Repurposing emergence theories: An interview with Andrew Pelling

Social Science Information, an interdisciplinary journal with 50 years of continuous, original and curiosity-driven publications, is preparing a special issue on the theme of Emergence. In this special issue, we’re interested in the complex genesis of any given form, asking questions such as: How do things get to exist or appear? Such things can be as disparate as a cell, a species, a machine or a lab. We are in fact interested in seeking new ways to engage with the emergence of things (and beings) as well as with the different modalities of existence things and beings manifest. In other words, we look at their intrinsic conditions of emergence as well as at their potential for emerging.

In this respect, we are very interested – eager even – to interview you since, as a scientist, you can shed a different light on the concept of emergence, which historically has been developed in science (inside the broader context of systems theory). We also thought that, not only as a scientist but as Andrew Pelling, what you actually do in your lab, your ‘anti-disciplinary approach to unnatural environments’, as you put it recently in Leonardo when reflecting on agency and motion (Pelling, 2015), could help us better navigate the complex realms of cellular life. So keeping in mind all this curiosity for emerging processes in unnatural environments, we would like to start with questions about your lab.

It’s indeed a very special space, this lab. A space made of various constituents such as silicon, carbon, ice, fire, air; but also a place shaped by both life forms (people and cells) and forms of life (organizations such as the University of Ottawa), as well as building walls, a huge amount of plastic gloves, strict procedures and constant brainstorming. In short, your lab is a composition in motion made of human and non-human force fields. Can you tell us a little bit more about its emergences, about how it came to existence and how it evolved to become such an interesting and unique place?

The lab is a very deliberate experiment. When I got a job at UOttawa, I really felt at some point, especially after I got my Canada Research Chair, after I had published in top journals and got this major national award as well as the coveted professorship, that there’s always a bigger grant to get and always a bigger paper to publish and all that … At that time I really felt that I’d kind of figured out the system, how it worked. I certainly wasn’t an expert or anything, but I had checked a lot of the boxes and for me it became really important to start a lab that operated in a way that was different than anything else I could see around me. But it was extremely risky. And that meant that I was going to let anybody in, artists, scientists, whatever. Here I would like to say that, luckily throughout my career, I have been able to work in environments like that. My PhD involved artists, and I had a supervisor who was conducive to that process so I really appreciated why that was important.

So I was going to start a lab like this, it was going to be a free-for-all, we were going just to ask questions … I had zero interest in applications. Part of the work that we do is showing that if you start without walls, you usually end up with discoveries that can be applied without even trying. Anyway, this was somewhat of a risky move, I was advised many, many times by senior colleagues – and they had my best interests at heart – to not go down this road: ‘Just publish a body of work, become an expert on a particular discipline’. But I ignored them … And I knew that was a risk and I figured, well, if I don’t get my tenure and if I don’t get grants then the system will route me out and that’s fine. I’ll figure out something else to do with my life. No problem with that, I accepted that from day one and just went for it.

As far as I know, there aren’t any scientific labs in hardcore physics or chemistry or whatever, that operate the way I do. There certainly are bioart groups – SymbioticA is a great example – that operate in this manner. But within the sciences, it’s pretty odd. It’s pretty out there. And that’s part of the appeal, too. I don’t want to be like everybody else and just do everything the way everybody else does.

People have reacted, I think, pretty positively. I can’t say that for everybody, though. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at figuring out who would work well in this environment, because some people don’t want that. They want a very structured and very predictable PhD experience; and that’s fine, it’s usually very obvious: they’ll know they don’t want to work here and I’ll know they probably shouldn’t work here because they want something else. But for the most part, I’ve found that the students who really gravitate to this are extremely creative and flexible and bold and willing to try stuff. Sometimes I push them a little too hard, but that’s ok, it’s good for them to be tested that way. But in the end, I would think that’s what you would want in a lab, in any discipline. You want creative people who are willing to push boundaries, trying things and experiments. I think it maybe broadened what an experiment is in my mind, and maybe I’m just giving myself permission now, so that anything I’m doing, even if it’s a talk or a course, whatever, an interview, can be treated like an experiment. Just tweak and try things, the human aspect is kind of interesting.

