Sanil V at Hence (un)Proven, KHOJ, April 2016

I meant to pose some very general questions, but seeing the artists’ work here I find that a
great number of these questions have been answered already. I hope everyone has a chance to
reflect and reconstruct based on their work — these works of art embody what we are to talk
about. I am going to begin by talking about questions that concern me as a student of
philosophy on the relationship between art, science, and technology, and maybe later we
could focus on what biology invites us to consider in this context.

We tend to think there is some essential connection between science,technology, and art. On
another side, we have what C.P Snow called the “two cultures”. I teach at a Technology
institution, and you have to be at an IIT or in some other engineering institution to see how
much contempt and animosity art and culture can generate. In some sense, where things are
divided, our tendency is to bring them together—like mind and body are divided, but in some
ancient Indian cultures, they were actually seen as one. We have to be very careful about
seeing any unity between art and science. Science deals with “truth” and, morality and art
are generally seen as something different from it, and I think such distinctions are good. We
do not want moral-religious authorities like our local guru or priest to clear our scientific
papers—we have committees deciding on ethics in science (and perhaps the scope and
competence of these committees is something to discuss as well), and similarly, we do not
want art to be subjected to moral considerations or cognitive constraints in any immediate
way. We know when MF Hussain painted a Hindu goddesses it became controversial.

There is some point in keeping science, morality and art separate, but at the same time, let us
look at the creative ways in which they are brought together in the works exhibited here.
Aristotle and Da Vinci worked across disciplines, and also the curricula in Medieval Europe
did not have the disciplinary boundaries that we have today. It is difficult to go back to that
point. What do we mean when we say that in these works art and science and technology
come together?

In his book Truth and Beauty, the Nobel laureate Physicist Subramanian Chandrashekhar
claims that both art and science converge in the quest for an orderthat is novel in some way—
it is a quest for novel and interesting patterns. The French mathematician Poincaré said, “The
scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and
he delights in it because it is beautiful. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which
comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.” And
this is from Heisenberg, another physicist, “If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great
simplicity and beauty—by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypothesis, axioms,
etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are
‘true’.”1

In fact, we often say science is about theories and about testing them through repeated
experimentation, and then proving them true. But, if you take any practicing scientist, they do
not simply give up on theories because there is counter evidence. People like Heisenberg
created counterintuitive theories. What allows them to create such counterintuitive theories
and also to stick to them? It is not that just because there is counter evidence or lack of

1Chandrasekhar. S, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Sciece, Penguine India,
New Delhi, 1993.
evidence they give up, but they work within the order that nature prescribes—God could not
have created anything that does not conform to it. It is summed up by Keats, “Truth is beauty,
and beauty is truth”.

Now, pardon me for the naiveté. If you look at any beautiful object—a tree, a flower—it
represents the Fibonacci Series2, or if you have a painting or any great structure, the Golden
Ratio comes in. If you watch Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, each section is structured
according to the Golden Ratio3. I am sure he did not sit and plan it, but that is the way it
turned out. .

This argument is no longer convincing to many artists because, as we know, modern art is no
longer about beautiful shapes and the like. What is the sense of order we develop, then?
Science works according to laws that allow you to predict nature, and why do you want to
predict nature?—to control nature. Science gives you the knowledge to predict nature. This is
what we call technoscience—scientific knowledge that is in the service of certain
technologies. Technology, as we know, is seen as applied science. None of these, I think,
hold any ground because this currently perceived relationship between science and
technology dates back only three or four centuries. We do not have the time to argue this out
here, but maybe we can bring it up later. Technology did not always need science. Can you
develop the best ships and structures without knowing the Archimedes Principle? Can we
develop steam engines without knowing the Carnot Cycle? Can we develop telescopes
without knowing the Snell’s Law? That is indeed how things happened. I suppose the only
way to acknowledge the relationship between science, technology, and industrial production
is to locate their relationship in history.

Some people respond to this predicament by aestheticising science itself. Today, a part of the
critical literature sees science simply as a story—one of the many ways of perceiving the
world. The moment you look at science as a story, it begins to look like art. If scientific
theories can be tested, and you believe in theory, then there has to be some relationship
between theory and the world—it is hard to live this relationship in a theory-independent
way. We are told that scientists go out in the nature and observe. There is a story of a
scientist noticing a chandelier oscillating, and it immediately occurring to him to measure the
oscillations. Do you think no one else noticed the chandelier oscillating? Of course, yes. It
probably did not fall within their theory of motion though. Observation is theory laden.
Knowledge is a construction, and what that means is that scientific knowledge is an
imaginative exercise. My mind can imaginatively see the bag with an inside even if I only see
the outside. Or I see a table with all of its sides even though I see only two or three sides. We
do not have to do guess work or to infer to perceive. Our perception itself is imaginative. We
also know science uses models and metaphors as part of its working.

