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THE DOLLY PROJECT

 

Dolly's Dilemma: Version I
The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, College Park
1999-2000

Installation with video and printed images.

Dolly's Dilemma: Version 2
Roger Williams University, Briston, RI 2000

Installation with video, backlit circuit board walls, printed images, and plastic sheep.

 

 

 

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277 to 1: The Cloning of Dolly: The dilemmas of cloning in detail...
This work refers to the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1996 in Scotland which required the extraction of 277 mammary cells from an adult ewe to produce one live cloned offspring. See the Project History below for how I became interested in cloning, and for factual information about Dolly and the cloning process as well as related ethical issues.


This installation was designed for the Wellfleet Public Library and shown in 2004.  However, it has many possible configurations for other spaces.


248 embryos (blue) died after extraction but before fertilization
16 of the surviving embryos were not successfully implanted in the surrogate mother ewes.

Of the remaining 13 that were successfully implanted, only 1 resulted in a live, healthy offspring.

Dolly as an adult ewe.  She was born in 1996, made public in 1997, and died at age 6 in 2002.

DOLLY'S CLONING & ISSUES OF BIO-DIVERSITY

 

 

 

 

 

 

While Shepherds Watched (Version I) Installed at the Historic Newport Congregational Church as part of the Visions 2002 Invitational Exhibition.

Overall size is 6 feet high by 15 feet wide. Inkjet prints on paper, fabric, stitching, circuit boards, plastic lawn sheep, and back lights.

While Shepherds Watched (Version 2) Installation at the Wellfleet Public Library, December 2004. In this grid of images, the rolling hills are comprised of about 100 portraits of different sheep breeds, and the sky from 50 pages of printed text listing the names of about 125 distinct breeds. All of the pages are tied together with wool yarn, a yarn fringe hangs from the bottom, and the piece is hung with loops of yarn from a wooden rod at the top . Overall piece isapproximately 72" h x 108" w.


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Note: The information on this page was compiled and initially posted in the late 1990's. Much work has been done on cloning of various animals since then. Many advances have occurred in technology along with debates on the ethics and morals of cloning various animals including humans. Therefore, this information should not be considered as current or consistent with today's practices and views..

 

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How the DOLLY PROJECT came to be.
The Dolly Project grew out of my involvement with computing and cyber culture which begin in the mid-eighties. I taught my first courses in digital imaging and made my first digital art in 1985. I became interested in both the conceptual ideas of computing and the physical tools--the hardware. The power of computers to create new images and also to modify and manipulate existing ones is now very old news, but it was a radical departure from traditional image-making in 1985.

My first body of work, The Architecture and Memory Series, consisted of digitally processed photographs, as well as critical writing and presentations. On the one hand, it seemed that computers, due to their capacity to record and store vast quantities of information, could enhance, extend, and stabilize human memory. On the other hand, it became clear that the opposite might also be true. As we came to increasingly use and rely on computers, the issues of information-overload, depersonalization, memory crashes, etc., tempered blind enthusiasm for technology. The second project I worked on through the mid-nineties resulted in several variations of performance and installation. Titled Mnemosyne's Dream, it was a further exploration of memory.  It also looked at relationships between the tangible world of nature, things, and bodies and the cerebral world of computing.

In the mid-nineties, after the coming of broad access to the Internet, email, and then the World Wide Web, questions of identity overtook those of memory in my work. It was not only information and images (also sounds) that could be easily modified with computers, but also our own identities. We could choose to "be" different individuals in the online world and we also saw the graying of the borders between human and machine as technology penetrated the body. Pacemakers and mechanical prosthetics, for example, made cyborgs out of individuals who most likely were not aware of the larger implications of these medical advances. Artists, scientists, and of course science fiction writers, knowingly transgressed the borders between biological and mechanical as they investigated the future of cybernetics and biology.

Humans and other animals were not only changed by mechanical and electronic devices, but they also were increasingly the objects of genetic manipulation. Origin and identity were suddenly terribly vulnerable. Dolly, the cloned sheep, was unprecedented, because she was cloned with cells from an adult animal. When the news of Dolly hit the press in 1997, my attention--like that of much of the world--was snagged. I knew that I wanted to make art in response to Dolly.