In such an open context, where constant attention is geared both towards what’s happening and towards what could happen (Is this living thing changing? Is it staying pretty much the same?), how would you link this type of attention (and the ecology of practices it supposes, one could even say the laboratory life it encompasses) to the idea of emergence?

Right. Things are changing all the time … So because of this whole TED ¹ thing I’ve been thinking a lot more deeply about how I operate; it’s a little weird to do and I’m being forced into it. I think one of the big drivers for me, why I operate the way I do … is that I’m chasing that moment of discovery. There are moments from my childhood that I remembered or re-remembered, and I think for me it’s always about that unknown. I really love what might happen as opposed to what did happen. It’s that possibility, that unknown. I like being in that space where I don’t actually know what the boundaries are, I don’t know what will emerge. I just know that, if I put a bunch of creative people in a room together and I give them freedom and resources, some cool stuff can happen! A lot of nonsense happens, too, and a lot of dead-ends emerge from that – which is equally interesting. But then there are those unexpected results you would have never predicted or an experiment you would have never designed. Artists and scientists are talking to each other. That emergent behavior is what excites me the most. It’s actually what I can’t predict. And then, just those little moments when you’re just like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic, I never would have thought about that’. That’s what this whole enterprise is about.

All this is very interesting because we thought: ‘We’re going to interview Andrew Pelling about emergence understood as a concept, a concept forged by scientists, and see how all this can eventually “resonate” with social sciences.’ But what we are in fact starting to understand is that the whole concept of ‘emergence’ triggers in reality a complex set of epistemological, methodological and even philosophical reflections for you, too. By raising questions of channelled attention and attunement, it is a very serious invitation to engage with the potential of things that emerges here. And a realm of potentialities that easily translates to other regions of research and creation activities. It can be the potential of a community, a family, a country. So at different levels of living organizations is contained a potential for things to unfold differently, differentially. What becomes more and more relevant to our purpose here, what we are really interested in for this special issue, is how people from various disciplines actually engage (and even sometimes cultivate – as your lab meta-management suggests) such an attention to conditions of possibilities and their actualizations.

That’s a difficult question. Yesterday, I was at the Science Museum [Canada Science and Technology Museum] for most of the day, as an advisor because they’re restructuring now that they’ve got the new building. I assume I was there to talk about these issues and I had many questions about ‘How do we do we do this?’ Organizations and corporations love the idea of having a big maker-space where people experiment and all that. But the reality is that in order to do it you have to take a big risk, and they have a hard time taking risks … They ask, ‘How are you going to pay for that? Who’s going to manage it? And what’s going to happen?’ Managers and executives want to know what’s going to happen you can’t know. I can’t guarantee it’s going to be interesting. In fact, I can guarantee there’s going to be a lot of failures, there will be a lot of problems. But the things that are a success will work away all of that. It’s just that I don’t know when those will happen or how. There are all these maker groups and hacker groups out there … One of the most interesting things I saw recently, you probably heard the COP21 conference, right? Well, five weeks before the conference, a hacker group self-organized in France and invited a 100 different hackers to this mansion. They funded it: food, clothing, resources, everything. And these people worked for five weeks prior to the meeting to develop 12 new sustainable technologies. They did it themselves, open-source, the whole bit. Again, this is something that museums and a lot of organizations would like to reproduce, but for that, you have to be willing to open up a big space and let everybody in and then stand back. You know, there are so many examples where it’s been successful and interesting. Their agenda was that, yes, the world is meeting to talk. We’re meeting for five weeks, to do, to build, to create new technologies and here they are. So by the time COP21 came around, they had 12 new sustainable projects on the line. They were very diverse, all sorts of energy things to growing your own food and housing. Anyway, I’m trailing off …

