Automated bioMEMS chip filling and handling process on the brink of physical/emotional stability. Addresses issues of sexual repression, loss of identity and unintuitive restraint in the clean lab.
Showing:
"SouthestNET: Techno", Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ 12/17/05 - 5/20/06.
Pictures, Video, Brochure and more at:
http://www.oleblue.com/leuprolide.htm
The life of the high tech cleanroom research and development engineer is one of constant restraint. When working with micro and nano-scale technologies, one must be painstakingly careful not to damage the devices; this means keeping everything free of particles (hence the clean and aseptic rooms and suits), preventing any vibrations (using vibration isolation tables), maintaining ambient conditions, and implementing extreme restraint in handling. The extent of physical exertion involves tweezers, microscopes, mouse clicking and constant meticulous calibration. Your hands become dainty and weak from the latex gloves, your skin turns a Victorian white, your muscles slowly atrophy. Working on the micro-scale, unable to use any real bodily force, you lose touch with your primal desires; your sexuality shrinks down to the scale of your work; hence the title, Aphanisis, a term first used by Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, to describe the fear of losing one’s sexuality. --Tristan Shone Tristan Shone’s sculpture Aphanisis is a re-creation of a micro-automation bio-tech system common to many engineering clean rooms. The robotic system handles and fills microscopic capsules called Bio-MEMS chips. At the company Shone worked for as a mechanical/automation engineer, the chips were filled with Leuprolide, a drug for treating prostate cancer. Implanted in a patient’s body, the programmed chip releases the drug at timed intervals. Filling these chips is an extremely meticulous and frustrating process that must be carefully calibrated; a needle must line up perfectly with a tiny hole and cannot puncture the bottom of the chip, and the exact amount of the drug must be dispensed precisely. While Shone re-created this process, his machine attempts to make violent and unrestrained motions, gasping for a chance at instability and sexual freedom. To make the actions more visible, Shone uses LabVIEW, a software that displays a magnified, detailed view of the filling process, as is done in an actual automation and robotic lab. The magnification on the computer screen accentuates the anxiety and physical restraint in this microscopic repetitive action. This highly constructed closed circuit generates a feeling of futility as the image of the machine failing to do its job appears over and over, battling the control system that is governing it’s actions. In Aphanisis, Shone alludes to issues of health and control, a dynamic teetering precariously in a world in which multinational pharmaceutical companies wield enormous power. A sense of foreboding disempowerment and over control from the corporate hierarchy led Shone himself to abandon engineering in favor of making art that is critical of these issues. The repressive clean room experience of his past is in a sense re-enacted and turned back on itself in his perpetually malfunctioning machine. Ironically, the fact that the machine is making a drug for prostate cancer adds a message of sexual dysfunction and emasculation—a direct challenge to the conventional image of the engineer as a powerful figure in society. |
