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Introduction:
This Living Book is partially living – it is about the Semi-Livings and Partial Lives, tissues without a body .While the biological body cannot survive without organs and cells the latter two groups can survive in technological body, removed and separated form their original biological body. Living fragments of biological bodies, lab grown life- reconfigured, mixed and remixed, reappropriated, recontextualised and instrumentlised. The semi-livings require different epistemological and ontological understandings as well as considerations and, by extension, a different taxonomy of life. The Liminality of this type of technological approaches to life can lead to a form of fetishism - Neolifism.
The Semi-livings and Partial lives are a new class of objects/beings, in most cases they constitute of living and non-living materials; cells and/or tissues from a complex organism grown over/into constructed scaffolds and kept alive with an artificial support. They are both similar and different from other human artefacts (homo-sapiens’ extended phenotype) such as constructed objects and selectively bred domestic plants and animals (both pets and husbandry). These entities are living biological systems that are artificially designed and need technological intervention in their isolation, construction, growth and maintenance.
Semi-living and partial life can be seen as interchangeable terms. There are however some nuances; The Semi-Livings entities are usually shaped to forms that are not recognisable as being part of any Body in particular, partial life can be recognised as parts (i.e. an ear, or tissues) of a whole of a living being. Symbolically, in the continuum of made life, the semi-livings entities are nearer to the constructed part of the scale, while objects of partial life are approaching the grown.
The "population" of what can be referred to as partial life and semi-living entities proliferated to a vast amount of cells and tissues that are living and growing outside of the organisms from which they originated. A rough estimate would put the biomass of living cells and tissues, which are disassociated from the original bodies that once hosted them, in the millions of tons. In addition, there are tons of fragments of bodies (cells, tissues, organs) that are maintained in suspended animation in cryogenic conditions ( http://www.frozenark.org/ ) . All of this biomass requires an intensive technological intervention to prevent transformation to a non-living state. These beings are rarely referred to as subjects; their existence (supported by the techno-scientific project) is indicative of the transformation of life into raw material that manifests itself in utilitarian and economic value.
This edition of Living Book will try “to give them a voice” by presenting their history, and some examples of their use (and existence) with the aim to raise the problematics they may presents which are a reflection of current society: A society which attempt to cope with a growing gap between the rapidly increasing knowledge and technological ability to manipulate life, and the long rooted values towards life which are still lurking behind; a society that may be facing its own extinction as a result of ecological crisis and in urgent need to reconsider the Judo-Christian view of dominion over “nature” in favour of a more post-humanist agenda.
Having control over life, its processes and the environment as whole may have always been the basis for human endeavour. What changing are the attitudes towards life resulting from the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation. A choreographed interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should excite and disturb but is also easily forgotten. As the perception of the level of control over the matter of life increases, it seems that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems; life is becoming bio-matter, waiting to be engineered.
Historical perspective of the Semi-living:
Precursors of Semi-Livings: whole bodies sustained alive in techno-scientific “bodies”:
With the industrial revolution and the age of the machines coupled with the birth of systematic understanding of life, the late nineteen century ushered the birth of biology as engineering, and the union of life and technology. The introduction of baby and poultry industrial incubators coincided with the birth of tissue culture and the appearance of the semi-livings. The mix of life and technology manifested itself in strange ways: 
http://www.slpowermuseum.com/equipment/cypher/cyphersManual.pdf
http://www.archive.org/details/poultrygrowersgu00cyph
The Story of the development and acceptance of human incubators (incubator can be seen as a techno-scientific body or ‘epi-body’) and especially the way it was introduced to America, is a fascinating story which highlight how technological augmented life, even if human babies, needed to be articulated and negotiated before they “transformed” from objects of entertainment into subject of care.