But historically, there’ve always been recipes. If I’m going to produce microscopes, here’s the manufacturing protocol, here’s how to make each part, here’s how they go together. If we make enough of them, if we sell enough, for this much money, we can spend the money and we profit and we’re successful. It’s very well mapped out. But when people or even organisations are now gravitating around what I do and want to know how to do that … well, the recipe is to throw out any notion of a recipe. Or maybe there’s a small recipe there: being open and letting people be curious. It’s this fundamental thing about human beings, that we’re just curious. Fostering that and valuing it for once, I think, is a shift. We’ve gotten more and more risk averse in institutions and corporations, where no one wants to take any risks. You have to take some calculated risks sometimes. We’ve just gotten so far into risk aversion that we’ve kind of hit a wall. It’s so hard to avoid it because there are so many guidelines and all the paperwork to fill out. You’re so structured! How is it possible to discover something new if you’ve got these walls and boxes?

I am a pretty well-established scientist; I am within the academia. This whole idea of hacking, whether it’s cells or hardware, what we do here is we’re repurposing and hacking this institution and the way it operates. I like what Joi Ito has to say about this permissionless innovation, which is …: Do it! (Ito, 2014) I’m taking cues from these sometimes poorly, organized hacker groups out there and how they operate, and we’re inspired by them. We operate in ways that are similar to what they do and we simply pulled it into this context. There’s no rule against that, nobody’s saying you can’t do that. But nobody does it. And for me, it’s just like, why not? So let’s do the experiment, let’s do it and find out what’s going to happen!

I’ve really enjoyed being in that ill-defined space, I thrive on it, but other people are very nervous. This is something I’ve witnessed over the years; it struck me almost ten years ago when I started my post-doc. I showed up at this institution, and people weren’t asking me, ‘What are the questions you’re trying to answer? What’s the science you’re doing?’ The first question out of people’s mouths was, ‘What’s your application?’, and that just grated me the wrong way. I have no responsibility as an academic or a scientist to have an application; my job is to create knowledge. And if you take that as the core definition of what the academic is supposed to do then it’s irrelevant what the application is. It’s not like I’ve got to teach anybody, I don’t have to do anything useful, I am here just to ask questions and find the answers to those questions.

Applications come out of that naturally … but it’s not the driver. I think the question, ‘What’s your application?’ has been driven by the fact that a lot people want clearly defined boundaries. I’m doing this experiment to develop the drug that’s going to cure this disease. There’s a clear application at the end, as if that’s the most important aspect of the work, and it’s not. It’s just a side project. And it’s dangerous to do that, it might be more risky to do that because if your results are wrong, where’s your PhD? Where’s your research? Where are your publications? You’ve produced nothing if you define your research that way. Success for us is: we’ve identified a question, we’re now trying to answer it. It doesn’t matter what the answer is as long as we have an answer. Or we have more questions …

But it’s easy for me to speak like this and do this work in my own little microcosm. I notice this now that different organisations are approaching me. The university is publicly funded; they’ve got resources that are tax dollars. There’s another responsibility there to be a good steward of those resources, and it’s at a much bigger scale than at which I operate. So I can see why it’s so nerve-wracking and difficult to just let go of control, but I’m trying to convince people … you know: control 98% of it. I think we’re at a point where we can take a little risk. And I think, if you convince somebody just to take that little risk, and they see it prosper and grow … then it’ll expand over time, I hope. I think we’ve come too far with 100% risk aversion. We want to know everything, no surprises, which is the most boring way to exist, in my opinion. I think we can take a little step back. Just try and experiment, even in a small manner, and see what emerges.

Going back to the whole notion of hacking and how you are inspired by free-form hacker groups – this type of functioning is directly visible in your work. A prime example is your open-source design of a CO₂ incubator that supports mammalian cell culture and the way you made it available online. How does this tie in with the notion of risk aversion and also with giving back to the community?

