Gary Cass has been running a few workshops for SymbioticA residents. On Monday we did an electrophoresis gel workshop. We took a plasmid and cut it with restriction enzymes and then ran the DNA on a gel to work out how long the fragments were. If you do this with a few different restriction enzymes [...]

Another one of my bone cleaning experiments was to give a bone to the Scientific Director of SymbioticA, Stuart Bunt, to take home and put on an ants nest. It seems like they did a pretty good job except parts of the bone also went mouldy in the process. I hoping they managed to clean [...]

In addition to my other SymbioticA projects that I have written about, this one is an investigation of the effects of vibration on cell sedimentation in tissue culture. It also alludes to the relationship between sex and artificial reproduction and to the fact that the sex industry and the biotech industry have interesting parallels in [...]

I have been away the past week in Sydney attending the New Constellations conference at the MCA (and doing a spot of shopping cos lets face it Perth is a little lacking in this respect). I found it to be a slightly strange conference – it had an uncertain focus. It brought together a really [...]

I was watching a show on SBS last night about female war correspondents and I had a moment (as I often do) of longing for possible lives that I have not lived. There was something about being in the midst of survival, of precarious life, of sudden death, that seemed so much more real than [...]

And just for posterity a picture of my desk:

I spent yesterday cleaning out my bone maceration tank and oh my god it was so stinky that even I of the iron stomach felt a little queasy. I also cleaned out all the bone marrow from inside the bones and got most of the remaining connecting tissue off the outside. Then I put them [...]

Here I have some pictures of some of my other explorations at Symbiotica. When I showed my DNA film to Marie-Pier Boucher (a Canadian anthropologist/philosopher in residence at Symbiotica at the moment) she said “I didn’t know that DNA looked like a condom”… This film was made by disolving Na-DNA from salmon sperm, which you [...]

Well finally I return. Just finished the last bits of moving house and got hold of a camera so I can put up some pics of work in progress at SymbioticA. In order to overcome the the problem of long time lags in the process of working with material transformation I have started up a [...]