The incubator was initially ‘modeled after [the] chick incubator by Stéphane Tarnier. The “American father” of neonatology was Dr Martin A. Couney, a European physician who promoted the idea of mechanical incubators as an aid for the prolonging and saving lives of the neonatal, who otherwise would have died.
The creation of the ‘need’ for a device that will ‘passage’ the infant from a fragile ambiguous zone into becoming a person is a complex story. One impetus for developing the incubator was to stem population decline. There was a need not only to save these otherwise doomed ‘lives’, but also to strengthen the mother-child bond (which was directly related to infant survival). The initial design of the incubators was already geared not solely for the purposes of biomedical function but rather as an aesthetic device to make certain meanings out of the technique and the life it sustains; to generate empathy towards the bare life on display.
The way these incubators were promoted in Europe and the USA was through public fairs, in which the enthusiastic public had to pay for admission to watch the show of the ‘Infant Incubators with Living Infants’. Couney had a permanent incubator show at Luna Park on Coney Island, New York, from 1903 to 1943 and was instrumental in Cornell University’s New York Hospital opening the city’s first neonatal ward.
Why was a successfully working technology, which saved so many lives, so slow to be accepted by the medical community, while it was thriving within the public entertainment realm? Some say that Couney never intended the technology to become widely available as it would end his ability to profit from it by charging the public to come and see the living display. It may have been that the context of the Luna Park exhibition and the showmanship prevented the medical establishment from accepting this technology. These are interesting and valid points, however we suggest that such vexed cases, in which liminal beings are in a transition towards not just bare life but also scientific and moral classification, have to be articulated initially via aesthetic rather than scientific modes of presentation. A similar story is evident in the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ which was a prelude to the natural history refined taxonomy.
In a sense the neonatal technology has assisted in ‘classifying’ premature babies in the realm of the living and of the human, and therefore as persons. As a result, the context where these new lives dependent on their epi-bodies had to be dramatically changed – from the realm of entertainment to that of the bio-medical.
Today the new cabinet of curiosities is being constructed/grown again in the form of new technologically-dependent and yet to be classified lives, created in scientific laboratories by emerging technologies. These new entities do not conform or fit with the natural history museum classifications let alone with our traditional understanding of what is life and what is alive.
http://www.neonatology.org/classics/nic.nih1985.pdf
A report from a symposium commemorating Child Health Day originally presented October 7, 1985, National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland titled: The Care of Premature Infants: Historical Perspective in Neonatal Intensive Care, NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE - A HISTORY OF EXCELLENCE”.
History of Tissue Culture:
The idea of the cellular body dates back to Aristotle (340 BC) and Theophrastus (320 BC), who both described animals and plants as being made up of unified elements; blood and sap, flesh and fibre, nerves and veins, bone and wood. Later scientists such as Malpighi (1675) and Grew (1682) theorised that these elements are literally ‘woven’ (tissé) into tissues of still finer elements. In 1667, Robert Hooke, using one of the earliest microscopes, observed cell structures in a thin slice of cork. He coined the word ‘cell’ as the structure reminded him of a honeycomb.
Parts of bodies have been sustained and grown, cultured, for more than a hundred years now. This is not 18th Century Galvani style reanimation by external power, but the continuation of life processes and functions of parts that have been removed from bodies; be it organs, tissues and cells. Fluttering attempts of keeping body fragments alive, were performed by Willhelm Roux in 1885 who sustained embryonic chicken tissue alive for short periods of time, and Ross G. Harrison’s growing a frog nerve cell outside of the body in 1907.
The on-going existence of living fragments, semi-living, appeared with the more systematic and sometime occultish practice of Alexis Carrel, who cultured cells, tissues and later organs from 1913 to the 1940s.
Carrel was a well-known and respected scientist who advanced the medical field in new techniques of suturing arteries as well as transplantation and tissue culturing, and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912. He was also a complex and controversial figure who pushed the ontological implications of his discoveries to some extreme and morally questionable places, far from its strictly bio-medical or even scientific realms into ontological, political and ethically questionable.
