Paul Vanouse (UB-Art Department) will join us for a discussion about his new bio-media artwork, Labor, at the Burchfield Penny Art Gallery on Thursday, March 28, 5-6PM.

Labor is a dynamic, self-regulating art installation that re-creates the scent of people exerting themselves under stressful conditions. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell – it is created by bacteria propagating in the three glass bioreactors. Each bioreactor incubates a unique species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Corynebacterium xerosis and Propionibacterium avidum. As these bacteria metabolize simple sugars and fats, they create the distinct smells associated with human exertion, stress and anxiety. Their scents combine in the central chamber with which a sweatshop icon, the white t-shirt, is infused as the scents are disseminated.

The Labor project reflects upon industrial society’s shift from human and machine labor to increasingly pervasive forms of microbial manufacturing. Today, microbes produce a wide range of products, including enzymes, foods, beverages, feedstocks, fuels and pharmaceuticals. They literally live to work. These new industrial activities point to a deepening of the exploitation of life and living processes: the design, engineering, management and commodification of life itself. In Labor, the microorganisms ironically produce the scent of sweat, not as a vulgar bi-product of production, like in factories of the 19th and 20th centuries, but as a nostalgic end-product.

Labor also reflects upon our changing understanding of what we are. Microbes in and on the human body vastly outnumber human cells and they help regulate many of our bodily processes, from digestive and immune systems to emotional and physiological responses like sweating. Our microbiota is integral to who and what we are, and complicates any simplistic sense of self. Likewise, the smell of the perspiring body is not just a human scent, unless we are willing to redefine what we mean by human.

Vanouse is a professor of Art and Director of the Coalesce Center for Biological Art at the University at Buffalo.

More about the artwork can be found here:
http://www.paulvanouse.com/labor.html
and

A recent article by Vanouse appears here:
State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art: