on 'knowing' versus 'knowing about' + haptic epistemology

In considering hands-on work and haptic intelligence, both in a lab and creatively, I've been thinking about the difference between knowing something, and knowing about something. I'm concerned with knowledge generation, or as it is known in academic circles, epistemology. My thinking around epistemology is along the lines of contact, touch and working with something in a practical, hands-on way as a way of knowing something versus reading about something and thus knowing about it. I see a problematic highlighted by this distinction, and that is the problematic of certain educational approaches. In academia, far too often I think, students know about things because they read about them, but don't often know things in the sense that I'm referring to: not haptically nor experientially. A different educational model, that of the technical/community college, the lab, or the art studio, where technical skill is valued and practiced, provides an opportunity for students to know something. I call this haptic epistemology. 
The difference between knowing (haptically) and knowing about can be illustrated thus: people read news or watch it on TV or read/watch it on the Internet. People learn about wars, strife, murder, mutilation, shooting sprees, etc. to know about them and what they do to bodies. But many of us do not know them because we haven't personally experienced these horrors. We do not bear the scars of flesh wounds or PTSD from the experience. I'm not advocating for knowing war, but I'm illustrating the distinction: we can't say we really know something when we haven't experienced it firsthand.

Likewise, a professor at UWA told me an anecdote recently about how he had to fail one of his students. The student failed his exam because he knew about the bodily systems he was working with as a medical student, from reading his text books. However, when it came to physically handling those same bodily systems, he didn't recognize them. He didn't know what he was holding and looking at, nor how to treat it. You see the critical difference.

Some artists have become the same. Art schools have all but been swallowed by academia, becoming mere departments in the overall academic system. I've seen far too many artists just stop making work and become enmeshed in philosophy and history of art to the extent that an art PRACTICE becomes utterly stunted and superseded by talking about art instead of actually making it. The conversation alone becomes the focus, instead of the work inspiring the conversation.
I want to give a practical example from my own experience. The recent funding I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was based entirely on my ability to articulate in writing the philosophies and art histories supporting the work I wanted to do. I was not required to submit images of my previous or current artwork whatsoever, despite the fact that I'm working in visual art. I was not even required to address the materials I would use nor the objects that I would construct, in much detail. Materially and visually, it didn't matter. The framework for my proposal was scientific: evaluation methods and projected outcomes. Artists know that we don't really work this way. We don't necessarily work towards meeting a specifically-determined outcome but rather respond to materials and make adjustments along the way, with our final work often resulting from accidents, mistakes, and changing the approach.
This 'responding to materials' is a haptic process. It is an exploration of knowing versus a system of knowing about. Research methodologies are of two main kinds: bibliographical research (reading) and experimental (hands-on). The two can complement each other (and should), but I've demonstrated what happens when the research is top-heavy with bibliographical methodology and weak in experimental. Talking replaces doing.
As a person with a background in adult education, both formal theoretical training and (mostly) practical learning, I am a firm believer in hands-on learning, in not blathering on too much at students (the old 'open-head, pour-in-knowledge' model of the 'sage on the stage') but rather in providing students with opportunities for taking responsibility for their own learning, for doing their learning and then knowing something instead of just knowing about it.
This is an important argument to make for my current work, which engages with haptic intelligence, process and epistemology, from the perspective of generating knowledge through my own art/sci creations, as well as observing the knowledge and communication that happens in a biological system via cell culture. I'm not working alone in my projects - the agency of the biological systems to determine the direction in which they wish to grow, change shape, die and leave me with nothing is something I need to acknowledge, respect and know.


  

the altruism of biotechnology + aseptic requiem

Woven catgut sutures on 3D printed ABS loom, now enculturated with 3T3 cells. Loom & needle printed at Alternate Anatomies Lab with Stelarc.

It struck me last night (as I was attempting to hand-weave the above miniature cloth of surgical suture thread--which is, it turns out, decellularized cow/sheep gut--within a sterile laminar flow hood, touching as little as possible, gloved and gowned and sprayed down repeatedly with ethanol, and using sterilized tweezers to attempt to hold and manipulate my miniature tools to do the weaving), the deep contradictory nature of employing a handcraft technique to a laboratory process. Or is it?

Surgeons still stitch their patients up by hand as far as I know. Skilled textile and flesh artists they are! The below diagram of minor surgical stitches is something I find fascinating, particularly the vertical mattress stitch.

Anyhow, I am doing biological weaving - something that hasn't yet been done in either the scientific or textile arts worlds, to my knowledge. Perhaps the creation of a diagram is warranted. Using suture thread of gut is perfect for my work with the cell cultures because it naturally deteriorates in about 90 days, long enough for the cells to take over the structure. The gut thread maintains its original tensile strength for approximately a week. It will be interesting to watch my weaving degrade and change as the cells work away at forming colonies on it.