http://jem.rupress.org/content/15/5/516.full.pdf
On the permanent life of tissues outside of the organism by Alexis Carrel
May 1, 1912 // Journal of Experimental Medicine vol. 15 no. 5 516-528
The Rockefeller University Press,
Carrel, A. and Burrow, M. T. (1911) Cultivation of tissues in vitro and its technique. J. Exp. Med. 13:387-396. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at www.jem.org.
Carrel, A. and Burrow, M. T. (1911) An addition to the technique of the cultivation of tissues in vitro J. Exp. Med.14:244-247. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at www.jem.org.
Carrel, A. (1912) On the permanent life of tissues outside of the organism. J. Exp. Med. 15: 516-528. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at www.jem.org.
Carrel, A. (1913) Contributions to the study of the mechanism of the growth of connective tissue J. Exp. Med. 18:287-298. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at www.jem.org.
Witkowski, J. A. (1979) Alexis Carrel and the mysticism of tissue culture. Medical History.;23:279-296. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1082475/pdf/medhist00098-0025.pdf
In 1935 publication, Man, the Unknown A conviction view of science, combined with religious, even mystical declarations, led him to speculate on the great problems of human destiny. Carrel theorised that mankind could reach perfection through selective reproduction and the leadership of an intellectual aristocracy. Through scientific enlightenment humanity will be free from disease and will gain long life, and spiritual advancement. Carrel suggested gas chambers as a solution to eradicate unwanted elements in society. ‘Eugenics’, Carrel wrote in the last chapter of Man, the Unknown, ‘is indispensable for the perpetuation of the strong. A great race must propagate its best elements’. The book, a worldwide best-seller translated into nineteen languages, brought Carrel international fame.
Men, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel http://quantumfieldtheory.org/ALEXIS%20CARREL%20Man%20the%20Unknown%201935.pdf
Was it the realisation that life is much more complex than previously thought which led Carrel to mysticism?  What lead him to Eugenics? One can argue that the experience of developing partial life forms, which contradicted the Christian/humanist perception of the whole body, drove him to engage with the occult. In short, the ontological questions thrown up by Carrel’s scientific experiments ironically resulted in his mystic and eugenic tendencies. However, rather than looking at tissue culture or partial life as a metaphor for the pure and perfected life we would like to explores partial life (or semi-life) as a hybrid, dependent and far from perfect entity.
Early tissue culture in the UK:
http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/2/225.abstract
The tissue Culture King:
In the ‘The Tissue Culture King’, written in 1926, Julian Huxley reflects/articulates some of the anxieties surrounding early tissue culture experiments. ‘The Tissue Culture King’ is a story about a western scientist, Hascombe, who is captured by an African tribe. In order to save his life, he employs his skills in the service of the African king. He decides to merge scientific principle and techniques with the religious tendencies of the tribe. Hascombe then employs tissue culture techniques to create ‘The Factory of Kingship or Majesty, and the Wellspring of Ancestral Immortality’. The idea is to culture parts of the kings’ (or other ancestors’) bodies and by that increase the biomass of the king, enable the people of the community to own parts of the king, and to physically nurture, care and worship it. Furthermore, this technique will ‘increase the safety, if not of the king as an individual, at least the life which was in him, and I presumed that this would be equally satisfactory from a theological point of view.’ Hence, the fragment stands for the whole.
Huxley considers the wide implications of the disciplines of tissue culture and associated epistemological revelations by looking at the option of mass production and the economic and spiritualpotentials of the use/abuse of scientific knowledge and applied technologies and the social sensitivities of the society.
The Tissue Culture King by Julian Huxley
in Great Science Fictions by Scientists, Groff Conklin Ed., Collier Books NY pp.147-170 1946
http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/tissue/index.html
Plasticity: Cell lines, HeLa Cell line
It was not until 1948 that a continuous line of cells, originating from the one organism was established- the strain L mouse cell line which is still widely used in laboratories. The strain-L was followed three years later by the first continuous human cell line – the HeLa cells. 
HeLa cells are an immortal cell line that was derived from cervical cancer cells taken from a black American woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died from her cancer in 1951. The cells were propagated without Lacks’ knowledge or permission. The case reveals many social and political paradoxes resulting from developments in biotechnology; such as that a person (just like any other animal) cannot, according to the law, own her own tissues; the commercial rights of ones’ own tissues; and issues of race, class and gender which are heightened especially when matters of profit are considered.