Giving back is really important to me. I think that’s part of the broader culture of open-source and hacking. I’ve learned so much just by Googling: ‘How can I build this circuit? Where’s the code?’ There’s a sense that information is there because a community or a person made it, figured it out themselves and shared it. It’s really important to me also because this lab is publicly funded, that the public has access to what we do and how we do it, that knowledge doesn’t get stored away in papers that cost 300 dollars to download. As the way academics work, I look at what’s going on in the hacker world and the biohacking world, what are they all doing … and I can see that there’s a lot of bacteria going on, there’s a lot of genome stuff going on, so ok there’s nothing new for me to contribute there. But because I’ve worked with so many bioartists, one question we always get is: ‘do you have any plans for a CO₂ incubator?’ What everybody felt they needed was such a simple project to me. So there’s the need, there’s the gap in knowledge, and I can contribute the new knowledge . So we developed it and just put it back. It’s a small hole, there’s a larger biohacking community and you give that once piece.

There’s an agenda there, too, because I do want to push the ethical issues. I don’t have answers, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s one thing to work with bacteria, but the process of growing them is actually pretty straightforward. You can even do it on a benchtop if you really want to, on a kitchen table. Taking that whole idea of anybody anywhere being able to genetically modify and engineer an organism, we can do this with bacteria … let’s push that one more step to making it possible to engineer human cells. What does that mean? What are the implications of that? What are the social-safety concerns that arise from that? I’m not so much interested in documenting all of those questions, I’m interested in provoking them by just putting the tools out there and seeing what happens. My hypothesis is that it’s going to be very much like anything else that’s ever happened in history; every new technology is used for good and evil. I don’t think the risks in a public lab are any different than the risks in this lab. Mistakes can happen here; I don’t see why what we do is any safer in any way, really. I’ve seen students working and bona fide scientists working, and mistakes happen with human beings. I think it’s just as possible somewhere on a university campus to accidentally create a super bug as to create a superbug in a warehouse or wherever. Someone with ill intent could easily be working here. They have every single tool available to them, in fact even more than in that warehouse. There’s really nothing stopping them. It’s a risk, but it’s always been there.

But going back to the cells and the unnatural, maybe. These cell lines we work with, they’re very simplified models of what the body is, and it’s just something that had been bugging me for years. People work on cancer cells in a dish and make these audacious claims about treatments for cancer and diagnostics and everything else. Pick your favourite disease. But cells growing on a flat hard plastic dish … If we’re really honest, it tells you almost nothing about what’s happening inside the body. There’s a diversity of people and environments and everything else, on top of that.

Again, it’s kind of symptomatic of this obsession with the genome, as if this thing really controls everything. It’s certainly important, but our environment matters, not just our macroscale. The environment of the cells matter. So I was pondering all these questions for years, and then I think I got criticized in a review for one of our papers. We hear this all the time: ‘How do you know what’s happening in your experiment is actually happening in the body?’ The criticism that this is an unnatural environment I thought was actually the most interesting part, for me. The more I thought about how it is interesting that you can take a living organism, essentially strip it down, treat these cells with all sorts of detergents and chemicals and everything, and pull them out for several weeks, and then put them on glass and they’ll still grow! They’ll self-organize and elicit biological behaviours … maybe that’s the more interesting question. Forget about trying to make our dish more natural, it’s never going to be natural. It’s going in the exact opposite direction, and that’s interesting because no one else is doing it. Suddenly again we have the potential for all sorts of discoveries. So the idea of pushing cells and creating an environment that’s very unnatural in a way compared to the naturalness of a normal scientific lab, or maybe not normal but more conventional scientific lab, has become an underlying theme for a lot of the projects, a lot that we’re doing now. I think you learn something about normal behaviour by doing this, too.

Almost everything in this lab has been built in a way that’s modular so it never has to stay the way it is. There’s a laser and it’s set up in a particular experiment but it’s not confined to only do this, it can be anything. It always can be reconfigured. I collect all sorts of junk, not knowing what it’s going to be used for. I have no idea most of the time. But you see something on the street, somebody’s throwing it out, you know it’s full of good stuff. Just get it, put it on a shelf. And who knows? Some student will find it at some point, take it apart, find something useful in there. This power supply was in the garbage; it can power all sorts of things. I just grabbed it because why would you throw that out? It can be used for something, at some point.

