March 2012, a wonderful new institution officially opens its doors in Pittsburgh: the Center for PostNatural History. The center is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The ‘postnatural’ in its title refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering to meet human desires, and the center collects and provides access to a series of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.

The Sterile Male Screwworm, for instance, was released in the late 1950s to eradicate the live-flesh-eating fly populations that plagued cattle ranches in the American south. Male screwworms were industrially bred, after which they were treated radioactively to end their reproductive capacities. The mature adult flies were then released above the region, where the impotent males would be unable to impregnate the monogamous female fly. The BioSteel goat, on the other hand, had been engineered to produce spider silk in its milk for use in manufacturing bullet-proof armor and fishing line. 40 such goats were produced by the Canadian Nexia Corporation, which sold some of them to the US Defense Department, according to the CPNC currently housed in a decommissioned Air Force Base in New York.

The Belgian institute for art and contemporary design Z33 recently featured an interesting exhibition and symposium on the topic of ‘Alter(ed) Nature’, with 20 international artists on display. The exhibition focused on different ways in which people displaced, manipulated or designed nature: “from small gardens to private islands, carrots, bonsai trees to acoustic plants and orange pheasants”. Check here for the exhibition catalogue and essays.

Book review in ‘Academische Boekengids’

The Dutch Academische Boekengids (‘Academic Book Review’) published a short review by Koen Beumer and myself in its November issue on the recent ‘Bats Sing, Mice Giggle. The Surprising Science of Animals’ Lives’ by Shanor and Kanwal with the title ‘Achter het spiegelraam van de biologie’ (‘behind the reflective window of biology’). The magazine is circulated among Dutch academic staff and readers of Vrij Nederland and readers of Dutch can find it here. We used the metaphor of the reflective window to expose a paradoxical relation between animals and humans that is reflected in these authors’ discourse. Ostensibly, they stress correspondences between human and animal lives, which not only should bring them closer together but also prove useful for man’s survival in nature. Yet at the same time, the authors refrain from drawing ethical conclusions from such correspondence. Instead, animals feature very much as objects of research, surprisingly similar yet distanced by a scientific and technical gaze – in effect setting man apart from these natural origins.

Great big silences

Perennial Acoustic Laboratory

The British Film Institute Archive has recently restored a 1924 film by photographer and cinematographer Herbert Ponting, who had joined the British Terra Nova endeavour, a scientific expedition in the early 1910s to Antarctica. The expedition became infamously ill-fated, not only because the Norwegian team of Roald Amundsen beat the British team in the race to the South Pole by a mere month, but also because the expedition party died on the return journey from the pole. Ponting’s film captures their initial hopeful moments in the camp — crew members romping after the penguins — besides the challenges that life in that Great White Silence entails. Its newly composed score (by Simon Fisher Turner) does a great job in evoking the alien beauty and its massive silences – of the medium, the expansive landscape, and the fate of the explorers.

Quite a different sound of the Antarctic is produced by the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Sear Research. Their research station, the Perennial Acoustic Laboratory, has been recording the underwater soundscape around the ice shelf. The hydrophonic recordings are transmitted live via their website. They are used to study the acoustic repertoire of whales and seals “in an environment almost undisturbed by humans”. Nevertheless, it streams also many non-biological sounds, generated by movements of the ice masses and anthropogenic events like passing ships.

The sound quality, the research team acknowledges, is far from perfect, as a result of compromises between sensitivity to animal signals and not ‘overdriving the system’. In March 2006, for instance, the researchers fell off their chair when two icebergs at 20 kilometers distance from the microphone slowly collided, which resulted in a ten-minute extended exposure of well above 200dB!

As a source of scientific research, the team explains, it is not exactly “optimized for easy listening”. The live-stream presents a monotonous static, now and then interrupted by acoustic blinks and flashes, the equivalent of a tv-set antenna reception on a snowy day. (in that sense it is different from a contemporary pastime of digi-observing hatching birds). Obviously, the expert ear may hear data where the unaccustomed only picks up noise. Yet while such static may be regarded as communicative ‘noise’, it is also a real-time trace of an actually existing deeper world, a great blue, silent wasteland. Its interruptions, clicks and flashes are alive, and thereby different from the drones and hums of mechanical noise.