3T3s are my best first test cells to use for the woven scaffolding because they grow like weeds. 3T3s are connective tissue cells. I now have five healthy flasks of 3T3s that I grew myself, after receiving a gift flask from a fellow artist-researcher here at SymbioticA, Soichiro Mihara from Japan. Soichiro afffectionately refers to us as 'cellmates' now. Soichiro has been treating his 3T3 cultures with low levels of gamma irradiation in order to disable their genetic ability to reproduce. I went with Soichiro last week to the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, where we used the gamma irradiation tank. My purpose there was to sterilize my miniature looms and tools with very large doses of gamma irradiation (>25kGy). This was an experimental method for sterilizing my looms because I can't sterilize them by autoclaving--the 120˚C steam would warp the looms--and I can't sterilize them by UV radiation because the ABS plastic they're printed of is initially UV cured when it comes out of the printer, so futher UV radiation will deteriorate the material. Alas, what I discovered when attempting to sterilize using gamma irradiation is that the irradiation vault we had access to is set permanently to a low level of radiation and in order to irradiate my items to the level required for sterilization, they would have to be irradiated for 11.5 hours continuously. I just couldn't use the machine for that long. So, failed effort. I settled on ethanol sterilization, even though it too degrades the material that the looms are made of, but not to the extent that it will ruin them. So, it is the best option out of my available options. The absolute best method would be cold gas sterilization, but I don't have access to those facilities.

Here are some images of 3T3s from the digital microscope:

I named my first 3T3 culture after my grandmother, one of my 'cell parent' donors from my crowd funding campaign.

 

Everything is pink in the flasks and dishes because the cell media (food) has a pH indicator added to it so that it is easy to tell if the culture is unhealthy (too acidic with ammonia or too basic) or not. I am pleased, since I really like the pink as an aesthetic component.

I've thawed and plated my osteoblasts that I received from Audrey Chan, the PhD student and researcher at the QEII Hospital, and they are healthy and happy, I'm thrilled to report. This is a pinnacle moment, as just last week I euthanized every miserable, dying and otherwise useless cell culture I had in the incubator. This includes the historical SymbioticA pig wings cells, proving that a moment in history cannot be brought back to life. Essentially, I started from scratch again last week, with 3T3s as my saving grace. I was extremely nervous thawing the osteoblasts, because they are my last shot at being able to grow bone while I'm here--my last access to bone cells, really, since my primary sourcing directly from bone did not pan out in the end. Anyway, my osteoblasts are thriving in regular D-10 media, with a new batch of bone soup on the front burner (not literally but the metaphor is nice).

When euthanizing my last batch of cultures, I took a moment--the 30 seconds or so that it takes for the bleach to do it's killing job--to thank the cultures for all they had taught me in the last two months. And then, I wrote a new lab protocol for 'Aseptic Requiem for Cell Cultures'. The protocol is below:

The requiem (or service) for cell cultures is appropriately brief and timed and convenient with the rest of process. This is done purposely to highlight the level of emotional distance or complete lack of sentimentality when dealing with life in a laboratory environment. The idea of an aseptic requiem is ludicrous. I'm also toying with that false dichotomy between science and religion by calling it a requiem, which is essentially a Catholic mass for the dead. Anyway, I did say a nondenominational prayer of thanks to my cell cultures before disposing of them because for me, acknowledging and reflecting on the life that I'm working with is important for maintaining my sense of humanity.

I also thawed my extra C2C12s that I had initially grown and they are doing their thing in their flasks. The previous flasks of C2C12s I had essentially starved to death because I had been feeding them differentiation medium, which is only 2% fetal calf serum versus the 20% they thrive on. Differentiation medium turns the C2C12s from single nuclei cells into myotubes, or joined together, multiple-nuclei cells. I probably should have been feeding them regular media (10%) after they differentiated but Ionat was traveling abroad for three weeks and I had no guide. Interestingly enough, Ionat just returned from the Viconti lab in Boston, Mass. and learned a new protocol that is similar to my project with using silk (only it's not woven). My silk is now a beautiful milk chocolate brown after dyeing it with my sterile-filtered, autoclaved eucalyptus bark dye. Not only is it beautiful, but it is now slightly antibacterial from the eucalyptus, which can only be a good thing in a cell culture.

One last consideration--something I've pondered in the last few days: the donors who became 'cell parents' during my crowd funding campaign are by extension, 'cell donors' even though the cells have not come from their own bodies. They are surrogate cell donors, of C2C12s, 3T3s and now mouse osteoblasts. I will attempt to grow new embodiments from this disembodied life. The altruism is manifold. What about altruism in science? 
In watching a documentary about Ayn Rand and her (I think, sociopathic and reactionary against communism) philosophy centred on Individualism, as well as its link to the development of technology, the crash of the financial world, and essentially the general degradation of society one might argue, I think there is a place in the world for altruism, and perhaps in biotechnology. More to unravel for next time.