A Response to Research: Defenses as Reflex
In an era dominated by mass production, luxury materials, and digital ephemera, the challenge of shifting the audience’s focus from passive consumption to critical thinking is becoming more pressing. Engaging with humble, unadorned materials demands a deliberate attentiveness that disrupts the instant gratification and surface aesthetics pervading contemporary visual culture. When an installation requires sustained attention from the viewer without offering immediate resolution, there may be an opening for the viewer to move from passive observation to active participation. One viable consideration for sustaining attention is through enticing cerebral and sensorial faculties. More specifically, the invitation to be placed into a world of uncertain appropriateness may encourage the viewer to confront resistance or sadism to foster active inquiry required to awaken a dwindling buzz.
In The Lives of Flies, Tatiana Istomina creates a living (and dying) bio art installation, reminiscent of an antiquarian cabinet. Her use of materials, arranged within constellations of archival historical, social, and psychological frameworks, elicits wonder, ethical responsibility, discomfort, and the questioning of the paradoxes inherent in species-based research practices. Through this arrangement, she invites viewers to critically face these complexities through their interconnected themes, prompting much deliberation on their implications. In her formal yet unsettlingly methodical setting, the viewer’s awareness is ushered toward the physical and psychological defenses functioning within human and non-human subsystems. For example, Istomina’s hand-made assemblage clusters are built as intricate visual mappings, including signage sourced from the Pavlovian experiment on classical conditioning translating to “Response: a defensive reflex”, silkscreened archival photographs of nameless faces and fragmented bodies, and fruit fly diagrams. A 17th-century treatise comparing living organisms to mechanical structures contrasts with a laboratory housing thousands of Drosophila melanogaster in "The Fly Machine." The exhibit features a breeding maze of winged and wingless Drosophila circulating through a glass and plastic network. Istomina's commitment is evident in the precision and care required to build a self-sustained laboratory that effectively isolates the flies from viewers. This meticulous setup ensures the continuation of the life cycle within a controlled experimental environment while safeguarding against an infestation.
Istomina, holding a doctorate in physics and a master's degree in fine arts, explores the adaptability of Drosophila melanogaster, thriving both in nature (as composting herbivores) and under controlled laboratory conditions (as ideal subjects for human prototype experiments). She views the fruit fly as a "perfect biological instrument," bridging mechanical and living states together. Widely used in biomedical research due to its genetic and physiological similarities to humans, the fruit fly is crucial for studying diseases, neuropsychiatric disorders, aging, and more, offering a low-cost, ethically neutral model for scientific inquiry. Drosophila, often called the "Queens of Genetics," play a pivotal role in advancing developmental and evolutionary biology as specimens to study, despite being cast as insignificant creatures in their natural habitat. Their use in behavioral and neurogenetic studies, such as those exploring emotional processes (Lueningschroer-Wang et al., 2025), demonstrates their value in understanding emotion. Subjected to isolation, starvation, and anxiolytic substances, Drosophila’s resilience in these harsh conditions mirrors a troubling history of bodies, both human and nonhuman, mechanized for scientific progress. The installation’s silkscreen fabric images of docile bodies reflect how the value of certain beings is determined by their utility to the dominant group, echoing a long-standing ideology driving industrial development, exploitation, and unethical experimentation. Dehumanizing systems of enslavement, colonial labor, the Tuskegee Study, eugenics, and the industrial prison complex emulate the treatment of Drosophila melanogaster. Bred exclusively for experimental research, these flies are named from the 1830 Latin classification, meaning "dew-loving black belly." Outside the lab, they are often dismissed as insignificant, swatted without thought. This utilitarian view underscores a broader societal tendency to devalue life, often influenced by racial categorizations. Such tendencies are evident not only in scientific research but also in the commodification and distortion of marginalized identities, reflecting a historical pattern of exploiting vulnerable bodies for power and control. Even within contemporary culture, the nursery rhyme "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me" has been modified and codified without being examined with care. Stemming from the Antebellum South and popularly performed at minstrel shows, the violence of the song underscored the perpetuation of harmful racial stereotypes while contributing to cultural erasure.
