injection was done raw with home-made tools. My research shows that intramuscular plasmid injection is enough for incorporation into the genome. In fact, the new Hepatitis B vaccine is just a raw plasmid injection. This is a way towards a furtherance of qualitative knowledge of artistic avian embryology and mutagenesis research. Students actively commented on concepts of humane sacrifice and the ritual roots of sacrifice by designing some conflicting schemas for ending an embryo’s life. I also took time to practice during this event, developing Fratricide to her legal limit.

The lab gives students the tools and skills they need to interact through the humanities with their four day incubated and windowed eggs. The students are offered microsurgical, teratological and naked plasmid injection as developmental embryology tinkering tools. In this lab the students are given a chance to make their first transgenic vertebrate, an embryonic pheasant. Held at the University of Leiden, this lab cleared both the Animal Experimentation Committee and Recombinant safety. It appears that avian embryos are not considered animals by definition in the EU as they are not ‘free living beings.’ They are also not considered a Recombinant Safety Hazard because they are incapable of reproducing.

In the name of transgenic art, fledgling artists are utilizing lab technique as a new medium to produce living and often mutant living art forms. As these ‘sculptures’ live and die, often at the whims of the artistic investigator, the personal, non-repeatable moments take on a ritual air. What kinds of rituals do interdisciplinary Art and Biology practices entail? How do they reveal the implicit rituals of science? What new performative rites come out of mixing ethics and esthetics in the laboratory? Scientists also have their methodologies of creative flourish and humane sacrifice. But, scientific and artistic play is often based on different paradigmatic reading of what the act of experimentation is. As artists learn laboratory technique, the rituals of science and new rituals of sci-art unfold, decouple and reconfirm magical thinking in both arenas. How does animal research relate to the history of animal sacrifice? What is the role of subjectivity in developmental embryology? Is transgenic protocol also a ritual for the cultural production of liminal monsters. And how does mutagenesis impede or coerce the imaginary in the lifeworld? Through an analysis of artists confronted with the responsibility of ending the life of transgenic pheasant embryos, (which they had altered with plasmids in the name of art,) I hope to show living rituals for new biotechnological processes as they are invented.