There is potential in people to use this in some creative way. Again, I would not have predicted it … Even a table, this marble table, was destined for landfill by the university, and I said, No. We created three huge marble slabs and fabricated the legs and for years it just sat in a corner, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Then this laser project came along, and I realized I needed a stable table and there you go. This was also going for the landfill, and the rack. We just collect garbage, it’s amazing. The organ bath system was from a company going under, it would have gone to the landfill, so I grabbed it. This table, and the rack … So much. A lot of hardware here that’s holding up things, it’s all stuff I found in the garbage.

This is part of the incubator story. This myth that gets perpetrated about commercial scientific instruments, that they’re better than what you can make yourself. I’m sure there are some examples where that’s true, but for a lot of it, there’s no reason why you can’t collect garbage and make research-grade tools. If anything, the biohacker community showed us that it’s possible. That’s really what opened my eyes, the fact that we’re doing all this stuff. Again, there’s a responsibility here. I play with a lot of public funds: Is it in the public interest that I buy something for 100,000 dollars when I can make it for 150 dollars? I would argue that it’s not. I can do so much more with that money.

To further branch out on the potentialities of things, would you be able to describe the thought process occurring when you see an object, and its potential, that is about to be discarded? How do you relate to the object taking a place in the lab when you see it and think: ‘well, this could be useful at some point’?

That’s a good question! It’s usually something visual that looks cool to me for whatever reason. That’s how most of the projects here start anyway. Some visual in my head that I think we should make, and it looks cool. We can figure how to do that and then afterwards we can figure out why and do science. So there’s that, it just looks interesting … maybe I don’t even know what it is and I have to open it up to find out, it’s just that discovery again. Or there’s the far more practical side, which is: I know it’s got some components, I know what it is. And I know there’s a fan in there, there’s a motor in there, there’s transistors and things we can re-use, there’s heat syncs, I know all of these components and I know they’re useful because I’ve used them before. And I know if I bought them new I’d pay an arm and a leg for them. There’s that practical cheap side of me, but we can do better than just buying a new heater sync or a fan for 15 dollars when I can get it for free.

Usually I would collect everything in that pile, bring it back, figure out what I want and what I don’t want. That’s usually how it would be. I take it all. So there’s a pile out there from the Public Health Agency or Health Canada, because they know that I’m one of these people. A few weeks ago I got a message over Twitter: ‘By the way, we’re getting rid of all this lab ware stuff, do you want any of it?’ And I responded instantly: ‘Yes, I’ll take everything!’ I show up, I was a little disappointed because she told a bunch of people so it wasn’t all mine, but most of it was. I have no idea what we’re going to do with it. It’s just glassware, beakers, these are just useful items for whatever reason.

This has been happening only really recently, but enough word has spread, and I’ve met enough people that, when people are throwing things out, they call me. It’s great, I’ll take it! I’m even seeing repurposing spread to some of the other profs now. At first I was really the oddball, but now people are starting to think this way, which is really satisfying.

Speaking about cultivating productive conditions of possibilities, you’ve recently challenged your lab members to create a ‘true’ cyborg, where organism and machine would be interdependent … Could you elaborate a little more on this?

I must have seen something on cyborgs. There have been two well-reported studies recently on cyborgs, but I think the term cyborg is really ill-defined. I think in general, looking at cyborgs, most people think of something living using a machine or something integrated into electronics. Somebody gets an implant and calls themselves a cyborg, and I don’t think that qualifies. So there are two things. There’s the more recent study that was in the news of this cut rose that they grew in water, put it into a vase. But in the water was a polymer that got sucked up into the rose. It’s a conductive polymer, and you can hook up electrodes, pass current, and measure things like voltage. I think they were even changing the colour of the chlorophyll just a little; cool. And then there was, about a year ago, another project: it was a mesh of wire that tissue was crawling onto. Same idea: you could pass current and read voltages. But to me, that seems too easy in many ways and a little bit lazy to call that a cyborg. Not the work itself, but the definition seems a bit lazy. Yes, this living thing has electronic components, but if you didn’t have those electronic components, that living thing would still be functional. There’s no dependence on electronics. And likewise, the more interesting thing to me is that the electronics function fine without the living thing. Like somebody having an implant in her mind, yes they may need that piece of electronics to live, but that piece of electronics doesn’t need them to function. So I find that historical perception of what a cyborg is very incomplete. In my mind, you need both sides: the electronics can’t function without the living object in any way, it’s completely non-functional, and likewise the living thing can’t function without the electronics. You need that complete symbiosis. There’s another conceptual problem here, and that is that you still need a human to assemble these things, but we’ll tackle that later when we get to self-replication. So what I would like us to think about, the lab to think about, is how do we create a true cyborg …

