diffractions

a gesturing to that end, in acknowledgment of all the generous responses and engagements, in writing and in reading practice, that you all have left for me.

I find myself entirely excited and confused by the readings assigned for this final week. I feel enlivened by the horizons made visible through these accounts of bioart practice and the insights of Tactical Biopolitics (2008); however, I also feel caught by questions of funding and questions of cost—the latter a multiplex invocation which I hope registers both a consideration of the amount of capital needed to engaged in these projects, but as well, the toll of not attempting to engage in such projects, or perhaps, to borrow from Nicole Jeremijenko’s, the price of not doing something, or not generating some tactic of response.

In spite of, or perhaps in relation with, this uncertain suspension I think the readings for this week also provide us with a space in which to creatively re-imagine these ideas. Last term Ken Little invited me to replace the word art in Elizabeth Grosz’s chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth (2008) with the word ethnography or anthropology to see what methods, what tactics, what engagements and relations could propagate in the switch. I wonder too, picking up from our discussion of the Helmreich’s work and the spaces opened up by ethnographic research, if we might do the same for Tactical Biopolitics—if we might read the words art and artists as ethnography and anthropology?

In addition to suggesting this rendering practice, I also want to offer a rendering that I think fits, albeit precariously, with the project of tactically and tactfully responding to biopolitics and the biotech industry. The Daily Dish (2009) is a blog project composed of three hundred and sixty five posts of Klari Reis’ painted petri dishes. The ‘about’ section of her website offers this description: “Klari uses reflective epoxy polymer to depict electron microscope images of natural and unnatural cellular reactions. The effect is hopeful, almost playful, belying the serious nature of the subject matter.” While each of the dishes posted as explorations of her culturing process—the uncertain and unpredictable result of mixing epoxy polymers with acrylic resins, left to cure and quietly blend and collide—these dishes are usually installed in groups of 150, 60 and 30 dishes and titled more broadly as the hypochondria series (2007-present, [imaged below]).

What I find most compelling about these works, and indeed what compels me to post Reis’ work in conversation with our reading on bioart, is the way in which her pieces refigure relationships with scientific technologies. Acutely aware of her surroundings as an artist working in San Francisco, she is described as recognizing that “[N]orthern California hosts more life sciences companies than anywhere else in the world. Klari Reis’ art work is a product of biological techniques, which provide context for the artworks and explore the increasingly fuzzy line between the technological and the natural.” Not only is her work a product of these techniques, her rendering of biotech practices calls attention the ways in which organisms and substances cultivated in such contexts are themselves worldings– constructed coagulates of a multitude of decisions and mediating actions which directly impact what appear in the supportive medium of the agar.

I am drawn to her work precisely because she offers a ways in which we might redraw the boundaries of the petri dish—of reconsidering and reimagining what it can be and what it is possible to cultivate inside its curves. In this case, the petri dish becomes a space of speculation—a space of uncertain, creative engagement. Here I am reminded of Paul Vanouse’s description of his piece, Latent Figure Protocol (2007) as a “[p]roject that seeks to downgrade the scientific authority of the ‘DNA fingerprint’ to the status of ‘portrait’ (an association aided by my own status as an ‘artist’ rather than a ‘scientist’)” (in Tactical Biopolitics, 2008: 187). However, in returning to questions of the relation of art and capital, of funding and contact, I wonder at what point Reis’ work becomes a celebration rather than a creative critique of biotech and biocapital. To this end, I wonder how different her hopeful re-imagings of petri dishes differs from Nicole Jeremijenko’s politics of hope attached to the UrbanSpaceStation—a politics Jeremijenko describes as “re-imaging, re-designing our relationships to natural systems.” While both are questions of doing, I wonder what project does more in the sense of instantiating a new relation with biopolitics?

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da Costa, Beatriz and Kavita Philip. 2008. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York: Columbia University Press

I thought I had imagined my rendering for this week. I found myself troubled to conjure the proper combination of nouns and verbs to fill up the search fields of the short-list of blogs I imagined hosted the images I held in my mind:

floating apartments sea/ ocean/ oceanic/ oceanic architecture/ floating houses/ houses sea/

The google application in my browser is still marked with these laughable combinations for what I finally found was titled underwater skyscraper or ^hO₂+ scrapers (water-scraper)

As I write this, I find myself am afraid to clear my browser history for fearing of losing the link to this image. Inside this tension I feel that “[the] ground is liquifying” (Helmreich 2009: 169)– that both my relations of locating, departing and returning to this imagination are movements as fluid as the flows that have caught and captured the very potential of imagining a space in time in which skyscrapers float. Inside this tension I find that my attempt to render this image is pulling me closer to Helmreich’s notion of abduction. Here my thoughts on the ^hO₂+ scrapers are resonate with Helmreich’s indications that, “[a]bduction is reasoning from premises that may materialize in the future” (2009: 172) insofar as both the matters of the sea and the matters of sea architecture are contingent on predictive reasoning that has been abstracted from material caught by investigative and capitalist flows–materials that are caught by interest yet left unexamined in anticipation of “[y]et-to-be-invented techniques of theories for making sense of such information” (Helremich 2009: 172). To clarify, “Abduction, in other words, joins hope to reason , present texts to future contexts, contemporary life forms to scientific forms of life yet to come” (ibid).

