Kirsty Robertson (with knitting by Brad Colbourne, Jim Morris, Nikki Porter and Kirsty Robertson)

“Genetic research has revealed coding to be the very stuff or flesh of things.”¹

[Cast on 64 stitches in colour A, K 4 rows in SS]

It is said that spider’s silk is five times stronger by weight than steel, with a chemical resistance greater than any man-made polymer fiber. Solitary territorial carnivores, however, spiders cannot be farmed in the manner of silk worms, cannot be, essentially, forced into a role of production and consumption. The elusiveness of mass produced spider silk, with its potential applications in the military, industrial and medical worlds, for soft armour, biodegradable bandages, artificial ligaments, skin repair, and high performance textiles, has made it a highly sought, and enthusiastically sponsored transnational biotechnological project.²

[Row 5: with right side facing, K15A, K1B, K48A]

In 2000, researchers at Nexia Biotechnologies on the outskirts of Montreal introduced Peter and Webster to the public (www.nexiabiotech.com). Though retaining the essential characteristics of African pygmy goats, a complex gene splice incorporated spider silk protein into their genetic composition creating two transgenic mammals whose milk contained the arachnid proteins that when isolated could be reproduced and manufactured into fibres with potential usage to both protect and repair the body. In its final application, the spider/goat silk BioSteel (as it was known) could be woven directly into the human body or developed into a composite material offering “ballistic protection that could lie closer to, and more gently upon, the body.”³

[Row 6: P47A, P2B, P17A]

I am interested in these experiments in part for the way that the seemingly natural and ephemeral has been so easily reconfigured into a perceived need within a military/capital rubric, but also because there is something strangely appealing about the spider goat – the spoat/gider that even makes an appearance in Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Oryx and Crake.⁴ But for this paper, I am also interested in the spider-goat experiments and the search for the elusive production of spider silk because they speak to an insufficiency of the human skin and body, a need to bind it, suture it, stitch it, repair it, cover it, arm it, and protect it. Penetrated by malignant moles, bullets, and burns, by scars and sunburns and warts, skin has seemingly been released from a role as an epidermal envelope, a mediator between world and self, to become something both endangered and replaceable.

[Row 7: K16A, K2B, K46A]

Recently, scientists at Manchester University developed a printer able to produce human skin. Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, skin cells are taken from a patient’s body, multiplied, then printed out, creating a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound’s dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.⁵ Still in the early stages of development, it is not known how the printed skin will react to that other sense of skin – touch. Printed skin might look right, but feel wrong, or not feel at all. It might be, in other words, a trick, from the French word tricoter to knit or knot together, and thus deceive or riddle.⁶

[Row 8: P45A, P3B, P16A]

With the epidermal layer printable on an inkjet, the question might be what is not manufacturable, what is not commodity, and when the body is deconstructed through bio- and nanotechnology, through prosthetic limbs and silicone features, through hair dye and braces, the mapping of the human genome, the patenting of human genes and the collapse of the body into so many tradable components – what is not a trick? What does not fall into a space of deceit, consumption, riddling, or elusive reality?

[Row 9: K17A, K3B, K18A, K2B, K24A]

Well, spider silk, for one. In 2003 the spider silk project at Nexia was closed down and the company’s assets moved into the increasingly lucrative markets of counter and anti-terrorism, manufacturing Protexia, a pre-treatment used on military personnel to counter the toxic effects of nerve agents (www.nexiabiotech.com). Recently, Nexia was bought by the Minnesota company PharmAthene, a bioengineering facility set up in the wake of 9/11, and dedicated solely to “making the world a safer place” through Anthrax vaccines and other lucrative fear-driven pharmaceuticals (www.pharmathene.com). Solitary, territorial, the spider cost too much to replicate, the end product of bullet proof, yet biodegradable, body armour too far from a paranoid reality of white powder in envelopes and active armies needing immediate, rather than futuristic, protection. Researched by DuPont (the manufacturer of the bullet-proof Kevlar), NASA and others, the production of synthetic spider silk has proved remarkably elusive and mystifying.⁷ The patent for spider silk, bought by Nexia from the University of Wyoming, has recently been picked up by an Israeli-German team who are seeking to produce the silk in insect cells through the insertion of spider genetic material through fast-replicating viral structures.⁸ Bugs in bugs, spider viruses, spider-viral, spiral.