Let’s strip it down as simple as possible: we have cells, we have electronics. So how do we keep a culture of cells alive with electronics and how does that cell culture power and allow the electronics to function? So that’s the goal. It was very much inspired by the potato clock: you can power a little clock, so we should be able to power a circuit. With that we should be able to power a simple valve to change media so that the nutrients are always being refreshed. With that in mind, we have a mass of cells that have an electrical potential with which we can, then and with the right electrodes, generate a small amount of current. I don’t know how we’re going to do this exactly. But you know, as the cells grow and consume nutrients, the pH will change, which I hope would generate enough current to say turn on the circuit, to open a valve, to flush all the old media out with new media and as soon as the new media is in there, the current will drop so the valve can close and the cells can continue to grow. Other than setting up the system, we have no intervention. The cells generate enough electronic potential to turn on the circuit, to flush the system, to give them new nutrients, as soon as that’s happening the potential drops, the valve closes and the cells keep growing, and at some point, when they’ve made the media, the cycle goes again. In theory, we can just stand back and let that go. That way, the electronics are not functional unless the current is supplied from cells, like a battery, and the cells don’t live without the electronics to induce this feeding mechanism.

I think, if we can achieve that, that’s the starting point. Because there are still problems there. Like somebody still has to fill the reservoir of media and somebody still has to put the system together, so it’s really not truly the cyborg I envision, but it’s a step in the right direction. If I can be convinced that we can actually do this, then we’ll spend more resources on making it as autonomous as possible.

The question of the cyborg is not just about a machine and a living organism that are put together, right? It’s also that, after being put together, both the living organism and the machine have been transformed and eventually gained something. So it’s really the interdependency, the actual circulation of a contact zone: a cyborg will be a cyborg because you put these two different force fields together and something emerging from the interaction will eventually transform the terms. Which applies to ideas as well … For instance, when you come to the lab meeting and pose such a challenge to your students, is it in part to see what emerges from those contact zones?

There’s this constant floating around in my head. But then there’s also the interesting experiment to just propose it to the group and see what people do. I’m interested to see who gravitates to it and who actually takes it up, if anybody. So that’s interesting, that’s the experiment where what I envision is one thing and what is actually becoming is a whole other thing. It could go in a completely different direction. So I’m just going to wait and see what happens …

I am constantly looking for people who are bold, who are willing. This is what I’m interested in. The reality is: we don’t live in isolation. Speaking as a scientist, I constantly stand on the shoulders of others. They’ve done their work, and I’m only able to do my work because of work that’s gone before. But so many scientists think that they’re god’s gift to humanity, and it really confuses me a lot of the time: I don’t understand the attitude at all. I find that, actually, they might be very famous to ten people. Because that’s how I’m thinking about it, you’ve got a fan club of ten, you’re pretty famous. But even if they work, I often don’t find their work very bold. Yes, it’s made more contributions but in fact if you look carefully, it’s not some paradigm-shifting thing; it’s just another increment along a long history of people contributing. There was a paper recently looking at star scientists, what happens to their metrics, their H-index and all of that after they die. And what you see is that all their collaborators and people stop citing them, and it’s all the young people with all the new ideas who were being held back essentially by a dogma in the field who start to rise. It’s teamwork, it always is, whether people admit it or not. I didn’t get here by myself. At some point, somebody trained me. I’ve had this discussion with other people who were put out about the fact that they had to train somebody. You know this because somebody trained you, and somebody trained that person. It’s the life cycle.