Curating Creation

FANTASTIC MAN

FANTASTIC MAN

FEATURE

Spider goats, alcoholic rats, and glowing zebrafish are all part of the collection at the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The man behind the museum, Carnegie Mellon professor

RICHARD PELL is a computer hacker turned artist turned social activist who uses the tropes and traditions of natural history museums to raise controversy about human involvement with nature.

TEXT BY MU-HWA KUO PHOTOGRAPHY BY MU-HWA KUO 35

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CURATING CREATION Pound for pound, the dragline of the golden orb spider is stronger than Kevlar.

If you take the spider’s silk and knit it, tugging on the resulting fabric will feel like tugging on a bike chain. Imagine, the applications of a Kevlar-strength tensile thread—featherweight body armor, artificial ligaments and tendons, even ecofriendly fishing lines.

Unfortunately for the revolution of military, medical, and water sport technologies, harvesting spider silk is a pain. In Madagascar, it took a team of eighty-two people four years and a million wild spiders to loom an eleven-byseven feet textile. For an ounce of the saffron yellow silk, you have to harvest four hundred spiders. Orb weaver spiders are also notoriously cannibalistic; it’s impossible to keep them long enough to harvest anything before they start chomping on each other.

So, we can’t farm spiders. But we can farm goats.

Opposite: The white rat has been systemically inbred since the 1800’s to create a reliable stand-in for humans during laboratory testing.

Which is why Nexia Corporations, having had success with producing pharmaceutical components in the mammary glands of livestock, decided to turn their attentions to creating spider silk from goat milk. Partially funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Nexia engineered a new species of Angora goats—one of which, named Freckles, is standing in the lobby of Pittsburgh’s Center for PostNatural History.

Freckles is a BioSteel goat. She started her life in a laboratory in Canada, just outside of Montreal. As an embryo, her chromosome was manipulated to include a gene from the golden orb spider. She can create, in her milk, the same substance that spiders produce in their abdomen, which can then be extracted and spun into threads. She is one of the earliest examples of a “biofactory,” and her kind is the only species to date that can produce spider silk in non-negligible quantities that isn’t—well—a spider. (Scientists have also experimented with bacteria to reproduce this coveted silk.)

She and her sisters were kept on a defunct Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York; this was where the military kept the B-52s during the Cold War, gassed up and ready to fly over the Atlantic with their nuclear cargo. When Nexia went bankrupt in 2009, the tribe was scattered, records were lost, and people stopped keeping track of which goat

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was breeding with which. A researcher from Utah State University managed to save some of these goats, including Freckles, bringing them to his university-run farm where the last existing BioSteel goats (on record) still live today.

Freckles is the first thing people see when they walk through the door of the Pittsburgh museum. She looks like a normal goat, nothing to hint at the technological breakthroughs behind her existence nor her jetsetting ways. Four feet tall, big black eyes, taxidermied and poised a la natural history museum diorama—the white pelted Angora goat, in a simulated natural habitat, astroturf under her hooves.

She is one of many geneticallyengineered specimens collected by Richard Pell at the Center for PostNatural History.

Located in a nondescript storefront on Penn Ave, among the galleries of the upand-coming Garfield district, the museum is the physical location of Pell’s ongoing art project. What started as DIY bioart in the streets of New York, turned into a residency at the Smithsonian, turned into a permanent museum in Pittsburgh. He also exhibits his collection internationally, most recently in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Pell is the second thing people see when they walk through the door. The museum is

FEATURE

“WHEN WE HEAR ABOUT GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS, WE EXPECT THEM TO BE LITTLE MONSTERS. WE EXPECT THEM TO HAVE TOO MANY LEGS. SOMETHING OBVIOUS. BUT THAT’S NOT WHERE THE CHANGES ARE.” only open a handful of days out of the month, and he is usually behind the front desk. He looks more like an intern than the director, boyish in a black hoodie and perennial blonde stubble. But his look is deceptive: he teaches electronic media art at Carnegie Mellon University; he co-founded the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a highly acclaimed art and engineering collective; he won the Rockerfeller New Media Fellowship in 2007; his Smithsonian Research Fellowship led to the internationally touring exhibition, Atomic Age Rodents.

Pell defines “postnatural” as biological life that has been intentionally altered by humans, and these changes are heritable, or affecting the offspring. He, in fact, made up the word because there wasn’t one that suited his needs. It fell halfway between “natural history” and “postmodern,” and it seemed self-explanatory, like you can almost parse it to determine what it means.

“Think of topiary,” he said. “If you clip

your bushes to the shape of Mickey Mouse, that’s not really postnatural. But if you get them breed so that it makes little tiny Mickey Mouse plants, then it qualifies.”

Natural history museums have gaps in their collection, but this is by design.

They do not keep record of living creatures that humans intentionally altered. White laboratory rats, for example, were bred extensively to be stand-ins for humans, and the history of rat breeding traces back to 19th century America—by now, there are millions of different breeds. However, there are only two white rats in the collection of the Smithsonian to represent all white lab rats, and they are labelled with “Locality Unknown.” The more that something was touched by us, the less likely it was to be documented. For Pell, this seemed like a blind spot, one that was worth filling.

“They strive to bring into one place the global diversity of life on planet Earth,” Pell said, “But they don’t include things that have a

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cultural imprint, things that are intentionally shaped by people.”

