Chaos and Control

Daily we are inculcated with the technical need for sterility, precision, and control in the pursuit of creating bio art/synthetic life, genetic twiddling -partly i guess this is to minimize the huge financial and environmental cost of this sort of work and partly to adhere to scientific rigor.

Apparently this is how we can obtain outcomes which illustrate or prove a biological concept!! However there is another rather large conceptual disjunct going on for me in the lab, which keeps re presenting itself in different ways.. eg:

- I tried to post a blog missive on Tuesday titled “Isolation and Transformation” and it oddly disappeared in the lab computer, then when i rewrote and posted from my iphone , it appeared online. Victory..- then i went to edit some appalling spelling and pressed save, and only the title mysteriously remained. Too tired from info overload to think more about it, the moment and motivation to post was lost.. information was obstructed in translation..
- In the process of dissecting a dead fish to try to remove the spinal cord and some good meaty muscle tissue to grow a tissue culture on polymer scaffolds, i discovered it was a pregnant dead fish full of little baby fishies, still in yolky sacs, which may have been alive even tho its parent was dead, as the fish had been at room temp since its demise from natural causes in a fish tank earlier that morning. Its deadness was incubating life..
- After a heated discussion on whether the definition of life was dependent on a plant animal etc ability to make conscious choices or to suffer pain, I dislocated a rib from my thoracic spine simply by sleeping in a bad position. unconscious choices produce pain and suffering..

As I tend to think and work in a creatively chaotic way, which i perhaps mislabel “artistic temperament”, making sense of it all by pulling concepts and materials from random locations as above either in a studio, on the net or from disparate streams of cultural knowledge and perspectives. i have difficulty seeing a linear controlled objective, leading to a defined monocultural outcome, as creative.

I do recall however that in art school in the 1980s that we were taught to draw and paint and develop realist 3d work..ie do it “properly” -learn a set of skills – before we could be “creative” and break rules.. (unfortunately i never drew again after art school – that properness killed the joy in it for me..) For me being clean, having one objective, being patient,brings out rebellion..

Now I’d always thought random acts, chance couplings (in a very scientific sense), odd juxtapositions,networked systems, imperfection, junk dna, dark matter, chooks and cows in the one field etc, promote diversity, create resilience, enable survival. That a level of chaos and chance was necessary to create newness, to mutate, to evolve..

So as a beginner in this arena im wondering when and how one gets to be fanciful or frankenstinian? how long does it take before you can slap few things together and just see what happens? Or does this ever happen ? Is biological experimentation too dangerous to play with in that way ?