http://www.atcc.org/ATCCAdvancedCatalogSearch/ProductDetails/tabid/452/Default.aspx?ATCCNum=CCL-2&Template=cellBiology
Cell culture forensics by Stephen J. O'Brien*
http://www.archivesofpathology.org/doi/pdf/10.1043/1543-2165-133.9.1463
10.1073/pnas.141237598 PNAS July 3, 2001 vol. 98 no. 14 7656-7658
http://www.archivesofpathology.org/doi/pdf/10.1043/1543-2165-133.9.1463
Brendan P. Lucey, Walter A. Nelson-Rees and Grover M. Hutchins (2009) Henrietta Lacks, HeLa Cells, and Cell Culture Contamination. Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine: September 2009, Vol. 133, No. 9, pp. 1463-1467.
Tissue engineering:
The realization that cells from complex organisms can not only be sustained alive outside of the body, but also grow, divide and function came in the 1910s when Dr. Alexis Carrell begun his experiments in a technique he termed as “tissue culture”. However, it took more than eighty years to realize that cells can be grown in three dimensions to form a functional tissue that has the potential to replace missing or failing body parts. This development came from the collaborative work of a surgeon, Dr. Joseph Vacanti, and a material scientist, Dr. Robert Langar. They developed a system that uses specially designed degradable polymers that act as a scaffold for the developing tissue.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8493529
The Techno-scientific Body:
Maintaining and growing living fragments, the semi-livings, involves the creation of a surrogate technological body (or epi-body) in which to grow the cells. This technoscientific body provides conditions that allow the cells to grow and proliferate. In the most basic terms this includes providing the right temperature, nutrients and other substances and in some case substrates that promote cell growth. These fragments are unquestionably alive, in that they are metabolising, growing and multiplying. They continue at least some of the processes and functions needed to be “alive”.  In the last couple of decades, and only in some cases, the technoscientific body and the semi-livings form a cyborgian entity, in which function and feedback makes it a responsive and effective unit.
The growth of three dimensional “functional” tissues is no longer confined to the biomedical world. As other aspects of regenerative medicine such as stem cell, therapeutic cloning and cell engineering are increasingly taking dominance over the field; technologies that where originally developed for tissue engineering in the 1990s seems to be used for non clinical ends. Tissues and cells from complex organisms are grown in large quantities for the production of biological substances, liver cells are being grown as toxicity sensors, different cells from different sources (bodies and organs) are grown together in micro-fluidics chambers to make “animals” on chips as an alternative to animal and human drug testing, in-vitro meat is seriously considered as an alternative to traditional meat production, and an increasing number of artists, designers and architects are working with living tissues as part of their practice. 
The development of living toxicity sensors; bioreactors for liver cells: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mctbl/BiotechBioeng2002_LiverChip.pdf
A microfabricated array bioreactor for perfused 3D liver culture by Mark J. Powers1,2,†, Karel Domansky1,2, Mohammad R. Kaazempur-Mofrad1,3, Artemis Kalezi2,4, Adam Capitano1,2, Arpita Upadhyaya1,3, Petra Kurzawski1,2, Kathryn E. Wack1,2, Donna Beer Stolz5, Roger Kamm1,3, Linda G. Griffith,  in Biotechnology and Bioengineering , volume 78, issue 3, 237-353,  2002
Self-assembled microdevices driven by muscle:
Nature Materials 4, 180 - 184 (2005) http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v4/n2/full/nmat1308.html
Self-assembled microdevices driven by muscle, Jianzhong Xi1, Jacob J. Schmidt1 & Carlo D. Montemagno1
Cell and Organ Printing 2: Fusion of Cell Aggregates in Three-Dimensional Gels:
THOMAS BOLAND,1* VLADIMIR MIRONOV,2 ANNA GUTOWSKA,3 ELISABETH. A. ROTH,1 AND ROGER R. MARKWALD2. The Anatomical Record Part A: Discoveries in Molecular, Cellular, and Evolutionary BiologyVolume 272A, Issue 2, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.a.10059/pdf
