Collaboration: Starting with twenty six units of blood, 2013tablet, digital content, metal, silk, paper, ink and paint 32 x 31cm (closed)

Collaboration Essay by Ann Finnegan

 For many the question of collaboration is akin to friendship. There is not quite the intimacy of lovers or spouses, and yet the relationship with the other is fore-grounded.

Rather, collaboration takes place among friends and colleagues and is less about possession (and its cognate self-possession) than what arises through engagement, something more than the sum of individual participants, and more akin to a gift, an emergence.

It is somewhat ironic that perhaps the most famous of the Socratic dialogues, The Banquet (or Phaedrus), took place at the dinner table, and that rather than a group of friends collaborating on the question of love what developed was a contest in which Socrates, through method, was able to find fault with the rhetorical form of his ‘opponents’ or intellectual combatants, demolishing their arguments.

Our philosophical heritage, chez the ancient Greeks, has little to tell us on collaboration. Nor do we accord Plato, Socrates’ scribe, the status of colleague, or collaborator, but rather put him in the second place of the faithful copyist.

Indeed it’s disappointing, when reflecting on collaboration, that the French equivalent collaborateur carries the taint of Nazi occupation of France, and that its Napoleonic era cognate, collaborationism, referred to co-operating with the enemy against one’s country. Rather, contemporary collaboration has an entirely different ethos, having swapped conspiratory innuendo for the spirit of shared participation in something more fruitful and joyous, more akin to something belonging to neither party in that it arises out of a kind of free gifting.

The mid-twentieth century philosopher, Levinas, is to be thanked for setting us on a sympathetic trajectory towards collaboration when he displaced the foundations of the self from the various me-philosophies of Socrates and Descartes, to a primary relationship with the other: only through the relationship with the other do I exist; only through the other’s acts of conferring do I come into being; ‘I’ as an entity am always mediated through relationship to the other.

To paraphrase Levinas, it is the other who gives me my sense of self. Think of the pronoun forms and the function of the shifter, of the mutable relationships between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘you’ and ‘me’ conferred through the inter-subjective shifts in which we frequently change place with the other. 

This instability necessarily shares or distributes our subjectivity through a range of subject positions and various modes of active and passive recognition (I give to you; you give to me). Rather than claim the ground of Platonic self-possession we give or yield; we acknowledge and are given acknowledgement in return. It’s a healthy philosophical base, grounded in giving and receiving. Levinas calls it ‘an ethics of the other’, and, in a sense, this philosophical approach attunes us to inter-subjective modes of existence.

This is not yet collaboration in the contemporary spirit but the Levinasian foundation in its turning towards the other already predisposes us towards what emerges from our relationships.  We are all aware of modes of emergence which are not of me, or ‘mine’, even though I may have contributed to their facilitation.

Collaboration is thus more than the exchange of ideas – you give me one of yours and I’ll give you one of mine. Collaboration, instead, gives rise to the idea. It arrives. How often have we uttered the phrase, “I wouldn’t have had this idea if it weren’t for you.”  The idea arrives, as if shaken from somewhere, by this process of collaboration. “Two heads are better than one.”

Heidegger is perhaps the best champion of the model through which “something” speaks or emerges, inter-relationally. This something can be fleeting, evasive, hard to pin down: Heidegger resorted to elaborate descriptors like the ‘lighted clearing’ to open a place for the appearing of this something which, by its very otherness or alterity, sets it apart. This arrival could be said to be akin to what can come out of a collaboration, something apparently self-gifting, which neither party could be said to own or claim. A ‘third’ thing which is neither of you nor me, yet paradoxically of both of us.

Collaboration, as such, is not predicated on translation or even interdisciplinary transformation, though these processes can inform its realisation. To fall back on spatial metaphors, collaboration takes place obscurely in a somewhat detached  “in-between”.

Yet we recognise and acknowledge that it would not be happening without the relationship of the other. Perhaps it could be said, in general, that we never know where ideas come from, just that they come. But we also know, just as mysteriously, when their provenance is not entirely our own, and that they arrived through the trigger of the relationship with the other.

A specific collaboration: Fiona Davies, artist, and Dr Peter Domachuk, School of Physics, University of Sydney, joined later by Dr Lee-Anne Hall, a writer. 

