ANNA DUMITRIU: THE ART OF DISEASE
‘Susceptible’, by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.
Looking at the range and depth of Anna Dumitriu’s biotechnological art, it’s natural to assume that she has scientific training, but no. She explains that she was always interested in science but didn’t really respond to the way she was taught it. She attributes that partly to how ‘there’s this thing in science where they’ll tell you a kind of lie about how things work, then when you get to the next level, they’ll say ‘forget that, we simplified it so you’d be able to learn it, now we’re going to tell you the real position’ — then at the next level the same thing happens again … but I’d sort of suspect the lie and be left with lots of questions.’ That dissatisfaction led her to turn towards the arts and languages, and a BA in Painting at Brighton University. Yet in her own interests remained equally scientific, especially once the World Wide Web had given her the breadth of access to go down ‘whatever rabbit hole I wanted to’.
Anna Dumitriu with Fermenting Futures by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May. Photo credit: the artists.
Dumitriu’s first science and art collaboration was to work with robots, and she also became interested in microbiology and bacteria and the difference between what the general public get to know about science and what the scientists know. For example, she says, ‘you might read “three people got sick with E.coli’ but you never hear how the entire population of the world just digested their meals thanks to E.coli’ — because that story doesn’t get told. Only the one particular variant that caused the disease is mentioned. Bacteria, at least when I started out, were presented as dirt — the notion of the microbiome as a major contributor to human health and wellness has taken hold only recently. I started looking at normal flora bacteria, the ones that are just there, back in 2003, but they were seen as having no commercial or medical interest because we didn’t have the tools to study them. Scientists concentrated on the pathogens. I got Arts Council funding to study the microbiome of my home as an artistic thing, at a time when it wasn’t being studied scientifically and, indeed, before that term was in common use. Now, thanks to whole genome sequencing technology, it’s a significant area of scientific study’.
Dumitriu has often focused on diseases. For example, she has done lots of work on tuberculosis over the years, most lately leading to the installation Susceptible, 2020. ‘It’s one of the most fascinating microbes’, she explains, ‘and one of the biggest killers on the planet. It took over a year for Covid-19 deaths to reach the same level as TB in every year — it’s always over a million worldwide, and that’s since they created the vaccine in 1921. Moreover, because Covid undermined the infrastructures to deal with TB, the deaths rose to 1.7m last year. It’s a disease of poverty, more prevalent in the third world — though we still have it, and Romania and Russia have notably high burdens.’
Susceptible is a data-driven interactive artwork made in collaboration with digital artist Alex May. Here the scientific focus was on improving the targeting of antibiotics. ‘Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem — Dame Sally Davies, Sir Chris Whitty’s predecessor as the UK Chief Medical Officer, has said it’s on a par with global warming as a future threat to humanity. CRyPTIC, an international consortium led by the University of Oxford, sent multi-well plates around the world, each well containing a different antibiotic. Their international collaborators would take a sample from their patient’s TB and grow that in the wells and they would send a photograph of what grew along with whole genome sequencing the organism. The University of Oxford team looked at whether the bugs grew or not in the presence of the different antibiotics. Using data from over 10,000 patients, researchers compared the growth data and the whole genome sequences of those bacteria and have been able to predict which of the first four front-line antibiotic medicines (isoniazid, rifampicin, ethambutol or pyrazinamide) would be most effective in treating a patient with tuberculosis based on the DNA sequence of the bacteria infecting them. Moreover,’ says Dumitriu, ‘such protocols could be used in the future for other types of pathogenic bacteria to enable the targeting of antibiotics to counter the resistance which bacteria are developing to them’.
