Testing the Waters (2017)

Conceived by:

Kathy High and William DePaolo, DePaolo Lab, UW

Testing the Waters (2016) — Kathy High and William DePaolo, DePaolo Lab, University of Washington

“I want to talk about two things. The first is about institutional critique.”

February 2016. I joined a laboratory earlier this year. The head of the lab was incredibly welcoming. We met through a panel discussion. I asked if I might join his lab as an artist in residence. He said yes without hesitation.

As a result of that request I spent a month at USC at the Keck Medical Center as part of William DePaolo’s lab. Will specializes in gut biome, immunology, and ecology – my shared interests at present. He set me up in his lab as he would any participant. His team led me through their regular duties. I learned the protocols and politics of the lab.

Will asked what science I wanted to do and what art I wanted to make. I told him my wish to use my own body as a site of experimentation. And I also needed to create something more communal that involved people’s participation. After some discussion we had a couple of experiments designed using Will and me as subjects. These projects are still ongoing. I returned to continue the work in the DePaolo Lab in the fall. In 2017 Will moved to University of Washington (Seattle) where he is the Lynn M and Michael D Garvey Endowed Chair in Gastroenterology, Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the UW Center for Microbiome Sciences & Therapeutics (CMiST). Will was so excited about our alliance that he designed his new laboratory at UW including built-in gallery spaces for the display of art alongside the lab. Will completely understands the value of these cross- disciplinary conversations. He is a model for future art + science collaborations. This is our biofuture.

The second discussion is about openness and visualization.

Historically seeing the processes of biology have been accompanied the discipline. Biology has lent itself to the arts for both sonic and visual exploration with imaging capacity continuing into microbiology. Bioprocesses can be witnessed using more and more powerful microscopes.

How to watch your immune system work? 

At the DePaolo Lab, through our experiment Testing the Waters, I was able to see my own T-cells react to my own fecal matter. Will and I set up our experiment using body materials from me, the “sick subject,” and Will as the control – the “healthy subject”. The experiment was the picturing of my own body’s dramatic autoimmune reaction – cells turning against my own cells. Will had a theory that my blood immune system would react quickly and strongly to my fecal microbes, because he believed that my blood was introduced to the gut microbes much earlier when I first developed Crohn’s disease (some kind of leaky gut situation that develops). So we took my white blood cells and Will’s and introduced our fecal H2O and assays to the cells. Then I worked with lab technician, Kalisa Myers, to microscopically image the process over a couple days. In fact, there was an extreme reaction by my immune cells – and it was the first time I had ever seen my own body’s T-cell reaction. My cells reacted much more dramatically than Will’s cells did – and much more swiftly too. It was the first time I could see the way my over-active immune system works against itself and how it actually functions. There was something both poetic and frightening about the image. What looked like an angry black dot, was, in fact, the T cells taking over and breaking the other cells.

 There was something incredibly poetic in that image for me – enabling a new way to consider my health and dis-ease: I suddenly understood myself much more profoundly and also felt connected to the (dys)function of microbes. The image looked like a glitch, static in the system – trouble that happens over and over again – like some transformation.

The systems that allow over or under reactions can cause radical changes in our lives – and are mirrored in bodies, ecologies, climates and so on. And I realized that perhaps I am not “attacking myself” through my autoimmunity, but rather I am a mutant, preparing for another time. Or maybe caught in a past time where my body cannot catch up to the now? This one image made me see my biosystem with a more tolerant interpretation, situating even my ill health as part of a broader environmental entanglement.”

Excerpt from “Dear Bees and Microbes” essay by Kathy High in Institutional Critique to Hospitality: Bioart Practice: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Assimina Kaniari, GRIGORI Publications, Athens, Greece, 2017.