HI-TECH VS. THE IDYLLIC
It's relevant to report that I grew up on a farm and that I moved back to the country, living in rural Vermont from 1974-84. I had a handful of sheep for a few years and came to know first-hand their behaviors, stereotypes, and association with the pastoral. Beyond this brief shepherding encounter, I also admit to being enamored of idyllic landscapes speckled with flocks of sheep. Therefore, when I began making art about a particular sheep named Dolly, I decided to juxtapose this hi-tech specimen with the humble creature that has played a role in human culture for about ten thousand years. The irony of this rustic animal becoming the emblem of futuristic biology made Dolly an excellent subject for examining the promises and the problems of cloning.


Dolly & surrogate mom

Dolly was an ordinary looking sheep. She had no outward signs of her parthogenetic, or virgin birth. Nor would you know by touching her wooly fleece that she was the one live outcome of 277 laboratory trials. A central piece of my Dolly Project, 277 to 1: The Cloning of Dolly, is a "diagram" of the experiment carried out at the Roslin Institute in Scotland: it lays bare a key aspect of cloning for all to see. It consists of 276 images of a plastic sheep that have been digitized, "artificially colored," and slashed with hand-painted black "Xes" to indicate their non-survival. In contrast to these 276 unframed images is a triumphant portrait of Dolly in an ornamented gold frame.

The second large work in the Project, While Shepherds Watched..., is a tapestry-like wall hanging that also speaks to the unsettling issues of cloning. In this case, ethical, religious, agricultural, environmental, and genomic diversity issues make their way to the surface.

Additional works in this project include "portraits" of sheep done as monoprints, color photographic prints, quilt-like mixed media pieces, and a series called "sheep clothing" which are assembled and stitched from paper, wool yarn and other materials.

Resources on the Cloning of Dolly and the Ethics of Cloning

The Roslin Technique
http://library.thinkquest.org/24355/data/details /techniques/ roslin.html


Animation of Roslin Technique
http://library.thinkquest.org/24355/data/details/media/oslinanim.html

How Cloning Works by Craig Freudenrich, Ph.D.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/cloning3.htm

Cloning After Dolly: Who's Still Afraid? by Gregory Pence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004.

Bioethics, Stem Cells, and Cloning, updated by Maria Mergel (Mar 23, 2011)
http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Bioethics%2C+Stem+Cells%2C+and+Cloning

Michigan State University Library suggested sources:
http://staff.lib.msu.edu/skendall/cloning/ethics.htm

The Cloning of Dolly: Facts and Ethics
(as they have been made public through the media)

http://science.howstuffworks.com/life
/genetic/cloning3.htm

  • Dolly, a Finn Dorset sheep, was born on July 5, 1996 at Roslin Institute, a research center located near Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Dolly was the first mammal known to be cloned from an adult of the species. In this case, a cell taken from the mammary gland of a 6 year old Finn Dorset ewe was cloned through a technique known as nuclear transfer.
  • The cloning process began with the extraction of 277 separate mammary cells from a Finn Dorset ewe. These cells were "starved" for five days in the lab so that they would go into a suspended or quiescent state. This was necessary so that their "identity" as mammary cells would be turned off and the DNA susceptible to reprogramming once they were fused with egg cells.
  • Simultaneously, oocytes or reproductive egg cells were removed from another female sheep, (in this case, a ewe of a different and easily distinguishable breed, a Scottish Blackface).
  • The nucleus from each of those oocytes was extracted in the lab. It is the nucleus that contains the genetic material that would normally determine the characteristics of the offspring. These unfertilized and genetically empty Scottish Blackface egg cells were then ready to be "fertilized" with the genetic material from the Finn Dorset mammary cells.
  • Next, the 277 enucleated egg cells were fused with genetic material from the mammary cells.
  • Electric current was applied to the eggs to simulate the burst of energy that occurs during normal fertilization and to begin embryonic develpment.
  • Of the 277 fused egg cells only 29 embryos survived. Of these 29, only 13 were successfully implanted in the wombs of Blackface ewes.
  • 148 days after fusion, i.e., laboratory fertilization, on July 5, 1996, Dolly was born from one of the surrogate Blackface ewes--the single successful outcome of 277 attempts to clone.
  • The story of Dolly's birth as the first clone of an adult mammal was released to the public the following February when Dolly was a little more than 6 months old.
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