2007-2015

Installation consisting of video film, liquid nitrogen container, LED lamp and photographs

Snowflake explores and critiques the idea of eternal life made possible by cryonics. Cryonics, a field of research focused on the preservation of a body in liquid nitrogen, presents certain hopes for those wishing to be cryogenically preserved in order to be “awoken” in the future. The concept of cryonics was first introduced in 1962 by the founder of the Cryonics Institute, Robert Ettinger. In The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Superman Ettinger places great hope in nano/bio-technologies to restore the tissues and ultimately revive frozen bodies, although it should be noted that science is yet to resolve issues surrounding how to repair vital tissues and in particular maintain the brain plasticity necessary for knowledge, memories and identity. Although, the concept of cryonics (and its social and cultural implications) has been widely explored in many science fiction texts, it appears that our current times attempts to commercialize these yet-to-be-realised technologies via biomedical narratives of hope as well as fear.

Snowflake is a symbolic art object created by Boryana Rossa, Guy Ben-Ary and Oleg Mavromatti that conceptually and materially examines a scenario regarding biotechnologies’ manipulation of brain plasticity in order to create false memories, and the ethical and aesthetical implications of this potential on the border that separates the physical and the psyche. In 2006 Rossa and Ben-Ary worked in the Steve Potter Lab in Georgia Tech (a laboratory for neuro-engineering) where they grew neural networks from mouse neurons, creating a series of living ‘brains’ that could produce and receive data and stimulation through 60 electrodes. By repeatedly stimulating the neural networks with the image of a snowflake, Rossa and Ben-Ary molded the network’s plasticity or bio-engineered the image of a snowflake into the networks’ “memory”. They then cryogenically preserved the snowflake “engraved” neural networks at -80°C. At the time of cryongenic preservation Rossa and Ben-Ary had yet to conceive of a definite outcome for these frozen neural networks that carried a memory of a snowflake. Moreover, once their residency finished they were unable to take them with them as the frozen networks had to remain at -80 C. And so this artwork was left behind, preserved and conserved in a freezer. However, 10 years later the freezer unit housing the frozen neural network broke down and the fragile material thawed and died.