All of this is to say that science is actually a very creative activity that requires imagination.
It allows us to look at science in the context of human culture and human society, but we
know there is a great scandal at the heart of this account. Wigner, the mathematician, said this

2 The Fibonacci numbers are the numbers in the following integer sequence, called the
Fibonacci sequence, and characterized by the fact that every number after the first two is
the sum of the two preceding ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number)
3 Two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to

the larger of the two quantities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio)

is the “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Sciences”4. Somehow,
mathematics seems to work—mathematics is not just an instrument that involves calculation.
It is very abstract, but it enters the equations describing the concrete world. As Galileo said,
the book of nature is written in mathematics. The role of mathematics is something like this.
Remember the story in which an apple fell on Newton’s head—it never really fell on his
head—these are all stories we construct. It falls on his head, he is able to think about it, and
make a connection with planets revolving around the sun. There is no immediate connection,
right? But mathematics allows you to project. When you have a new theory, you can actually
project the old theory as an approximation of the new theory.

Even though we fully grant that science is socially constructed and that it requires
imagination, it remains hard to wrap our heads around the fact that it is just one story among
many stories. We have to be fairly critical of this idea. You cannot escape the scandal of
mathematics.

In this struggle, we bump into the science of art—it is called aesthetics—where you can
theorise and predict in some sense. Some of you artists may have a problem with this
articulation, but if you look at the Indian tradition and others, every muscle movement in
dance is specified in detail. Even in the Western tradition you have great aesthetics texts. One
thing that aesthetics tells us is that even though art is in fact fiction, there is some power in its
falsity. Like Nietzsche says, we have art, so that we may not perish from the truth. Or, as
some Marxists say, art is an ideology. In his novels, Tolstoy created worlds in which he did
not reside. He lived in a bourgeois culture, but celebrated peasant life. In this process, as a
bourgeois who cannot escape being the ruling class, but talks about peasant life without
knowing or living it—a double lie is created. However, he also tells something true about a
class-ridden society. This idea that the lie has a power of its own is an interesting and
peculiar one.

The relationship between truth and lie, and uncovering a truth through lie in art makes this
process peculiar and interesting. As psychoanalysts say, there are two ways you can tell a lie.
If I am a very fat person, I can wear a vertical striped shirt, and I will fool you because I look
thinner than usual. Now, I can wear a horizontal striped shirt, where you will think I look fat
because I am wearing the shirt. So, you can spin a lie in sophisticated ways too.

Even if you look into Indian aesthetics texts, they play with fiction—they maybe fiction, but
they have great creative power. If you take something like the Chitrasutra on the origin of
Indian painting, it says, there were two great munis (sages) who were doing tapasya
(penance), and Indra was very scared of the power of their tapasya. So, Indra decided to send
two apsaras (dancing girls) to disturb them. When the apsaras reached there, to counter them,
Narayana, one of the meditating sages, took a slice of flesh off his thigh and created a woman
more beautiful than the apsaras and called her Urvashi.After their meditation was over,
Narayana gifted Urvashi to Indra. Now, the fiction was created to hit back at the claim of
beauty to seduce the artist. Or, take the Natyashastra. In the Natyashastra, the first play was
done because the four vedas were not making people into better people, and the devas
decided that a new veda has to be written. They wrote this story about the devas (gods)

4 Wigner, E. P. (1960). "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural

sciences. Richard Courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York
University, May 11, 1959". Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. 13: 1–14
fighting against the asuras (demons) and winning. They expected the real asuras to play the
role of asuras in the play. but suddenly the asuras turned back and said that they refused to
be part of a story that paints them in a negative light They tried to destroy the stage. That is
when the stage acquired a sacred presence, so that some of the characters did not turn against
it and destroy it.

Fiction always has some tension with reality. Another example, the Ramayana—there are so
many different versions of it. One of the versions, in my mother tongue Malayalam, Rama
was asked to go to the forest, and Sita wanted to accompany him. Rama dissuaded her saying
there were lots of dangers, wild animals etc., and that she should not come. They just could
not agree because she really wanted to go, and finally she said, “Look, in all other versions of
Ramayana, you have taken me with you”. She gets that power because she is a fictional
character. Art has power, not because it is a true depiction of reality, but it is indeed as
powerful as fiction

Now, many of the criticisms that we have against science and technology from the side of art,
were developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, starting from the Industrial
Revolution. Like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, where he showed the man as a cog in the
machine—new factories are coming up, new cities are coming up—and people are moving
out of the feudal lifestyle. So, the whole aesthetic form of the graceful universe collapsed and
went up as factory smoke. Here, you also find a critique of the ugliness of Industrial
Revolution. At the same time, there were exhibitions in the West, where they showcased
great artworks, both western and oriental. There was a great valorisation of the oriental life,
and we have all the familiar figures here—William Morris, Ruskin, critiquing science and
technology, and proposing a new aesthetics for industry. They had a great influence on
Gandhi,