Dumitriu and May have fed this data into an interactive artwork in which the viewer seems to be moving through a bronchial landscape resembling a forest, and TB bacillus swarm around the bronchi and alveoli of the lung-like clouds. ‘There’s one bacterium for each patient in the study’, says Dumitriu, ‘and they cluster around you as you enter. The four antibiotics are represented by four different coloured cloud-like elements (the colours are inspired by the appearance of the medicines: red for rifampicin, yellow for isoniazid, white for ethambutol and peach for pyrazinamide). You need to move close to a cloud that’s the right antibiotic to get rid of the TB bacteria, each of which represent a particular sample. If they are susceptible to one of the four drugs they are attracted to it and destroyed’.
Susceptible, installation view by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May. Photo credit the artists.
‘The message,’ says Dumitriu, ‘is that antibiotics need to be targeted. People say, “you need antibiotics”, but it’s far more complex than that’. In a further twist, the installation is also layered with time-based origin and destination data from London’s Gatwick Airport from before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period, in the form of contrail-like threads which cross the space. That shows the massive reduction in flights that occurred during the 2020 pandemic and highlights the increasingly urgent point that health is a global issue which needs global solutions and collaboration. As Dumitriu says, ‘infections don’t see borders and quarantine is complicated’.
That installation is rather beautiful, but that isn’t always Dumitriu’s intention so much as the intermeshing of art and science. ‘I want to give people aesthetic sensations’, she says, ‘whether a feeling of the sublime or disgust, but also to provide layers that people can peel away if they are interested. An elderly lay person interested in the risks of ‘superbugs’ should be able to get as much from my art as a scientist working at the heart of the research.’
aDNA 1 by Anna Dumitriu. Photo credit: Anna Dumitriu
The depth behind Dumitriu’s projects is apparent, so it’s not surprising to hear that she favours long-term residencies: ‘you can go somewhere for a week and make a lovely artwork out of it, but if you’re working with complex science it is useful to have the time to reflect, revisit, change your ideas, see how the scientists respond … I like four-year projects, but of course I’m not engaged with them full-time. That also makes sense because scientists are busy — if you have just one residency, you’ll be hanging around waiting for them a lot of the time’.
The recent Entangled Health works, however, including aDNA and Zeneton, have emerged from a residency of just one academic year at the University of Surrey. aDNA, 2022, is a carved bone impregnated with a piece of ancient DNA (aDNA) which is an indicator for tuberculosis-causing organisms, in this case bovine tuberculosis. It was amplified from a sample of bacterial DNA extracted out of human bone from an Iron Age burial in the Siberian permafrost. Dumitriu worked hands-on in the lab with bio-archaeologist Professor Mike Taylor, who taught her how to repeat his pioneering experiment where he first found bovine tuberculosis in these ancient remains, the earliest example in humans of the disease’s genetic fingerprint. Dumitriu notes that ‘he would cut a square sample so future archaeologists would know it was done by a scientists, not by the disease — which can cause circular holes.’
Zenextron PLA version holder image by Anna Dumitriu. Photo credit: Anna Dumitriu
Zenexton, 2022, a strikingly bulbous necklace of sorts, takes its title from the term coined in 1570 by Theophrastus Paracelsus for an amulet that would protect the wearer from the plague. Until that time, Dumitriu explains, ‘amulets had a more general purpose of warding off (unspecified) disease, rather like the difference nowadays between “broad spectrum” antibiotics versus antibiotics carefully targeted to a specific organism informed by genomics approaches. Paracelsus said he did not believe he would invent an effective Zenexton in his day, and that it was a task for future generations. Over the next century or so, something like a twisted version of the scientific method as we know it adjusted what the Zenexton should contain — a paste made of powdered toads, sapphires that would turn black when they leeched the pestilence from the body, amber if you couldn’t afford sapphires, menstrual blood and so on. Bizarre improvements were later made to the concoction, ‘of course’ they reasoned, ‘the toad should be finely powdered’, ‘the menstrual blood from a virgin’, ‘collected on a full moon’ etc. Unlike the concoctions of that era this contemporary Zenexton offers the wearer something that will genuinely protect them, as it contains a recently developed vaccine against Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) developed by Professor Christine Rollier and colleagues at the University of Oxford using the ChAdOx1 platform (the same vaccine platform used to create the Oxford/Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine). Dumitriu’s Zenexton is 3D printed in gold plated brass and encrusted with lab-created sapphires.
