The reader may wonder where M. has gone. I am myself curious as to why the concerns of this Page 2 of the project are apparently so different to Page 1. In a sense, however, the artist reserves the right of awkwardness during the research basis of their work. While I'm trying to keep to the remit of research, which is in keeping with the platform of its presentation, the Research Catalogue, I might just as well refer to the work's process. Between the process and the result there's a gap of distance, I might say. But why should such a gap involve distance? Focusing on the example in question, I've moved in my thinking, manifest as visual-material process as much as possible, from the project's beginning as Page 1 to the present point at the end of Page 2, although certainly not the end of the project. However, the very break of pages of the Research Catalogue creates a disjuncture in the continuity between the more figural, ancestral emphasis of Page 1 and the present Page 2's emphasis on the cellular. Between the start of the project, represented by the first inclusion in the project's Page 1 and this closing note in Page 2, time, knowledge through reading, the drift of such knowledge as interspersed objective and subjective, intervenes, constrains and conditions materials, working methods and skills' particularity, and limitations cause a linear movement in which one initiative eclipses, alters and moves forward another. The idea of spreadsheet of this Page 2 is to suggest oscillation amidst a process, rather than forward-moving evolution, yet still one cannot circumvent the tendency of forward movement of time. The gap of distance is, in a sense, this process or research basis of the project taken in bulk and spread out on a table, as it were, to see what one has, before committing to something that might be more of the character of discovery, or finding, that might suggest its own and different movement towards completion.
I have this as itself an example, with the still images, texts, and video clips of the process of a piece of drawing-based work as it develops towards the end of this chapter, before being folded back, as it were, to the point where it's reproduced, below, below the page's brief introduction above. The work is at this stage unfinished, yet, as may be the experience of many drawing and painting-based artists, there are things about it, to use a phrase that might come to others' minds, that cause one to wish to somehow apprehend such qualities, to move forward with those rather than what one senses will have to be a disruptive negation of them to continue towards finish; the beginning point from which finding has taken over.
How can I have preempted this situation? Apart from the experience gained from many repetitions of this aspect of the working process that feels frustrating, part of the method of this present unfinished drawing will be what, unknown to the reader, is a structure and syntax that's much the same as my previous recent works. Each of those works also contains a narrative that's in part content particular to projects and in part processual. Suffice it to say about such a process, which I mean in this instance is working method – materials and material combinations – at this point I could place clear plastic sheeting over the time of the present layer shown below, with the advantage of then drawing on it in the form of smeared oil paint. The idea in mind is of Petri dishes. Whether these will work or not, I won't know until I've tried, through their representation oscillating over the present suggestion of cellular community, which is one of the keywords with which the viewer of the video clips will know that I was working. Can you, the reader, see this, however; those clear glass or presumably plastic flat dishes for cultivating biological cells held over the present drawn analogies to mutating cells – another keyword – that, I'm tempted to say excruciatingly, both offer the cell analogies into their presence as flat dishes and clearly range above what's underneath them? This paradox between spatial logic and conflation of surface tendencies is of course a formal and conceptual tendency of Modernism, but may be found also in drawings from the Baroque period where the artist is suggesting through strewn marks, as it were, the movement of a figure from one point to another. While in Modernism this is a movement in-place – to allude to a comment by Deleuze (2004, p.41), citing the artist Francis Bacon, of ‘…a movement “in-place,” a spasm…', and which is interesting from the point of view of Bacon's allegience, arguably, to the Baroque, the movement I have in mind as seen in Baroque drawings is lateral, between left and right, and visa-versa, but moves from something already formed, the start of the process, towards that which it will become, although arguably remaining with greater allegiance to the start than the finish. This is what I think I mean by gap of distance: the start is never a blank slate, although in a new project, such as this before stage of the Chapter 1's referenced ancestry project, one is usually not able to see much of what preceded the start, and the movement of the process is towards that which is on the brink of forming, or re-forming; the start of finding.