Regarding current research into the production of in-vitro meat; ironically, the authors of this book have begun the research into the possibility of growing meat without the need to slaughter animals already in 2000 as part of a residency at the Tissue Engineering & Organ Fabrication Laboratory at Harvard Medical School in 2000. The first steak was grown from pre-natal sheep cells (skeletal muscle), harvested as part of research into tissue engineering techniques in utero. The steak was grown from an animal that was not yet born. However ,a major complication arising from the victimless meat endeavour as a manifestation of the techno-scientific project is that it may create an illusion of a victimless existence. First, in order to grow in vitro meat, there is still the need for a serum created using animals’ blood plasma. Although there is some research to find alternatives for this ingredient there is no solution in the near sight and animals (mainly calfs or fetal bovine) are sacrified for that ingredient. Second, all the “costs” concerned with the running of a laboratory, i.e fossil fuels burned, green house gases produces, water and trees consumed, miles traveled and the waste created. Third, there is a shift from ‘the red in tooth and claw’ of nature to a mediated nature. The victims are pushed farther away; they still exist, but are much more implicit.
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/datar_and_betti.pdf
Possibilities for an in vitro meat production system by Datar, M. Betti
Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies 11 (2010) 13–22
P.D. Edelman, D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov and J.G. Matheny. Tissue Engineering. May/June 2005, 11(5-6): 659-662. doi:10.1089/ten.2005.11.659. In vitro cultured meat production
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/Invitro.pdf
Plasticity: Cell fusion, Regenerative medicine and Stem Cells:
Different cells from different bodies (regardless of sex, race, age or animal species) can be co-cultured. Furthermore in some cases the cells fuse. Cell fusion is ‘the nondestructive merging of the contents of two cells by artificial means, resulting in a heterokaryon that will reproduce genetically alike, multinucleated progeny for a few generations’.[i] When an undifferentiated stem cell fuses with a mature differentiated cell, the resultant cell retains the mature cell phenotype.[ii]
Cell fusion among different species and different families along the evolutionary tree has been carried out successfully since the 1970s. One example, the fusion of Xenopus and carrot cells, was written about in 1978:
Cultured Xenopus cells have been induced to fuse with carrot suspension cell protoplasts using PEG at high pH in the presence of high Ca2+. Ultrastructural observations confirm unambiguously that the fusion bodies seen by light microscopy are animal/plant cell heterokaryons. The cytoplasmic events occurring in these Xenopus/carrot fusion products during the first 48 hours of culture provide evidence for their viability.[iii]
The phenomenon of cell fusion, besides its practical applications such as a method for passing on specific genes to specific chromosomes, compelled Oxford University Professor Henry Harris to write about his experience as a pioneer in cell fusion techniques.[iv] Harris’ 2005 article opens with a somewhat romantic quote:
There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to earlier arrangements, get along, whenever possible. This is the way of the world.     
The new phenomenon of cell fusion, a laboratory trick on which much of today’s science of molecular genetics relies for its data, is the simplest and most spectacular symbol of the tendency. In a way, it is the most unbiologic of all phenomena, violating the most fundamental myths of the last century, for it denies the importance of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things. Any cell – man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect – given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it. Cytoplasm will flow easily from one to the other, the nuclei will combine, and it will become, for a time anyway, a single cell with two complete, alien genomes, ready to dance, ready to multiply. It is a Chimera, a Griffon, a Sphinx, a Ganesha, a Peruvian God, a Ch'i-lin, an omen of good fortune, a wish for the world.[v]   
Appendage Regeneration in Adult Vertebrates and Implications for Regenerative Medicine, Jeremy P. Brockes* and Anoop Kumar Science 23 December 2005:
Vol. 310 no. 5756 pp. 1919-1923 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5756/1919.full
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/cell+fusion.
Soft Substrates Promote Homogeneous Self Renewal of Embryonic Stem Cells via Downregulating Cell-Matrix Tractions by Farhan Chowdhury1, Yanzhen Li2, Yeh-Chuin Poh1, Tamaki Yokohama-Tamaki2, Ning Wang1*, Tetsuya S. Tanaka2,3*
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015655
Biopolitics of plasticity:
Living Differently in Time: Plasticity, Temporality, and Cellular Biotechnologies by Hannah Landecker in Culture Machine, Vol 7 (2005) http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/26/33%3E
Semi living Art:
One role that art can play is to suggest scenarios of “worlds under construction” and subvert technologies for the purpose of creating contestable objects.  This role of art makes the emergence of the Semi-Livings as evocative art “objects” and the multi levelled exploration of their use so relevant.
The Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) which was set up by us (Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr) in 1996 to explores, develops and critiques the use of tissue technologies for artistic ends. TC&A was practically interested in investigating human relationships with the different gradients of life through the construction/growth of a new class of object/being – that of the Semi-Living. These are parts of complex organisms which are sustained alive outside of the body and coerced to grow in predetermined shapes. These evocative objects are a tangible example that brings into question deep rooted perceptions of life and identity, concept of self, and the position of the human in regard to other living beings and the environment. We are interested in the new discourses and new ethics, epistemologies, and the ontology that surround issues of partial life and the contestable future scenarios they are offering us.  While doing so we relayed on and developed new ways of growing tissue using and subverting scientific tools and techniques from almost a hundred years ago to the present.
Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human by Deborah P Dixon. Transactions of the Institute of British GeographersVolume 34, Issue 4,
Towards a new class of being –The Extended Body by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/6/dt/eng/catts_zurr.pdf
Big Pigs, Small Wings: On Genohype and Artistic Autonomy by Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts in Culture Machine, Vol 7 (2005) http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/30/37
Aesthetics of Care Ed. Oron Catts  ISBN: 1 74052 080 7 http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/publication/THE_AESTHETICS_OF_CARE.pdf
Neolife:
As discussed briefly earlier, one of the more interesting interpretations, and definitely the most post-anthropocentric perspective of the HeLa cell line’s existence, comes from a scientist, Leigh Van Valen. Van Valen suggests controversially to his peers that the HeLa cell line is an embodiment of a new taxonomical branch– it is a new species of its kind. Due to its ability to replicate indefinitely, and its non-human chromosome number, Leigh Van Valen controversially described HeLa as an example of the contemporary creation of a new species, Helacyton gartleri,  named after Stanley M. Gartler, whom Van Valen credits with discovering ‘the remarkable success of this species’.[VI] His argument for speciation depends on three points:
• The chromosomal incompatibility of HeLa cells with humans, which makes them non-human.
• Their ecological niche, which may be technologically dependent, but we can assert that many species, including humans to a large extent, are by now technologically dependent.
• Their ability to persist and expand well beyond the intentions and imaginations of human cultivators.
Scientific knowledge leads to shift in the perception of life; life is becoming a raw material, while biology is turning into engineering. Whenever life and technology mix, odd things happen.
Where does lab grown and engineered life fit in human taxonomy? In tissue banks that provide cell lines, one starts to find all sorts of oddities: cells that have three different organisms as its origins, or fused cells of human and mouse origin. These cells are only classified by catalogue numbers or by very odd names. This is neolife.
More and more museums have started to collect fragments of life; frozen cells that represent the whole. Here, the technology of collection is converging with the technology of making strange. The old ways of privileging form (staffed idealised forms of animals) are been replaced with information and fragments.  New life forms are entering collections, but the collection is not complete - the ‘odd neolife’ is not in our natural history collections; the lab-grown, lab modified life forms are still absent.
Odd Neolifism is an updated cabinet of curiosities. Museums have conventions in displaying preserved life forms, and in this display, ideas about a progressive complexity of species are questioned. At the far end of this display we include the only living element—cell tissue within a bioreactor (a surrogate, technological body). These life forms are so abstracted from their source, and yet they are growing. Perhaps it is time to realise that we need to find a place in our ecology for Neolife.
http://www.tcaproject.org
http://www.frozenark.org/
Conclusion:
Some pattern, even if somewhat blurry and ever changing, may be observed which interwoven among the different examples of the semi-livings – the desire to sense as well as make sense of a situation that is post anthropocentric and the attempt to articulate the relation and interdependency of all living parts along the continuum of life and technology  through the intriguing and perplexing example of the in-between – the semi-living.This opens up new discourses about the different relationships we might form with these neolife and shed different light on our perception of life. These entities might become fetishised  or be our “natural-ish” companions, invading and replacing our constructed and manufactured environments with growing, moving, soft, moist, and care needing things.
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Revision as of 13:25, 4 September 2011

