Agency in Movement is a collection of papers responding to ideas concerning perceptions of life and agency through movement. This quest is part of a research project that explores, practically and theoretically, the animation of lab-grown life: Tissue Engineered Muscle Actuator (TEMA). Here the author introduces different approaches to untangle the relations between life and movement.

The biomechanical roles of skeletal muscle and their tendons are diverse. Perhaps most intuitively, muscle is regarded as a biological ‘motor’ that provides the work required for accelerating the body and overcoming aero- and hydrodynamic forces. With detailed biomechanical analyses, more intricate roles of the muscle-tendon unit have been uncovered, ranging from energy recyclers, to shock absorbers and capacitors. The functional scope of muscle-tendon tissue makes it an attractive choice for exploring bio-machine integration. Research and cross-disciplinary collaboration at SymbioticA offers a testbed for scientific and artistic exploration into engineered muscle-tendon constructs and the broader philosophical debate surrounding their place in ‘semi-living’ machine systems.

The author discusses an experimental and interdisciplinary art science project based out of SymbioticA and in collaboration with Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts that attempts to construct a “living machine” out of skeletal muscle tissue and the ontological, aesthetic and methodological complexities inherent in such a project.

This paper will explore the challenges of presenting unmediated liveness of living tissue engineered sculptures and overcoming the perceptual stillness of the semi-living. By looking at the work of The Tissue Culture Art Project which since 1996 has used living tissue in its artworks, the author explores the strategies of dealing with the presentation of “aliveness” in living, yet seemingly motionless, “objects”.

Responding to the current narratives about the impending planetary catastrophe caused by our human activity, this philosophy-cum-art piece develops a more affirmative story about life, death and extinction. Framed as a non-normative ethics for the Anthropocene, it considers the human’s expanded obligations towards the bio- and geosphere, while also critically reflecting on the very constitution of this “human”.

Aberrations in the constancy and duration of movement challenge the determination of bodies and things within and beyond dance. In fact, 19 th -century anthropological studies on animism and recent cognitive science experiments on timescale bias demonstrate that the agency of erratic motion is difficult to apprehend. From irregular and unexpected movements in dance to the variable tempos of cell motility, this paper considers how arrhythmic choreography recalibrates the agency of matter, objects, bodies and environments.

During normal daily activities, muscles are required to lengthen as frequently as they shorten to produce movement. Lengthening muscle actions are associated with high forces and low energy consumption, but can often result in muscle injury. These unique features are not explained adequately by current (cross-bridge) theories of muscle contraction. Using specific myosin inhibitors and different temperatures the author has examined the molecular mechanisms of stretch-induced force enhancement. The results, which suggest that lengthening force arises from the strain of both cross-bridge and non-cross-bridge components of the sarcomere, help to refine understanding of the molecular mechanisms of muscle contraction.