Imagine my sense in finding a resonance between Helmreich’s words and Sarly Adre Bin Sarkum’s plans for ^hO₂+ scrapers that despite its reverberation with my penchant for the pelagic and for the contiguities of land and sea, only to feel as though both it and my imaginings were abducted by this very sense of abducting–of the forceful capture of the imaginable and the contingencies of this imaginary aquatic urban life on technologies and measurements that are themselves still being imagined.

Staying stuck in this sense of abduction, I think the design plans for ^hO₂+ scrapers offers a place to consider not only the colours of aquatic capital (as ultramarine or sea green, or as the racialized configurations that Helmreich discusses in chapter five), but as well, as the forms of “ultraviolet capital” (2009: 268) — capital already encoded, already rendered B’ but nonetheless invisible to eyes territorialized in the present.

To this end, I am interested in rendering this rendering in relation to abduction in the terms that Helmreich proposes, as well as in relation to this concepts physiological definition–as a “movement of a limb or other part away from the midline of the body or from another part” (Oxford American Dictionary). Taken together, I think ^hO₂+ scrapers is an imagining and an enactment of how “[l]ife becomes deterritoralized into what might yet become” (Helmreich 2009: 272)—a deterritorialization that Helmreich indicates is often positioned “[a]t the stressed boundaries of existing forms of life” (Helmreich 2009: 268).

As I transduce and diffract these insights into the context of ^hO₂+ scrapers, it seems that the form of the skyscraper, as both a measure of the ingenuity of certain kinds of ‘life’ and as that which contains ‘life’ is being re-territorialized in relation to the edges of peak oil, glacial caps, and (un)sustainable social forms and practice. The plans for ^hO₂+ scrapers suggests that rather than intervening on the inevitable, we ought to take the technologies of the present and invert their invention in preparation for the flooded future. Literally. Reasoning that “the skyscraper… has become an ominous harbingers [sic] of our ecologically bleak future,” Sarly adre Bin Sarkum’s ^hO₂+ scrapers seeks to not deterritorialize this familiar form from its vertical stretches to skies unknown, and reterritorialize its technological reach toward the depths of oceans unknown. Here, the edifice of architecture is reterritorialized into a buoyant, resilient, self-sufficient, responsive, and amphibian, if not cephalopodic future—a building, a community—it’s Bay Street for the sea—commerce will never stop, and capital will not be forced to stop capturing if it can only be made to work upside-down.

And it seems, following Helmreich’s argument, that this condition of possibility is already occurring precisely in the places where the bio is inflected–that oceanic life is mobilized and indentured as “technological resource” (2009: 268) in frozen samples and in its possible services. Inside these images, ultraviolet capital as that which pushes the spectrum of speculation such that the future is abducted and returned to the present– a movement that makes it possible to describe the yet to be built ^hO₂+ scrapers as outfitted with “bioluminescent tentacles [that] provide sea fauna a place to live and congregate while collecting energy through its kinetic movements.” Further, this abduction makes it possible to “[p]icture a new metapolis, created from a collection of ^hO₂+ scrapers,   as a city that does not consume nature but creates and produces nature.” Trajectories stabilized, ground solidified. Ultraviolet rays flickering, flaring and blinding. This is an imaging, a cleaving to a future that cannot be washed away by a wave, but one that is nevertheless entirely contingent to the resources rendered from and contained within that very motion.

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Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

After reading Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) I find my surroundings differently presenced with spectral hauntings– with the apparitions of animals old and new, rendered aesthetically and violently in and into the objects and ideas that constitute my everyday.

I found that these presences followed me, pricking at my attention with shifting intensity the further I fell into Shukin’s book. Indeed, where I to lose sight of where she was taking me, or where I landed, I had only to return to the cover—to meet the gaze of three serious cows. A potent demand for acknowledgement.

In speaking to my ghostly company, a differently corporealized reminder, I was surprised, surprisingly so, to find these insights present with me as friends and I poked fun at the Academy Awards this past Sunday. With bingo sheets ready to be marked with our thoughts on what was best, I found myself caught in the presence of the documentary section, on the selection of The Cove (2009). I ask my fiends to confirm that this was the film, as I had phrased it, “about dolphins?” Indeed, as they confirmed, this is the film about dolphins, or more precisely about the public secret that is the fishing town of Taiji, in Japan and of the cove where fisherman commit criminal acts of capturing and harvesting of dolphins for the Japanese whale meat market.

