Transgenic Mouse Wet-Lab Immersive Hands-On Bioart as Research Data Goals
During our i3S residency, many artistic ideas were considered. Here is a list of the ideas that came up. Some are conceptual. Some were exhibited. Some have potential for the future. Some are just ideas that came up. Actually a lot of these ideas were done, debated or begun and some of these ideas are still in development:
- Doing a creative analysis or poetic review of the software and online databases involved as an online compendium that feeds the conceptual nature of the actual mutant colonies of these mice worldwide.
- Developing a crazy flowchart of the entire facility that could actually become an infographic, an animation that showed the facility over time with looping matings and births and deaths and tests and whole life cycles over time with all the complexity and comparisons to factory efficiency, death camps, zoos, human urban and suburban centers, hospitals and software code as poetic analogies.
- Crafting a healing salve for the irritated skin of the mice that were waxed to test a hair regrowth topical creme for people suffering from alopecia.
- Developing acronyms for the animal facility management software developed at i3S
- Developing animal enrichment devices for laboratory mice
- Developing some artistically inspired behavioral experiments for mouse conditioning, enrichment and testing
- Develop a Protocol of Artistic Enrichment for Scientists. Actually enriching the scientists through the use of free improvisational jazz and abstract action painting
- Creating some transgenic mouse lines for art, as art and not for science. This includes: what it would take to technically order mutant mice from i3S commercial services as a business proposition, what kind of ethical assurances and legal certification it would take for i3S to ship live transgenic mice to an exhibition space or bioart based housing unit, how much it would cost and. what kind of training the artists would need to come to another i3S residency and participate, hands-on in the making of these mutant breeds? The order form and debate might make a nice art and science crossover debate.
- Finding the gene for scatological paraphilia and making some mice or rats transgenic for fecality only so the sentinel mice or rats that protect the facilities many colonies would not have such stressful and adverse reactions to having their food mixed with the entire facility’s excrement.
- 3D scanning and modeling of the Animal Facility mouse housing, microinjection/cryogenic storage room as well as the behavioral testing areas.
- Doing an expose’ on the sexual politics that are implied by an experimental animal breeding facility.
- Having a funeral for mouse embryos
- Preserving mouse embryos like Egyptian mummies in lime, myrrh and salt.
- Making an ink that has mouse embryos in it for people to use to sign or sketch with an ink pen into a book or pad of public record. This leaving of a trace on paper with embryo ink for public interaction art was realized. Mix with microinjection and micro-enrichment of the mouse embryos during the initiation of transgenesis (with Duerme Duerme Ladino Language Sephardic Jewish lullaby referencing euthanasia and/or cryogenic storage as types of deep sleep referencing the tainted ink, the dank repercussions, the sadness and care, the timeless traumas of being.)
- Analyzing the need for comparative genomics to insure genome stability in transgenic mice by exploring the origins of kabbalistic numerology. This is about accuracy checking emanating from a time before printing presses when scripture was hand-duplicated. But it is also about the process of finding the failsafe checkpoints to be specifically important sites (even magical sites) in the text/genome instead of just rando-checks for accuracy in translation.
- Paintings or drawings from the photos not allowed to be posted or from memory of processes not allowed to be documented. Surgery/Implantation, Embryo Dissection/Primary Stem Cell Acquisition or Pluripotent Organoid Explantation
- Some rant about covid and nasal turbinates and cocaine and helping further science and fight disease… in the style of Swimming to Cambodia by Spaulding Gray.
- 12 ACE-2 Humanized mouse heads on a silver platter
- Understanding the CrispR Knockout software and other transgenic modeling software to be able to use it properly to design mutant mice and eventually germline mutant humans.
- Making a thorough accounting of the results of the residency on the i3S website
- Dreams of musical accompaniment like covering Donna Summer’s ‘Ring My Bell’ to backup egg collection along with saxophone jazz for the revealing of the uterine horn and cryogenic referencing through the standard of every gay piano bar, “Baby, Its Cold Outside”.
- Hippocampus dissection reflections on memory poetry jam