Yeast is also of particular interest to Dumitriu. That’s partly a practical matter, as it’s ‘a workhorse for synthetic biology: as scientists understand the genomes of yeasts and lots of their features, they can use them as mini-factories to make all sorts of things. Furthermore, it’s been suggested that humans first settled in communities in order to brew beer, because you can’t brew on the move. Indeed, in Culture 2022, Dumitriu and May explore the co-evolution of yeast and humans and investigate the relationship of fermentation, bread, beer and human settlement, and the idea that this relationship might actually be directed by yeasts rather than humans. ‘Our collaborators discovered the genetics behind fermentation’, she explains, ‘and used CRISPR to give a non-fermenting Pichia pastoris yeast the ability to make bread rise. In the installation a jumble of breadcrumb-encrusted architectural models made with this novel yeast emerge from a bed of soil. The buildings are piled one on top of the other, or side by side, representing the development of culture. They are furnished and wallpapered — wired with electric lights — and illuminated by the glare of tiny screens, visible through 3D printed windows and doors.’ Dumitriu points out that beer was more critical, historically, than is generally realised ‘because water used to be undrinkable, whereas the fermenting process killed off the dangerous bacteria. So, everyone would drink beer, even little children — people in the Middle Ages were half-cut all the time!’
She goes on to detail the two different yeasts — over 1,500 species are known in all, making up around 1% of all funguses — which lie behind the Fermenting Futures project. The Pichia pastoris yeast is capable of capturing carbon and using it to produce animal feed, while the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast eats sugar and produces lactic acid. She asked researchers whether they could be combined, and the result is seen in the central artwork in the series, a fermentation sculpture which explores and physically contains a modified Pichia pastoris yeast that is simultaneously able to capture carbon and output lactic acid for the manufacture of biodegradable PLA plastic. The sculpture Fermenting Futures, 2022, comprises a glass vessel containing the bubbling modified yeast, sustained by a mass of tubes. 3D printed yeast forms, including one which incorporates the yeast-produced PLA plastic, swarm across the container.
Dumitriu and May worked with researchers who transformed the carbon capturing yeast so that it can also produce lactic acid, and they are beginning the directed evolution process to improve its tolerance to the lactic acid it produces. As Dumitriu says: ‘we’re capturing carbon and outputting plastics. People might say “plastic is bad”, but this is bio-degradable if placed in animal manure. When it biodegrades it releases carbon, but the yeast can then capture it. The yeast is not doing it very well yet, because it grows in the presence of lactic acid, which is toxic to them. Most are killed off by it, so you take the surviving ones and work with them and keep doing it until they are tolerant of lactic acid: scientists normally do at least a thousand generations of evolution. Whether you want that particular process happening is another matter in terms of use of resources, but we liked how it raises issues about biotechnology and what you should allow in terms of the environment, and whether you should have plastic, which is a major question given that such a wide range of materials use polymers as their principal ingredient’.
Fermenting Futures by Anna Dumitriu and Alex May. Photo credit: the artists
The well-organised site annadumitriu.co.uk has details of some 50 projects. This autumn Dumitriu’s work IRL has been or will be shown at Spazju Kreattiv in Malta, The North Wall Gallery in Oxford (UK), MIT Museum in Cambridge (USA), Le Musée de la Main, Lausanne (Switzerland), The Botanical Garden in Rome, and more.
Dumitriu is also currently Artist in Residence at Modernising Medical Microbiology, University of Oxford; The National Collection of Type Cultures, Public Health England; the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology, Universitat fur Bodenkultur Vienna; EU CHIC Consortium; the Institute of Epigenetics and Stem Cells, Helmholtz Zentrum München; and EU CAPABLE Consortium. She is Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire and at Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
All images and video shown courtesy of Anna Dumitriu and Alex May. Copyright Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.