They come together by chance. Fiona’s father, a former student of physics at Sydney University, and later Professor at UNSW has died and she plans an installation in the department’s foyer to celebrate his life and also to mark his death. She can’t quite shake a story she is not quite sure she has misheard. The nurse said her father was intravenously fed twenty-three units of blood which bled out into his stomach cavity. 

But first, insights into Fiona Davies’s prior practice can go some way towards illustrating the deep impact of the subsequent collaboration. An earlier work dedicated to her father, Memorial / Time of Death, focused on her father’s stay in intensive care.

In this video work a splendid yellow chrysanthemum begin to curl up into itself and wilt into a black background of groundlessness, like a spirit departing from a body into the ether. The flower rejuvenates only to begin to die again, in a cycle of dying, reviving, then dying again, over and over. 

In this oblique response to what was happening to her father inside intensive care, Davies had found a medium to both translate and displace her understanding of this traumatic experience. The flower was a living metaphor she could film close up, a means of getting closer to the process of dying, as if to get inside it.

However, the story of those twenty-three units of blood bleeding across the stomach membrane into a location where they shouldn’t be, continued to nag. Davies needed to make another work that could close the metaphoric gap, bring her closer to this understanding of the frail border between life and death.

Intuitively, she choose the site of the foyer of the physics department, and intuitively she was engaging the alumni officer in this conversation, when the alumni officer recognised a link to somebody else interested in this very same set of ideas, a researcher into biofluids, physicist Peter Domachuk, who was just upstairs.

Davies’ title Memorial Double Pump Laplace II (2010) reflects that subsequent discussion with Domachuk. Laplace, a French physicist, developed the mathematical equations still used in the understanding of aneurysms today. Regular blood flow depends upon the cylindrical nature of the circulation system, which, when breached by the bubbles of an aneurism, generates distortions in flow. There was thus a deep connection between what happened to her father – between those irregular flows of blood across the membrane of his stomach cavity and what Domachuk was researching in biophysics.

Further Domachuk’s speciality lay within the field of silk biophotonics. He was developing silk implants that could collect data from the blood circulating within the living body; scanning the wrist would release information. There would be no more savage pumping of blood into the body to try and figure out what was going wrong. The scannable silk biochip could provide the necessary bio-information from inside the body itself, a much less invasive procedure than accepting twenty-three units of blood. It was a moment of epiphany. Davies came out of that meeting knowing how she would represent her father’s death - Blood on Silk – and with Domachuk as a collaborator.

Memorial Double Pump Laplace II (2010): the double pump was the heart, Laplace’s name referenced his original insights into biofluids, and the II represented the new generation of research. The title captures the idea of the double take, the surprise of the epiphanic moment; also her second go at representing her father’s death.

On their own, neither Davies nor Domachuk could have made the representational shift into the poesis which translated the scientific research. Davies made fibre membranes of beaten raw silk, which, when stained red in certain regular patterns, represented the matrix of blood cells. The silk membranes were then sewn  over the light boxes filling the foyer, effectively magnifying the body and shrinking the viewer to the scale of the cells in the matrix of the body’s membranes. Fantastic Voyage minus the B-movie submarine.  The membranes of silk were semi-porous, like those in the body.

Memorial Double Pump Laplace II (2010) was in a sense the product of emergence. In the thinking of Davies and Domachuk there was a deep core of multiple connections. Chance had seemingly brought that work to that building, its own Casablanca. Then Domachuk, somewhat ironically suddenly and tragically died. The collaboration had ended, all too swiftly, before it had properly begun, and yet it had also taken place at the right time, time enough in which to also set in circulation the idea of the art of biophotonics.

What remains, Davies has asked, of collaboration in such distressing circumstances? What happens when one party dies? Perhaps in a sense nothing changes in that the collaboration continues to do its work through the way in which Domachuk’s name resonates through Davies’ practice, and hers in his, as public perception artist of her artwork is mediated by an understanding of biophysics. The effects of the collaboration, as owned by neither party, seemingly ripple on as if by their own momentum, as if self-generating.

Philosophically ideas always could be said to own themselves, once they have come into being, though they may retain attachment to their creator. The same could be said of ideas or effects which are generated through collaboration, the difference being that they will always retain some aspect of the gifting of one to the other.