That does not make them more accessible to the untrained ear though, for they are traces are of a world we can’t imagine as real. As anthropologist Stefan Helmreich states in the opening sequence of his Alien Ocean, “the ocean is strange. It represents a contrast to the cultivated land and even the solid order of culture itself.” Listening to laptop-plugged-in-earphones, either to the dramatic sounds above the ice or the live-feed beneath, are both exercises in immersion in expansive silences that, despite being mediated by culture and technology, are as far from culture as can be.

Ocean Park

Diebenkorn . Ocean Park 79

Diebenkorn . Ocean Horizon

Summer is approaching! But in my case, it is not heralded by garden lunches and first chilly water dips per se. A more reliable announcement is made probably by the long pauzes I spent this week returning time and again to the painting by Richard Diebenkorn above. Perhaps it represents some abstract longing for what is soon to come: holidays. Indeed, seizing on the series’ title,Ocean Park (#79), it fills me with the sensation of distance and dullness of holidays. It is a resolutely concrete projection – too concrete perhaps – for the abstract geometric image that it is.

Or not. Because the image seems to be only a further step of abstraction removed from another painting by Diebenkorn’s hand.Ocean Horizon frames a similar view on the ocean, albeit a more figurative scene. There’s a cup of coffee, there are flowers and there are the electricity lines running towards the beach. But the sea is the same, and that is what matters. Both paintings do take an opposite vantage point: from the beach house onto the sea, and from the sea onto the sandy coast. But their view on the ocean is comparable. This is not the wild, unreliable mass, a source of the sublime for so many other artists. Instead, it is flat, geometrically controlled, domesticated, yet enticing. It is the ocean as it is on a day that nothing happens, and nothing has to happen. But it is also the ocean that one sees from a distance, the moment one anticipates when reaching the peaks of the dunes, before descending onto the beach. It is a sensation one tends to forget about in the cycle of seasons, but one that has just now re-surfaced:  the anticipation of the dulness of summer, and a flat, empty sea.

The Future of Finance

In the series of ‘The Future of Finance‘, the Dutch documentary program Backlight (‘Tegenlicht’) broadcasted an illuminating episode ‘Money and Speed’, on the global financial system. The system has become increasingly dependent on mathematical models that enhance ad-hoc economic trading. But such models are variably designed and are made to learn, and thus increasingly hard for traders and analysts to understand. These black boxes shape the economy and the market as a complex machine for trading huge quantities of data and goods. The question is what unforeseen consequences this system has, in which trade takes place at the speed of light at which data moves through the fibres. I guess the fear for the unknown threats of the capitalist moloch are a well-known trope, but that does not make it less urgent and relevant. The documentary also left me with the feeling that although time and distance do hardly matter anymore in a globalized world, in the parallel universe of economic stock-exchanges they are of utmost importance: who gets what information at what point matters for the entire dynamic of the exchange, and for the wealth of half of the world. Warmly recommended material!

I stumbled onto this picture/book/text at the blog of a band called ‘The Morning Benders’, with the lyrics of one of their songs. I like this picture, as I like all things dusty, old, yellowed for that matter – call it a fascination for moldy books. It’s the same fascination that kept me from depression when spending long days trolling archives, enduring asbestos-filled basements, dim TL lighting and droning climate controls, to unscramble the chronically illegible handwriting of lab notes. It is perhaps a not so obvious cliché that scientists’ laboratories are not quite unlike artists’ studios, if only in that they are both places of investigation, but so are the notes these spaces produce. Jotted down on anything in the near, and teeming with a similar sort of energy that is best illustrated by the rhythm their hand followed while writing — if at first duly disciplined and constrained by imaginary margins and line-spacing, they get quickly inflated, exaggerated and expressive by the end of every second page. Not sure what occult chiromancers might have to say about this, but this Philosophy of Handwriting (1879) discusses the handwriting of artists and scientists alike, from Emile Zola to Thomas Huxley or Charles Darwin – though the section on the latter is but a pagelong musing on the unintelligibility and unanalyzability of his writings even for the learned practitioner.

collections of letters and holes

I love typography. This tiny library of record envelopes surprised me with a collection of small, slightly creased, (typo)graphic wonders. Unexpected, for though sleeve have enough surface to qualify as small icons, works of art for coverlovers, the envelope designer had to make do with this large hole in the center. It’s another eye-opener for the remarkable in the mundane, as is this fascinating blog by new york designer James Philips Williams: just ordinary things to look at – or through, for that matter.

