Grow Your Own

'Just as a tree has no need to carve wood, so assembler-based production systems would have no need to carve their products; they would make them true to form in the first place, atomically perfect ... There will be no need to kill animals in order to have meat. Why not have a brainless beast who sits in a kitchen cabinet, one that grows fresh meat and vegetables as a tree grows apples?'

- K. Eric Drexler, 'The Coming Era of Nanotechnology,' in The Materials Revolution (1988)

Recent developments in nanotechnology mean that scientists are now able to control in detail the design and production of materials and organisms. The brainless beast suggested by Drexler ten years ago is now a distinct possibility, and this potential is beginning to seriously undermine our common-sense understanding of the terms 'apple', 'beast' and 'kitchen cabinet'. Where does stuff come from now? Materials engineers can fabricate matter on spec by precision-tuning the placement of atoms to achieve desired qualities like elasticity, tensile strength, or melting point. Atoms are sprayed onto a substrate according to a pre-determined pattern, and over time, what wasn't there before gradually comes to exist as a chunk of something with an unprecedented set of properties. Granted, this chunk is rather small, and takes a good deal of time to construct: according to science writer Ivan Amato, at the end of a year, it would still only span a centimetre. Given the time and incredible precision involved - a square centimetre can have as few as three atoms out of place - why bother to make 'raw' materials at all? Why not grow the thing itself - a kitchen cabinet, for instance, or an electric guitar? The field of materials research has for some time shared with genetic engineering an attitudinal shift, from starting with what we find (discovery), to starting with what we want (design). The paradox is that what we want is often constrained by what we already know, raising issues of form and content. This limitation was made strikingly evident by the form of one of the most celebrated nano-sculptures: the nano-guitar with strings 100 atoms thick.

Last year, Mark Schoofs reported in the Village Voice that researchers at the Maryland Institute for Biotechnology are considering an idea that could be a short-cut solution to the problem of declining fisheries and increasing world hunger: growing fish flesh in the lab in the shape of fillets. Medical laboratories have been growing epithelial cells (fields of skin) for decades, and this year a 'totally human' artificial artery was created from three separate kinds of human tissue cultures that were then combined like a jelly roll. Experiments with self-healing tissue and regeneration of limbs, not to mention Dolly the cloned sheep, are astounding developments in our capacity to design and manipulate living matter. While last October's reported cloning of headless tadpoles that initiated the idea of brainless bodies as production sites (producing organs and other body products), this fillet project leaps over the idea of an independent being altogether, reducing 'animal' to 'food' - a wholly utilitarian product - while maintaining allegiance to form. As a friend noted, the phenomenon of urban dwellers 'not knowing where their food comes from' would become academic - it wouldn't have come from anywhere, having been grown in the lab exactly as it looks in the store, sandwiched between polystyrene and cellophane.

Meat production facilities have already conceptually transformed their chickens, cows, or sheep from animals to products, so this idea is only a further development, and perhaps a more 'humane' one, since the question of whether baby calves have a soul would be solved if veal was grown in a dish (or would it?). The accompanying logic is that this kind of biotechnology would allow fish to be just fish (not food) and swim freely in the seas. This may be unlikely, given the only force that begins to counter pollution of the oceans is that of commercial fisheries. There is, too, an aesthetic question to pose the Maryland Institute: why grow fish 'in the shape of fillets'? Why should this product be 'anatomically correct' if it is already 'atomically perfect' (i.e., not only tastes and feels like, but is, mackerel)? Why grow muscle in a certain configuration to look like the bone has been removed, if it never had to be there in the first place? Why not a cone, a sphere, or a fancy pagoda, not carved or cast but genetically engineered to grow in that shape?

When I called Professor R.B.H. Chang at Northwestern University's Materials Research Center, I wondered how someone involved in nanotechnology saw his work in relation to artmaking. You give me a list, he said, of desirable attributes for a sculptural material and we will make it for you (or, tell you how much it will cost to make, as I think he meant). His question hit me like the sound of one hand clapping. What would 'the' perfect sculptural material be? Slippery (like mud), light (like foam, or egg white), blue (like certain butterflies, a reflected rather than pigmented blue), sliceable (like a slab of potassium, or sulphur), friable (like dry bread), smooth (like plastic), foldable (like canvas), flexible (like silicone), translucent (like hair gel), with a visible grain (like wood, or the scales of a fish), absorbent (like a communion wafer), non-toxic, water soluble...? Even putting aside the assumption of a singular material that could be used in flexible ways for traditional modes of casting, carving, or modelling (which is, I think, what Professor Chang had in mind), placing an order for a new material tweaks some of my dearly held beliefs. Sculpture used to be understood as a responsive activity, a process of engaging with materials to find out what they can do - not telling them. If the promise of nanotechnology comes to fruition, artists will be forced to confront the limits of their imagination. Is it possible to conceive of a material that does not already exist? What would you request?