 

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Full Text

Introduction:

This Living Book is partially living – it is about the Semi-Livings and Partial Lives, tissues without a body .While the biological body cannot survive without organs and cells the latter two groups can survive in technological body, removed and separated form their original biological body. Living fragments of biological bodies, lab grown life- reconfigured, mixed and remixed, reappropriated, recontextualised and instrumentlised. The semi-livings require different epistemological and ontological understandings as well as considerations and, by extension, a different taxonomy of life. The Liminality of this type of technological approaches to life can lead to a form of fetishism - Neolifism. The Semi-livings and Partial lives are a new class of objects/beings, in most cases they constitute of living and non-living materials; cells and/or tissues from a complex organism grown over/into constructed scaffolds and kept alive with an artificial support. They are both similar and different from other human artefacts (homo-sapiens’ extended phenotype) such as constructed objects and selectively bred domestic plants and animals (both pets and husbandry). These entities are living biological systems that are artificially designed and need technological intervention in their isolation, construction, growth and maintenance. Semi-living and partial life can be seen as interchangeable terms. There are however some nuances; The Semi-Livings entities are usually shaped to forms that are not recognisable as being part of any Body in particular, partial life can be recognised as parts (i.e. an ear, or tissues) of a whole of a living being. Symbolically, in the continuum of made life, the semi-livings entities are nearer to the constructed part of the scale, while objects of partial life are approaching the grown. The "population" of what can be referred to as partial life and semi-living entities proliferated to a vast amount of cells and tissues that are living and growing outside of the organisms from which they originated. A rough estimate would put the biomass of living cells and tissues, which are disassociated from the original bodies that once hosted them, in the millions of tons. In addition, there are tons of fragments of bodies (cells, tissues, organs) that are maintained in suspended animation in cryogenic conditions ( http://www.frozenark.org/ ) . All of this biomass requires an intensive technological intervention to prevent transformation to a non-living state. These beings are rarely referred to as subjects; their existence (supported by the techno-scientific project) is indicative of the transformation of life into raw material that manifests itself in utilitarian and economic value. This edition of Living Book will try “to give them a voice” by presenting their history, and some examples of their use (and existence) with the aim to raise the problematics they may presents which are a reflection of current society: A society which attempt to cope with a growing gap between the rapidly increasing knowledge and technological ability to manipulate life, and the long rooted values towards life which are still lurking behind; a society that may be facing its own extinction as a result of ecological crisis and in urgent need to reconsider the Judo-Christian view of dominion over “nature” in favour of a more post-humanist agenda. Having control over life, its processes and the environment as whole may have always been the basis for human endeavour. What changing are the attitudes towards life resulting from the accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, mounting up with increasing speed and scale of manipulation. A choreographed interplay between hype and actuality is overlaid on a public that is bombarded with information that should excite and disturb but is also easily forgotten. As the perception of the level of control over the matter of life increases, it seems that whereas previously biologists were employing their understanding of engineering to the life sciences, now it is the engineers who force-fit engineering methodologies into living systems; life is becoming bio-matter, waiting to be engineered.

Full Text


The Frozen Ark Project
http://www.frozenark.org/

Historical perspective of the Semi-living:

Precursors of Semi-Livings: whole bodies sustained alive in techno-scientific “bodies”:

Standard of the World Cyphers Incubator Company Buffalo N.Y. U.S.A. Annual Catalogue published 1896
http://www.slpowermuseum.com/equipment/cypher/cyphersManual.pdf
Poultry growers guide for 1912, published by Buffalo, Cyphers Incubator Co.
http://www.archive.org/details/poultrygrowersgu00cyphDr Lawrence M. Gartner and Dr Carol B. Gartner, The Care of Premature Infants: Historical Perspective in Neonatal Intensive Care, NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE - A HISTORY OF EXCELLENCE, A Symposium Commemorating Child Health Day Sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Originally presented October 7, 1985, National Institutes of Health Bethesda, Maryland NIH Publication No. 92-2786, October 1992. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, Public Health Service National Institutes of Health. P.4
http://www.neonatology.org/classics/nic.nih1985.pdf

History of Tissue Culture:

On the permanent life of tissues outside of the organism by Alexis Carrel May 1, 1912 // Journal of Experimental Medicine vol. 15 no. 5 516-528 The Rockefeller University Press.
http://jem.rupress.org/content/15/5/516.full.pdf

Carrel, A. and Burrow, M. T. (1911) Cultivation of tissues in vitro and its technique. J. Exp. Med. 13:387-396. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at http://www.jem.org.

Carrel, A. and Burrow, M. T. (1911) An addition to the technique of the cultivation of tissues in vitro J. Exp. Med.14:244-247. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at http://www.jem.org.

Carrel, A. (1912) On the permanent life of tissues outside of the organism. J. Exp. Med. 15: 516-528. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at http://www.jem.org.

Carrel, A. (1913) Contributions to the study of the mechanism of the growth of connective tissue J. Exp. Med. 18:287-298. This article with photos can be downloaded free from the archives at http://www.jem.org.