In The Lives of Flies, encounters are inevitable, shaped by the viewer's engagement and internal response. The viewer’s participation influences their interpretation of the spectacle. At the installation’s core, the life cycle of Drosophila melanogaster unfolds within glass beakers and plastic tubing in the peep show broadcasting mating, reproduction, and death. Magnifying glasses, placed within reach, invite scrutiny, blurring the line between scientific observation and voyeurism. This tension prompts reflection on the ethics of observation and participation, and more significantly, the act of looking, whether driven by curiosity, instruction, or reflex. Does magnified viewing implicate the observer in the spectacle of life and death? Is this participation passive, or does it reveal a deeper fascination with control, decay, or power over life? The installation challenges the viewer to consider whether the duration of engagement reflects moral sensibility, and whether such encounters (intimate, uncomfortable, and mediated by tools of vision) mirror forms of public execution or sacrifice. In doing so, it compels reflection on the value we place on life, the ethics of spectatorship, and the thin boundary between inquiry and complicity, raising the question of whether the act of viewing is ever truly neutral. Here, one encounters the drama and tragedy of The Lives of Flies, or perhaps more fittingly, The Lives of Lies, as the lens shifts onto the participant, who becomes a cog in the wheel of the installation's social experiment. Not to worry; there is plenty of wit to go around to help sublimate the inevitable anxiety. Istomina generously positions such diagrams of automata and hardware mechanics in plain sight. This particular kind of confrontation conjures the past and present-day quandaries shaped by ritual, industrialization, rationalization, and a paucity of remorse.
As a work that deals with the lived experience of the viewer and fruit fly as subject/surveillant, Istomina’s installation lab, or more fittingly, “Insta-Lab”, conjures the philosophical pillars of the Arte Neoconcreto (Neo-Concrete) movement from mid-century Brazil. Leaning into the phenomenological position that the viewer’s gaze animates the artwork, the manifesto speaks to the same sentiment as Istomina emphasized:
We do not conceive of art either as a “machine” or as an “object” but as a quasi-corpus, that is, an entity whose reality is not exhausted in the external relationships of its elements; an entity that, though analytically divisible into its parts, only gives itself up fully to a direct, phenomenological approach (Guillar, 1959).
The viewer/participant’s mere presence activates the living installation, inviting critique of the space as more than merely a mechanical facility for entertainment and breeding. Istomina’s description of the Drosophila as neither fully mechanical nor fully alive mirrors the installation’s operation. Could a participant’s engagement influence the degree to which The Fly Machine feels deadened, enlivened, or mechanized? Active involvement, rather than passive observation, might intensify relational complexities surrounding surveillance and morality, transforming internal tension into a generative force that encourages awareness and action. While The Fly Machine is carefully constructed and sanitized, it’s possible to assert that the spontaneous and generative impulses from the viewer (thought, emotion, or movement closer or away), coupled with the bodily excretions and instinctive responses from the flies, inevitably disrupt the aseptic aesthetic. That such a methodical infrastructure can elicit an exquisite range of valence and ambivalence is a testament to how designed order can host conflict.
Furthermore, this valuable tension of experiencing order and conflict is akin to the relationship between control and impulse. Like the flies feeding and mating under forced constraints, the viewer must now decide how to deal with the set of conflicts brewing in the living lab. Suppose behaviors provide a form for the expression of conflict, and conflict constellates aggression. In that case, the behavioral form of aggression may be more manageable when taking on the form of a public ritual. After all, rituals of aggression are no strangers to fruit flies or humans.
Placed behind the “The Fly Machine”, a hand- embroidered text titled “The original method of aggression” in typewriter font moonlights as a billboard, providing a short excerpt from a published paper (Dierick, 2007) on a study measuring aggression in Drosophila in male flies, with the help of virgin females to stimulate fighting. One key element omitted from the installation was the use of a decapitated female fruit fly placed on food under a spotlight to attract males—an environmental manipulation that heightens territorial behavior and male–male aggression. Recent research (Hindmarsh et al., 2025) shows that male Drosophila flick their wings aggressively to deter rivals, producing a sound that disrupts the female’s ability to hear other suitors. Female mating choices are influenced by these male confrontations, with successful courtship tied to dominance. Genetically modified wingless males, unable to produce the mating song, failed to court, rendering silence a form of reproductive impotence. While the research explores mating from both male and female perspectives, drawing parallels to human heterosexual dynamics risks oversimplification. Such comparisons ignore the biases of anthropomorphic interpretation and systemic shaping of human behavior. Perhaps a function as an active participant in The Lives of Flies is to break the ritual of avoiding accountability when uncomfortable and instead move towards a new ritual: reflecting on the nuances of aggression that disrupt a stagnant gaze.