I'm curious at this point: it's not so much where M. has gone, as whether I will indeed bring the Petri dish images over the top of the drawing's present circumstances, and so integrate a move more commensurate with finding into the project, or deliberately terminate the latter at this unfinished stage. In the context of quantum physics, one reads that the observer of any physics experiment cannot be subtracted from the observed system, and such observation inevitably charcterises and delimits the nature of the observation (Bohm, 2002 p.169; p.174). That is to say, the mechnaism of observation rather than any subjective view of the human observer. One may assume that similar mechanised observational circumstances affect biologists' investigation of the cellular. In the present context, however, by referencing this point made by Bohm – and Heisenberg also (2000, p.22) – I'm hoping to suggest that what the reader/viewer has access to in and as the exposition, is artistic research in a process of unfolding, as the work itself. The project presents the gap of distance up to a point that may begin to be commensurate with finding.
This Page 2 of the project in and as its before stage concerns the production and mutation of cells that begin with short annotations of the content of Page 1 formatted to look like cells, what's left of the annotations after their formatting after their being subject to coffee staining then isolated as text, and then their further formatting and re-working as mutating cells. As mutational, the artistic process here concerns not so much destroying the presenting combined textual and visual material as developing it through transformation. The emphasis is on cooperation. According to Ball (2020, p.202), '...cells display the kind of responsiveness that looks like foresight, intelligence, collaboration. It is this "looks like" that holds the tension about how we think of identity and autonomy in life'. In the artistic context that has at this time enabled comparison with biology, the identity in question has concerned family near-ancestors that are imagined, and in turn imagined, by the fictional character initialled M., which distances the images from any possible direct relationship to me. This fictional emphasis is part of the autonomy of the visual-material and textual practice that has used coffee staining and its liquid oscillation with other materials, in some cases also turning them liquid, as both a metaphor for the ancestry narrative and as a key operational medium of the project.
Figure 40: Cellular Community first state of drawing. Coffee staining, ink, acrylic, attached filing cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 120cm © Michael Croft
Ball, P. (2020) How to grow a Human: Reprogramming Cells and Redesigning Life (first published 2019) London, UK: Harper Collins
Bohm, D. (2002) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. (First published 1980) London; New York, NY: Routledge
Deleuze, G. (2004) Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation. (First published in French 1981) London; New York, NY: Continuum
Heisenberg, W. (2000) Physics and Philosophy. (First published 1962) London; New York NY: Penguin
Details, variable dimensions, of Cellular Community first stage of drawing. Coffee staining, ink, acrylic, attached filing cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 120cm
© Michael Croft
Father – subject to great-grandmother
pointiness trait 5
Contingent visual-material refs
genetic traits – gradually formed
and passed on through generations
Introduction
1
Call for Drawing – Genetics &
Identity
i3S Institiute of Investigation and
Innovation in Health – Porto University
cells behave cooperatively –
self-organisation into pattern and shape
Caffeine and Mitochondrial DNA
4 beginning ancestral record with
great-grandmother
corrugated cardboard –
observed top narrow dimension –
Also looks like mitochondrial DNA
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community – am suggesting that
the corrugation is the cell community –
the cardboard's material make-up with
organism
Continuation ancestral record with
father
6
corrugated cardboard – looks like mitochondrian
observed top narrow dimension
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community
collaborative community of microbial
non-human cells
Grandfather – mother's side
7 (maternal line)
descendant of Akha hill-tribe
S.E.Asia
Denisovan – sister group to Neanderthal
dogs – hyenas Neanderthals went
to Europe –
humans behind hyenas Denisovans to Asia
humans behind hyenas
as scavengers before
inventing tools
Mother - mother's side (maternal
line)
9
Termites reference (fungi)
roundness trait – genetically
inherited
Termites' re-processing of fungi, passed through system as faeces then re-eaten, among
other things such as compost, grass,
leaves, roots
Continuation ancestral record
with mother
10
corrugated cardboard –
observed narrow dimension
microbiome – constituted by genes
of host and its symbiosis
How can the visual-material process
embody this?