CCC

A German friend recently directed me to the hugely interesting webspace of the CCC: certainly not the Belgian extreme left-wing organisation, but the German Chaos Computer Club – not as violent yet not less ideological. Since the early 1980s, this Berlin-founded club of hackers strives for a free flow of information and advocates communication as a human right. They organize an annual congress for hackers and related life-forms, artists, utopists and technology researchers. You might know them from their installation, transforming the Haus des Lehrers at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz into a big low-resolution computer-screen – immortalized in this duet with Miss Kitten. Even for those not hindered by a poor command of German, much of it may be just a bit too technical, unintelligible and puzzling for those not initiated in the complexities of ‘hacker-ism’ – not all hacking is as easy as a game of chess. But even then, the ethics of the movement may be refreshing, and its view on technology and culture provoking – for instance in protesting against the collecting of biometric data by obtaining and copying the fingerprint of the German home secretary. Their podcast network ChaosRadio is definitely worth checking, collecting several series of talk-shows on issues relating to data-flow, privacy and hackerism.

 

My scientific excuses

It has been such a long time since the last story that I had even forgotten about this place. Over time, of course, it had completely lost its ‘raison d’être’ and I was surprised to find that it still floated around somewhere. Surprised and relieved, maybe, that this digital trace had resisted the wear and tear of the digital vaccuum.

But for this absence of almost a year, I have recently been given a sound scientific excuse. The American-Hungarian professor of physics and director of the Centre for Complex Network Research Albert-László Barabási recently published a popular scientific book in which he explains how predictable the patterns behind everyday human behavior are. This may not be so surprising: people have routines, in travelling, working, shopping, doing their evening walk. More surprising however, is that a lot of these human activities are clustered together in short periods, separated by long periods in which we don’t do them at all. He based this mathematical law on a study of people’s occupations with e-mailing, googling, paying, phoning, arranging meetings, but also detected the same pattern in the correspondence of scientists such as Einstein and Darwin, who both organised their letter-writing the way people nowadays write their e-mails.

And so, although my yearlong absence may be a complex variability in Barabási’s already massively complex (or so I presume) mathematics, it also gives reason to suspect that the sudden increase in postings that you may expect in the next few weeks or months is but a short outburst and a statistical indication of my soon-to-come vanishing from the virtual scene. For that, of course, I apologize – already. But know that eventually, I will be back.

Of rats and men (of science)

In cleaning up the dusty shelves of the Copenhagen University’s health science department, a team of Danish researchers that investigate the history of biomedicine’s material culture dug up this intriguing and slightly morbid instrument. The ‘home-made’ guillotine was used to prepare laboratory rat samples for examination, or to dispose them after they had paid their short and inglorious service to scientific research. (A marvellous image, this bent stainless steel covered with fingerprints).

The instrument is by no means unique according to some – the devices are “still sold commercially and […] they can be found in virtually every pharmaceutical company’s laboratory and in many hospital laboratories”, yet thus far these corners of the lab have remained s haded within Science and Technology Studies. Perhaps anthropologists of science routinely closed their notebooks and switched off their recorders at this point. Perhaps they had already taken off their white coat and anxiously followed the lab worker to her pc to see how she would now arrange her hard-won data. It leaves a sobering image of some of science studies’ realizations: hasn’t it in some cases reinforced rather than challenged the standard and popular image of a sterile, cold and clean practice. Where are its mechanics repairing (and calibrating) the equipment and where are the early-morning cleaners? When can animal objects be disposed off, because they have changed from scientific object into biochemical waste?

On another line of thought, the guillotine captivatingly illustrates the disturbance of a relation between the rats and scientists, and more broadly between rats and men. A friend and colleague, Koen Beumer, has recently published a fine article on these relations. He demonstrates how over the past century the rat underwent various translations, from being venomous gutter dirt to becoming a pet and much-appreciated laboratory technology. It is an ambiguity that struck also poet, broadcaster and author Ramsey Nasr, who during a recent field trip to Tanzania found rats to be redefined and re-drawn multiple times. If to some they were pets, to others they distributed diseases, and while to biology students they were objects of dissection and living databases, to an NGO in the neighbourhood they were most useful alive, to be trained to detect diseases or landmines. The appearance of the rat in these instances as a blank canvas on which to project its meaning may be taken to support what Beumer distinguishes as a process of domestication, and the fascinating figure of a rat guillotine as its ultimate expression.