Given the Western intellectual tradition, rooted in positivism, behaviorism, biomedical research, and genetic determinism, to critically reflect on the idealization of objective knowledge is in part to understand the neglect of the subjective, political, and cultural dimensions of being in a body, or the denial of embodiment. Whose body is being examined, and who is doing the observing? Within the canon of performance art engaging themes of bodily spectacle, power, and sacrifice, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) critiques institutionalized violence by implicating the audience in the act of witnessing his non-lethal, yet shockingly disturbing shooting. Similarly, Ron Athey’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1994) centers his own body as a site of self-mutilation and confrontational exposures. The Lives of Flies extends this lineage by disrupting body-mind dualism; through The Fly Machine and its installation assemblages, it positions the body as both a source and object of knowledge. These interdisciplinary expressions reveal how the body is not merely a biological entity but also a site of meaning-making, power, and resistance. In his seminal text, Foucault (1995) declares how the body is shaped by political power through control and discipline, becoming economically productive only within systems of domination. Therefore, the body is useful only when both productive and controlled. Springboarding off Foucault’s insights compels such considerations of the body not as a passive object of study, but as an active, contested terrain shaped by socialized forces. By examining the body’s role in these power dynamics, we uncover how even the most intimate, personal aspects of private life are shaped by larger structures of control and economic necessity. This framework invites us to consider how scientific and visual practices participate in these structures, shaping which bodies are seen, studied, and controlled. Istomina’s showcasing of living and representational fruit fly bodies in conversation with cropped prints of mostly female bodies forces a reconsideration of whose bodies are subjected to examination. After all, in Russian, "fly" is a feminine noun, culturally linked to women as intrusive, bothersome, and domestic. How these bodies are politicized and objectified in the pursuit of “objective” knowledge reinforces unequal power dynamics within and beyond the research laboratory. This juxtaposition challenges the presumed neutrality of scientific inquiry, urging us to question the power dynamics at play in determining which bodies are studied and how dominant cultural and political agendas shape their representation.
The Lives of Flies may disrupt psychological defenses, as the display of the fruit flies' physical vulnerability provokes a conflicted impulse towards predatory curiosity and an urge to recoil. In this way, the installation may offer a method for participants to engage with such contradictions, including grappling with forced constraints and the instinct to escape, similar to those experienced by fruit flies. Conceivably, the installation may also offer a method for participants to engage with specific internal constraints, akin to those experienced by fruit flies. The encounter with The Lives of Flies becomes a flight, or potential fight, with the identification or rejection of non-humanness. If drama serves as a function to externalize and purge emotions of terror and pity (Freud,1942), perhaps the participatory nature of the installation may serve to study one’s defenses as reflexes on the invisible stage?
Dana Kline, PhD
May 2025.
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Bibliography:
Dierick, H. (2007). A method for quantifying aggression in male Drosophila melanogaster. Nat Protoc 2, 2712–2718.https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2007.404
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish | The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, A. (s.l.): Vintage Books.
Freud, S. (1942). Psychopathic Characters on the Stage. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 11(4), 459–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1942.11925508
Hindmarsh Sten, T., et al. (2025). Male-male interactions shape mate selection in Drosophila.Cell, 188(6), 1486–1503.e25
Lueningschroer-Wang, Y., Derksen, E., Steigmeier, M., & Wegener, C. (2025). Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly Drosophila: Insights from the Open Field Test. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.28.640745
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Image list:
All images Courtesy of the Artist. Photo credit: Richard Hogan, Practice Gallery.All images and detail shots are of the installation “The Lives of Flies.”
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About the Artist:
Tatiana Istomina is a Russia-born American artist and writer. She works across several mediums, including painting, sculpture, textile arts, installation and video - and more recently, biological art. Istomina’s art practice is informed by double relocation: from Russia to the US, and from research in physics to contemporary art. The central question in her work is the condition of knowledge and the variable concepts of truth. Istomina’s projects have been featured in exhibitions and screenings across the US and abroad; venues include the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum (San Antonio, TX), Gaîté Lyrique (France), Castle d’Aspremont-Lynden (Belgium), the Drawing Center, the Bronx Museum, the AIR gallery and White Box (New York, NY), and the Practice gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Istomina is a recipient of several awards including the AAF Prize for Fine Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, the Chenven Foundation grant, and the Puffin Foundation grant, and worked at multiple residencies, such as Yaddo, the Core program, Air In-Silo (Austria), RAVI (Belgium) and Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands). Istomina’s artist book “Fhilosofhy of the Encounter: A memoir” was published by Pinsapo Press in 2019.
