A touching experiment: Tissue culture, tacit knowledge, and the making of bioart

Abstract

In this paper I present an experimental project carried out at The University of Western Australia's art and science organisation, SymbioticA. The paper looks to the embodied practice of learning to make bioart through consideration of the tools and protocols required in the making process. In so doing, the paper traces through the process of “making” by attending to the sense of touch in the laboratory. As an analytical guide, I work through Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge, which I approach through a focus on the sense of touch, to consider the ways in which proximate knowledge is generated at SymbioticA between artist, objects and subjects. This is knowledge that not only emerges to enable the experimental project, but which also re‐works it. Such an approach provides mechanisms for close consideration of the various actants with which knowledge is generated. In so doing, I offer a post‐phenomenological account of embodied practice in the space of the laboratory to think through the roles of the somatic senses and non‐human others, as well as artists themselves, in the acquisition of knowledge at SymbioticA. Deploying an experimental project as research method is, I argue, a valid methodological manoeuvre for geographic studies into experimental spaces such as the laboratory as it enables unforeseen lines of inquiry to emerge through “doing.”