There was then a search for aesthetic beauty for the modern age, but you could not go back to
the aristocratic forms of great, graceful beauty, but we did manage to extract beauty from the
very manufacturing process itself. The labour of making things created this idea of the
beauty of handiwork/craft. We had functionalism, which placed primacy on the form that was
derived from function. If you come to the IIT building, you will find, all the concrete ceilings
are unfinished—not polished nor painted. If you ask the students, they might say, it is some
lazy contractor failing to complete the work. But actually, it is the artistic form of
functionalism, where they did not want a Technology institute to conceal the marks of its
making. So that’s the kind of reasoning that was used. There was also a functionalist critique
of the ornament. They called ornamentation a crime. If you look at BioArt today,
ornamentalism is being rethought in very interesting ways. Then, Le Corbusier’s idea that a
home is actually a machine, and then minimalism, brutalism—these were all exercises in
extracting an aesthetic from technology.

Art can also become a critical force against instrumentalisation, bureaucratisation,

colonization of our knowledge. I just wanted to point out this idea of art being a form of
critique of science and technology. To recapitulate what we have said so far— technology
gives a medium to art; art can give form to technology through ornamentilisation; art can be a
critique of science and technology; and a fourth possibility is now being explored, through
BioArt,- Technology itself is now opening up new forms of experience.

So, given this picture, I want to talk about the relationship biology, technology, and art are
establishing today. Maybe I should go through three works of artists that I personally found
fascinating. The first is the work of the bioartist, Eduardo Kac. The work he created -a
fluorescent rabbit Alba , which he created combining rabbit and jellyfish DNAs. It is
luminous. Now, not only did he create a live, luminous rabbit, but also domesticated it. This
is interesting because domestication is one way we have been intervening in life for long. So,
it is not only the creation of a new genetic entity, but also its domestication. There is another
work he did—called the Genesis. He took the first line of the Bible and converted into Morse
code; he then converted that into a genetic code to be manipulated by an ultra violet source
controlled through the Internet. He then converted that manipulated genetic code back into
Morse code, which in turn was translated into English. So, you have one language and you
convert it into another and you show how they are related using a techno-bio medium. We
should also talk about the intervention of biology and technology in the construction of
language, to think about the relationship between technology and life itself.

Here is another work—this is a crazy work. This is the Brainus/Analolly, an anus made of
biopolymer tissues, which was then seeded with brain tissue and another one a brain made of
biopolymer, seeded with anal tissue. This is by Adam Zaretsky.

Stelarc, another great bioartist. —he created his third arm and then wired it into his thigh
muscles, and then he could write using his thigh muscles. There is another work, where he
developed an ear on his hand. Another one, where he suspended himself on hoops, and his
movement was guided by Internet traffic. One of the things that make us human is bipedality
and the way we stand, and this bipedal sense shapes our perceptual world and even the way
paintings are oriented. You know the struggles of the great artist Jackson Pollock, who had a
great problem with the verticality of the canvas. Stelarc proposed this sort of spider like
movement machine, and there is no immediate connection between the legs and the rest of
his body, which allows us to reimagine mobility.

What is important about Stelarc’s work is that, and he says, the “body has created an
information and technological environment in which it can no longer cope. This is sort of an
impulse to accumulate more and more information, which we are no longer able to absorb.
This is one of the challenges that make the computer necessary. Man needs machine simply
to absorb and retain what he cannot”. This is his proposition for what Technology is, “we
have created technology that far surpassed human capability; we have opened up the
possibility of life without humanity. The only evolutionary strategy I can see is an
evolutionary dialectic where technology is incorporated in the body, and a synthesis is
created between the organic and the synthetic”.

The last artist whose work I want to mention is the French Artist Orlan, and she has declared
herself Saint Orlan. She conducts a series of public surgeries and the scenes of this surgery
are available online. While the surgery is happening, she is reading online, and you can see,
that the brain is functioning. She wants to go back to the Baroque, Christian idea of the
reliquary where a part of the body is maintained as relics. These are the frightening images
where she conducts these surgeries. Through these relics of her aging body she is creating a
bio-history which might one day enable to think about immortality once again..

I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about what happens when biology and art come
together in this way to work on the life-technology combination. One of the things is that
there is an active reconsideration of science in relation to life itself, not science per se. I want
to make that distinction because philosophers of science often want to make profound
statements on science as if they know something about science which the scientists do not
know. Richard Feynman, the scientist once said, “Philosophy of science is to science what
ornithology is to birds”, so that is what it is and we have to be careful about making
generalisations.