A Fictional Protagonist
Momrey
2
Demographics origins of human
species and also
coffee
(15thc)
East Africa – Ethiopia
Sketched Verisimilitude
a wedding photo – coffee-stained,
leaving four likely descendants
(great-aunt still not referenced)
Great-grandmother, father's side (maternal line)
3
ref. to Cameons' The Lusiads
Adamaster - Cape of Good Hope
Adamaster a
giant who's lying down
created
Cape of Good Hope
two regions – Africa/S.E.Asia
pivotal to Momrey's idea of
origin:
x human origins
x coffee
Beginning of ancestral record with
8 mother
corrugated cardboard – looks like mitochondrion
observed top narrow dimension
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community
collaborative community of microbial, non-
human cells
microbiome – inherited from mother + others
during infancy
Details, variable dimensions, of Cellular Community second stage of drawing. Coffee staining, ink, acrylic, attached filing cards, on crumpled tablecloth paper, 100 x 120cm
© Michael Croft
Continuation ral record
with mother
10
d –
narrow dimension
microbiome – constituted by genes
of host and its symbiosis
How can the visual-material process
embody this?
with
8 mother
ed ca looks like mitochondrion
erved dimension
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community
collaborative community of microbial, non-
human cells
microbiome – inherited from mother + others
during infancy
ecord with
father
6
looks like mitochondrion
dimension
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community
collaborative community of microbial
non-human cells
Grandfather – mother's side
7 (maternal line)
escendant of Akha hill-tribe
S.E.Asia
enisovan – sister group to Neanderthal
gs – hyenas Neanderthals went
to Europe –
humans behind hyenas Denisovans to Asia
as scavengers before
inventing tools
9
genetically
inherited
re-processing of fungi, passed through system as faeces then re-eaten, among
other things such as compost, grass,
leaves, roots
ntroducti
1
Call for D Genetics
i3S Institiute estigati
Innovation in He
cells behave cooperatively –
self-organisation into pattern and shape
4
Also looks like mitochondrial DNA
blurred boundaries between organism
and cell community – am suggesting that
the corrugation is the cell community –
the cardboard's material make-up with
organism
This is not so much a problem, as almost a statement of fact as to the awkward nature of art practice approached as research, in this case concerning the fact that the image detail on the left is a statement of a process, the emphasis of which has, itself, been on the self-same process. Such process can best be seen in its unfolding in the video clip above, Mutating Cells 3 and 4.
Having said this, the point I would wish to make is that the left-hand image detail would not come out looking like this if I had not been recording it at the same time. While the aforementioned video clip is indicative of how all these image details have materialised, I now require them to be considered in their own right as finished, albeit as details. The character of their becoming, as a process that unfolds through time, has been lost in their still-image capture. This is an inevitable ambiguity until or unless the work is shown as video only, the latter of which should ideally also have audio that speaks both author and viewer through the process. (See Closing Notes)
The above text titled 'Transcript of Mutating Cells 3 and 4' shows what the enunciation of such spoken audio elements look like when transcribed as text.
So this, cell three, Alamastor, a giant, whose laying down, creating the Cape of Good Hope, in the context of human coffee, origins–– a-human-ha–– human origins and coffee origins. . . . From here. . . from here. . . morphed to here. . . . So I was reading the reverse I was reading from the morphing. . . to, the cell that it’s morphed from. . . cell three. . . . Simally similarly. . . also looks . . . mitochondrial DNA . . . blurred, between organism, and cell . . . suggesting that . . . cell community . . . material makeup . . . and the rest is obliterated . . . from the, starting cell here, cell four . . . . So reading in the reverse, to what it morphs to . . . . which is a kind-of . . . mutation . . . . So cell three, and cell four . . . obscured by . . . the . . . imploded rectangle . . . of the action camera . . . which I’m drawing round here . . . . So this is a, abs–– obstructing, condition . . . which I can only indicate to you . . . as an image . . . . While it obstructs my vision to the extent that I’m having to look either side of it . . . which I . . . find interesting in what I’m having to do . . . in relation to what I’m having to do . . . I can only show this . . . in the work as an image . . . but its an obstruc–– obstructional image . . . which in this case . . . cuts right through the middle, of the mutation from, cell three . . . and the mutation, from cell four . . . to these new . . . micro-cellular events . . . . I’ve done the similar already done similar already . . . from, the starting cell one . . . to the mutation, mutating cell one . . . and from the starting cell two . . . to the mutating cell two . . . and the . . . obstruction over the top of them . . . by the imploded rectangle of the action camera . . . the–– And apart from this . . . there is the . . . framing . . . of this, blue circular frame . . . of my glasses . . . two sides imploded into one . . . . This–– which creates a circle . . . which as I look at, fragments . . . . As I look from right to left . . . behind the, clear plastic goggles . . . towards the frame . . . the frame fragments . . . .