Witkowski, J. A. (1979) Alexis Carrel and the mysticism of tissue culture. Medical History.;23:279-296. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1082475/pdf/medhist00098-0025.pdf

Men, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel, 1935, 1939 by HARPER & BROTHERS
http://quantumfieldtheory.org/ALEXIS%20CARREL%20Man%20the%20Unknown%201935.pdf

 

Early tissue culture in the UK:

Early Tissue Culture in Britain: the interwar Years, by Duncan Wilson, in Soc Hist Med (August 2005) 18 (2): 225-243. doi: 10.1093/sochis/hki028
http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/2/225.abstract

 

The Tissue Culture King:

The Tissue Culture King by Julian Huxley in Great Science Fictions by Scientists, Groff Conklin Ed., Collier Books NY pp.147-170 1946
http://www.revolutionsf.com/fiction/tissue/index.html

 

Plasticity: Cell lines, HeLa Cell line

http://www.atcc.org/ATCCAdvancedCatalogSearch/ProductDetails/tabid/452/Default.aspx?ATCCNum=CCL-2&Template=cellBiology

Cell culture forensics by Stephen J. O'Brien Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute, Frederick, MD 21702
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/14/7656.full.pdf

Brendan P. Lucey, Walter A. Nelson-Rees and Grover M. Hutchins (2009) Henrietta Lacks, HeLa Cells, and Cell Culture Contamination. Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine: September 2009, Vol. 133, No. 9, pp. 1463-1467. http://www.archivesofpathology.org/doi/pdf/10.1043/1543-2165-133.9.1463


Tissue engineering:

Tissue engineering by Langer R, Vacanti JP. In Science. 1993 May 14;260(5110):920-6.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8493529


The Techno-scientific Body:

A microfabricated array bioreactor for perfused 3D liver culture by Mark J. Powers1,2,†, Karel Domansky1,2, Mohammad R. Kaazempur-Mofrad1,3, Artemis Kalezi2,4, Adam Capitano1,2, Arpita Upadhyaya1,3, Petra Kurzawski1,2, Kathryn E. Wack1,2, Donna Beer Stolz5, Roger Kamm1,3, Linda G. Griffith, in Biotechnology and Bioengineering , volume 78, issue 3, 237-353, 2002
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~mctbl/BiotechBioeng2002_LiverChip.pdf

Self-assembled microdevices driven by muscle, Jianzhong Xi1, Jacob J. Schmidt1 & Carlo D. Montemagno1, in Nature Materials 4, 180 - 184 (2005) http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v4/n2/full/nmat1308.html


Cell and Organ Printing 2: Fusion of Cell Aggregates in Three-Dimensional Gels:

THOMAS BOLAND,1* VLADIMIR MIRONOV,2 ANNA GUTOWSKA,3 ELISABETH. A. ROTH,1 AND ROGER R. MARKWALD2. The Anatomical Record Part A: Discoveries in Molecular, Cellular, and Evolutionary BiologyVolume 272A, Issue 2,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.a.10059/pdf

Possibilities for an in vitro meat production system by Datar, M. Betti Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies 11 (2010) 13–22
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/datar_and_betti.pdf

P.D. Edelman, D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov and J.G. Matheny. Tissue Engineering. May/June 2005, 11(5-6): 659-662. doi:10.1089/ten.2005.11.659. In vitro cultured meat production
http://www.new-harvest.org/img/files/Invitro.pdf


Plasticity: Cell fusion, Regenerative medicine and Stem Cells:

Appendage Regeneration in Adult Vertebrates and Implications for Regenerative Medicine, Jeremy P. Brockes* and Anoop Kumar Science 23 December 2005:
Vol. 310 no. 5756 pp. 1919-1923
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/310/5756/1919.full
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/cell+fusion.

Soft Substrates Promote Homogeneous Self Renewal of Embryonic Stem Cells via Downregulating Cell-Matrix Tractions by Farhan Chowdhury1, Yanzhen Li2, Yeh-Chuin Poh1, Tamaki Yokohama-Tamaki2, Ning Wang1*, Tetsuya S. Tanaka2,3*
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015655

Living Differently in Time: Plasticity, Temporality, and Cellular Biotechnologies by Hannah Landecker in Culture Machine, Vol 7 (2005) http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/26/33%3E


Semi living Art:

Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human by Deborah P Dixon. Transactions of the Institute of British GeographersVolume 34, Issue 4,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tran.2009.34.issue-4/issuetoc

Towards a new class of being –The Extended Body by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/6/dt/eng/catts_zurr.pdf

Big Pigs, Small Wings: On Genohype and Artistic Autonomy by Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts in Culture Machine, Vol 7 (2005)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/30/37

Aesthetics of Care Ed. Oron Catts ISBN: 1 74052 080 7 http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/publication/THE_AESTHETICS_OF_CARE.pdf


Neolife:

http://www.tcaproject.org
http://www.frozenark.org/