Many of us did not take biology in school because we just had to mug up things, there was no
logic to it, but now there is an active incorporation of physics and chemistry, and also
probability and computer science which changes the logics it works on—the attempt is to
make Biology a scientific force of its own. I think this started with evolutionary Biology and
genetic theory, where a radical form of chance is proposed, where this chance cannot simply
be controlled or predicated using probabilities. A sophisticated form of machines and models
are needed in order to deal with random variations. The algorithmic processes and structures
of repetition, which can create absolutely new patterns, produce a new way of thinking about
science. Even the BioArtists are working with, playing on the question of variation. What
this is suggesting is that we need to focus on Bio-logic—as a logic that is grounded in life.
After all, biology itself is an outcome of the evolution of life!

Earlier we thought that technology was culturally situated. Now, we see a grounding of this
logic in the evolutionary process itself and that is where we need to secure it. Technology
seems to play a very important role in this Bio-logic—not simply as a tool—we need to think
about technology differently too. Technology is not just about optimisation, but also the
result and site of evolution.

One of the ways in which technology entered evolution is when man became erect, so you
had the hand and mouth assuming relative independence as they were no longer needed for
locomotion. Now, the mouth and hand were freed for speech and tool use. When you stand
up, your cortical fan can expand more and your organs can be functionally more
differentiated. There is paleontological evidence to show that there were regular shaped
flints predating man. So, you see when the hand is freed from locomotion, it is plugged into
an incipient regularity of tools. It is not that man evolved as mind or intelligence and then had
needs and devised tools. Before any such intentions and needs the hand was bio-technically
exteriorised into a milieu of tools. So, man evolved from his erect feet and not from his head
or mind. First you have the tool, then the handle and around them grew the hand! In other
words, technicity is prior to ethnicity. There was techne before any purpose. Culture is co-
original with technology. It is not that you have hands, handles, and then tools; it can also be
just as likely that it happened in the reverse order.

Bernard Stiegler5 a contemporary philosopher who thinks about the link between technology
and life talks about three kinds of memory—one is the genetic memory, the second one is the
epigenetic memory (of the nervous system), and a technological memory that is language,
tools, and machines. Not only computers and CDs but technological systems in general can
now also be viewed as sites of memory because it can be repeatedly used.. Anthropologists
argue that what happens with humanity is that evolution gave us technology, but technology
allows for evolution. So, human evolution is bio-technological. Technology is evolution
through inorganic material. Look at our lives with computers—we have to think of it as

5Stiegler Bernard, trans. Richard Beardsworth Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of
Epimetheus (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (No. 1), 1998.
evolution as well, which is why it is no longer sufficient to think in terms of genetic
evolution.

Today biology is bringing out a new intimate connection amongst art, science, and
technology. The contemporary enthusiasm surrounding this movement, in my submission is
what makes it momentous, not just because you have some interesting patterns or you can
look at them under a microscope or photograph them or you can create and manipulate life
forms. Other than that, what is conceptually interesting is that the emerging connection
between these three is not just instrumental.

Let me end here. We can now think about a hybrid human-animal-machine art. In fact, both
biology and technology are allowing us to reconsider the relationship between the human and
the animal through the medium of art. Earlier, we thought, to understand what it means to be
animal, is to have empathy, to have connectedness, but now we find more direct connections
through technology and art. I saw an artwork showing the shadows of penguins making
numbers on the floor—these marks are signs of a new language. This is not speech intended
as communication, but a language of life formation.

I think herein lies the possibility of a new semiotics; so far, we have asked, how do you know
that animals can think? How do you know they have minds? We are just anthropomorphising,
or projecting our concerns on them. Now, anthropocentrism is broken not just to feel humble,
but we have built tools, technologies, and imaginations to intervene in the continuum of life.
LifeArt/BioArt is a “monomaniacal” [borrowed from Louis Bec] activity, which consists of
fashioning and seeing life as a wholly expressive matter. Now, when we see the life process
itself as expressive and containing meaning that we channel through technology.

There was an interesting artwork from a Danish artist, who made a lamp that was lit by the
fish that hit the lamp. The light was proportional to the number of fish-hits and it also in some
way indicated water pollution. There is an expressive sign, but this expressive sign is
developed through the processes taking place. This is what Stelarc tries to state—producing
art that is contingent on process, and there is an interesting term that Bec uses—
“technozoosemiotic practice”.

Technozoosemiotic practice is where technology, semiotics, ethnology, zoology, cognitive

and computer sciences, creative and artistic practices meet. By intervening directly in the
genomic syntax of the living, biotechnological art, with the help of geneticists, aspires to
produce “constructs” (these are the artworks)— genetically transformed living organisms that
respond to specific tasks and take on ambitious poetic objectives. These can be called
“techno-teratogens”—these human, animal, and machine hybrid , which can also serve as a
means to think about evolution as a whole. Now, anthropologists and philosophers are also
arguing that it is impossible to conceive of evolution without thinking about the evolution of
life through inorganic matter seriously. Thank you.