Editor and author Lisa Margonelli interviewed Kathy High, a pioneer of biological and video art, about her extensive oeuvre focused on lab rats. Though hidden within labs and animal facilities, we owe much of scientific knowledge about human health to the experiments scientists perform on them.
Kathy’s installation, Embracing Animal (2005-2006), featured three live rescued rats that were bioengineered with human DNA. For 10 months, the rats lived on public display alongside films exploring the shifting relationships between humans, monsters, and beasts. The piece was an homage to the lab rats that were sacrificed for science. The work was part of the 2005 exhibition Becoming Animal: Art in the Animal Kingdom at MASS MoCA. The following is an excerpt from Lisa and Kathy’s live conversation at BDC Summit 2021:
Lisa.
How did you get interested in rats?
Kathy.
A lot of my work comes from looking at my own body and thinking about what is going on with my own diseases. These rats were the HLA B27 transgenic laboratory rat models used in research for my own autoimmune diseases, but they are invisible. Basically, if a medicine needs to be tested, it ends up being given to rats to see how they respond. They act as a kind of a proxy for the human experience of that molecule. I became interested in rats, partly because I started to get really interested in what research was taking place on their bodies.
L.
You’ve done 15 years of rat work. You’ve made Tamagotchi rats, white chocolate rats, and you also have real rats. Tell us about them.
K.
Some of the first rats I ever encountered were ones whose fur was dyed by students of mine. They were albino rats dyed pink for a photoshoot, and they were going to throw them out. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, wait, let me take these rats.
The rats that I used for my project Embracing Animal were used in medical research. They were intentionally developed to be sick and used for treating autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases, etc. I was able to order some from a lab animal supplier and started to work with them. I had this theory about looking at them from a humanist perspective rather than a scientific one. I asked, “What happens to these rats if we take them out of the lab, and start treating them with alternative medicine?” This was what I was actually doing with myself to treat my Crohn's disease—I wasn't having success with the medical system, so I started alternative therapies like acupuncture. They started to work and even my doctors were wondering why. I began treating the sick rats with these alternative therapies and some of them worked. It wasn't a controlled situation and I don't have any real statistics, but the rats eventually began to thrive.
L.
So your goal was twofold. One was to make the sick rats healthy. And the other was to experience the rats as individuals.
K.
The rats were bred by the lab facility to be sick, so I don't think they could have ever become truly healthy, but they could become healthier. I also wanted to give them the opportunity to explore spaces and foods and even each other in ways that lab conditions don't allow. These animals can't really exist in the wild because they do have diseases that prevent them from living independently. They had to be cared for, and that’s what we did: the rats were either with me at my house, lab, gallery, or museum. They were cared for by the curatorial team, by veterinarians, and myself. It was a labor of love by a lot of people to build spaces for them that enriched their lives.
The other goal of the project was to translate these rat relationships for the public. I had the rats from 2004 to 2006, during which they were exhibited twice. One of the exhibitions was at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is a museum that puts on long term exhibitions. The exhibition, which was about human-animal relationships, was on display for 10 months. They estimated 10,000 people came through per month.
The rats had been bioengineered with human DNA, so they could carry autoimmune diseases. They were a little bit human, which is why I was attracted to them. But in 2004, “transgenics”, the practice of genetically modifying an animal or organism with another species’ DNA, wasn't yet understood the way it is now. Today, it's more ubiquitous and publicly discussed. At the time, the museum did a great job instructing their docents to bring that term to the forefront and make people understand the kinds of genetic work done on research animals.
L.
There’s a video on your site of a little rat that comes up to the edge of a cage, and squeezes its nose through the wires of the cage. You get this sense that the rat has feelings and is exploring that environment very intentionally. What is the role of empathy in this work about rats, humans, and technology?
K.
Empathy is one of the important things that we need to understand when we think about what I typically call “trash animals.” By that, I mean ones that we don’t really care if they live or die—rats, pigs, and coyotes all fall under this term. We can even extend that term to organisms like microbes and other cellular beings to develop a kind of care or concern that goes beyond the human. It’s incredibly important to be able to empathize with the world around us.
So to get back to your question about that rat, who’s name was Echo, she was really great at trying to get my attention. We had this little blueberry treat that she loved and she knew exactly how to get me to give it to her. When I first got rats, I didn’t like them at all. But by the end of this period of living with them, I had basically fallen in love with each one of the five—Echo, Star, Matilda, Tara, and Flowers. As a team, they taught me more than I ever taught them.
Check out the full conversation here.
Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist working with technology, art, and biology. She collaborates with scientists and artists, and considers living systems, empathy, animal sentience, and the social, political, and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. Her art works have been shown at the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Science Gallery Dublin, MASS MoCA, and the Esther Klein Gallery, Science Center. Kathy is Professor in Arts and has a lab at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She is project coordinator for the Urban Environmental Center, NATURE Lab at the community media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media.
Lisa Margonelli is Editor in Chief at Issues in Science and Technology. She is the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long Strange Trip to Your Tank (2007) and Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology (2018). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, Slate’s Future Tense, Pacific Standard, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. Formerly the Editor in Chief of Zócalo Public Square, Lisa wrote about energy policy at the New America Foundation from 2006-2012. She lives in Maine.
Cite This Essay
High, Kathy and Lisa Margonelli. “Rat Chat.” Biodesigned: Issue 8, 22 July, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].