There is a poster of two mice hanging above the front desk, their bones dyed blue and their soft tissue dyed red. The mouse on the right had been genetically modified to have no ribs. The one on the left had ribs growing all the way down its spine.

Most of the postnatural specimens in Pell’s museum are not so obvious. “When we hear about genetically modified organisms,” Pell said, “we expect them to be little monsters. We expect them have too many legs.

Something obvious. But that’s not where the changes are.”

The changes are on a genetic level.

The exhibits at the Center are displayed in bell jars and fish bowls, and as pressed leaves and tiny creatures pinned under glass. They are deceptively quaint, and at first glance can be mistaken for a cabinet of curiosities. The bell jar, though, holds kernels of Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready corn. The leaves come from

FANTASTIC MAN

Triploidy salmon have three sets of chromosomes instead of two, rendering them unable to reproduce. They are virtually indistinguishable from normal Atlantic salmon when it comes to size, shape, weight, and scale count.

Lower jaw deformity is the only physical difference between normal Atlantic salmon and Atlantic salmon affected with triploidy.

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Triploids have string-like gonads because they are sterile. Aqua Bounty Farms™ use triploids to control their population of farm raised salmon.

FEATURE

From left to right: Hybrid brine shrimp marketed as Sea Monkeys; laboratory tobacco plants used to produce biomass vaccines; corn seeds engineered by Monsanto to be resistant to RoundUp Ready herbicide.

Below (opposite): Illustration of an Atlantic salmon engineered with triploidy, a genetic deformity. Image courtesy of The Center for PostNatural History.

POSTNATURAL (ADJECTIVE): BIOLOGICAL LIFE THAT HAS BEEN INTENTIONALLY AND HERITABLY ALTERED BY HUMANS. the Transgenic American Chestnut Tree, which was crossed with a wheat plant to be fungal-resistant. (Scientists who engineered the plant had considered crossing it with a frog, but feared the political backlash against frog-trees.) Even domesticated chickens make an appearance—they have been bred, over time, to be homogenous. Chickens we eat have to be the same across the board so that a machine can process them, on a mass scale, as parts.

“What the museum has always been about is the experience of being confronted with the real,” he said, “The changes are extraordinary and profound and perhaps frightening or surprising, but it’s not what you’re expecting them to be. The important thing is being confronted with the reality that

is, to my mind, stranger than the science fiction of the story.”

Pell didn’t sound like an archivist. He compared the legal agreement on a bag of Monsanto RoundUp Ready seeds to a software licensing agreement you would find on a CD jacket. When he found a way around the agreement to collect samples for his collection (by purchasing generic bird feed, growing the seeds, then using RoundUp to kill any plant that wasn’t RoundUp-resistant), he calls the resulting specimens “open source.”

He came to art as a computer hacker.

A self-described underachiever, he attended art school because his grades were not high enough to get into computer science. (He

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painted mainly landscapes, with oils.) As a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, he got busted for hacking. This was the mid1990’s, the early days of the internet, so the most severe penalty for him was community service, which he did on a farm in Hawaii. It was there that he got involved with the native Hawaiian sovereignty movement, a radical separatist group that wanted independence from the US and that needed someone to build websites for them. “They thought it was hysterically funny that they had a white haole guy working for them now, who’s a hacker on top of it all,” Pell said.

It also gave him the first taste of hacktivism. When he went back to CMU, he found other people who shared his interests in the social politics of technology. Most of

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the engineering research in robotics at the time were DARPA-funded and focused on unmanned aerial vehicles and driverless helicopter projects. The term “drone warfare” was a decade away, but even in the planning stages, the engineers at CMU were obviously working on military technologies. Pell and his fellow detractors eventually get together to form the art and engineering collective, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, which criticized the engineers’ inability to take DARPA’s money; but before that point, they went by the name of John Henry.

As the folklore goes, John Henry was a spike driver for the railroad. He was working in Talcott, West Virginia in the 1870’s, the biggest and strongest man to hammer a drill bit into a mountain for the Chesapeake and Ohio railway. One day, steam machines were brought in to replace the railroad workers.

The workers, realizing their livelihoods were at stake, arranged for a competition between Henry and the machine. If he wins, then the workers get to keep their jobs. If the machine wins, then it’s machines from here on out.

So the two started digging. People gathered around, listening to the hammering inside the mountain, waiting to see who will win this race, man or technology. In the end, Henry was the one who triumphantly bursts out of the other side of the mountain. He then fell to his knees and died.

Moving from engineering to synthetic biology was not as big of a leap as even Pell thought it was. Pell, above all, is concerned with moral ambiguity: we created these technologies, but at what cost?

Transgenesis is old technology. Freckles and her kind were created in the relatively unsophisticated way of mixing the genes of two or more existing species. Biotech companies now use computers to create organisms that have never existed before in nature. Scientists type a DNA sequence into a program, and a machine in a lab can mix together the components to create the desired cells. Amyris Biotechnologies alone created over 3 million unique organisms, which are being kept in barcode stamped vials, at negative eighty degrees, in an undisclosed repository in California.

These scientists are on the search for new, purportedly beneficial organisms, like bacteria that can break down plastics in landfills, and yeast that can mimic the taste of vanilla. But, Pell warns, “Everyone needs to be thinking about this a little harder than we all are right now.”

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FEATURE

The Center for PostNatural History is located at 4913 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15224. It is open first Fridays of every month from 5 – 8pm, and every Sunday from 12-4pm. Richard Pell can be contacted by email: rich@postnatural.org

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