This week, in relation to the implication of animal capital, in relation to the con-scription and co-scription of the animal body, I want to offer a consideration of this documentary as that which capers between a serious consideration of human-animal relations, while simultaneously recapitulating the very forms and flows of capital which tow this line as “strategically ambivalent” (Shukin 2009: 11).

WARNING: moments of animal violence depicted

If you prefer not to watch the preview, this description gives content to the points I seek to make: “Using state-of-the-art equipment, a group of activists, led by renown dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry, infiltrate a cove near Taijii, Japan to expose both a shocking instance of animal abuse and a serious threat to human health” (IMDB).

As my sense of this film was confirmed, I asked my friends about their experience of watching this film. Words of disruption, pain and disbelief were offered, and in the echos of these adjectives, one of my friends pushed his bingo card aside, exhaled deeply and turned to me to say that “It was like the focus of the film went from being this documentary about the dolphins, to an ad for the high-tech spy equipment they used.”

Here I feel the full force of Shukin’s comment that “animal signs [are] alibis of power” (2009: 5). That the dolphin as a site of violence, stands in to measure the moral continuum of technological use—that the high-tech-spy-optics and advanced machinery used to hunt the whalers is just (say nothing of the animal bodies implicated, and hinging from the history of film [Shukin on “The Rendered Material of Film Stock,” 2009: 104]), whereas the spears and nets, and aluminum boats used to hunt the dolphins are unjust. It seems that the dolphins of this film stand in to reproduce capital in ways that seems innumerable in the five hundred words allotted for this rendering. The body of the dolphin, even as it is depicted as a slaughtered body (though not in this preview), its very viscera is used to reproduce forms of capital which are also, though differently, tied to animals. The entire economy of entertainment, of animal activism, of eco-tourism, of documentary film making is tethered to the animal sign of the dolphin—to the friendly flippers, bubbles and squeaks of an animal that has been used in a variety of contexts to the benefit of humans, whether to delight or disarm bombs.

Moreover, the violence of relation of capital, biomobility and animal borne illnesses are also dangerously fleshed out in this film vis-à-vis the threat that dolphin meat (as full of toxic levels of mercury) poses to the humans who consume thinking they are purchasing a safe, consumable form of food. Here too, the pandemic of safety and prevention is a question never asked or never directed to the animal body—of how it came to be so deadly in the first place, or of the kind of human actions which have poisoned its body.

While this film, aesthetically, purports to be about the violent rendering of the dolphin body, it seems rather to offer an alibi for and about the conditions of capital, and the kinds of technologies that are implicitly and explicitly enabling and entangled with the project of both capturing dolphins and capturing the captures–technologies that are themselves already violently foreground in animal bodies.

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Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“We speak of [the body] to others as of a thing that belongs to us; but for us it is not entirely a thing; and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it…It is the most urgent, the most constant and the most variable thing imaginable: for it carries with it all constancy and variation.”-Paul Valéry, (in Kirby 1997: 65)

In relation to considerations of the contingent conditions of knowledge and knowledge making practices–of the entanglements between apparatuses and impetuses–I offer a rendering that re-orients the relativity of what is possible, to a position of potentiality.

To this end, I want to offer a consideration of Shelley Jackson’s SKIN: A Mortal Work of Art. My offering of this piece is motivated by Sara’s comments on the necessity of situated vulnerability. Moreover, it is my hope that this rendering will speak to with and build upon the conversation instantiated by Emily’s posting of Ryan (2005) and her comments on the visualization and animation of the bodily impacts between bodies and moments, across time.

The SKIN project, of which I am a participant, began in 2003 with a call for persons interested in constituting a “mortal work of art.” This mortal work of art takes shape as “[a] 2095-word story published exclusively in tattoos, one word at a time, on the skin of volunteers.”  The call for participants was sounded across international contexts, most notably in virtual spaces constituted in relation to interests in contemporary literature, and in body modification. Once applied and accepted, Jackson’s guidelines indicated that, “From this time on, participants will be known as “words”. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the words they bear, but as their embodiments. As a result, injuries to the printed text, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, tattoo cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died. The author will make every effort to attend the funerals of her words.” Bodies made word in and through apparatuses of writing—corporealities produced in and through the inscriptions of participation.

Jackson’s guidelines also indicated that members of the project must submit a portrait of themselves and an image of their tattoo. These documents, together with the modified flesh of the embodied words constitute the archive of this project. While we might read this archive as a kind of “textualization”—a rendering of “living bodies [as] data” (Waldby 2000: 7), I think the SKIN project offers a space in which to consider the liveliness of such corporeal configurations.

To this end, I think this very notion of a living, breathing, sloughing, shifting archive shifts this process of textualizing from a practice of colonizing corporeal spaces (Duden 1991) or from the exceptional capture of life (c.f. Agamben 1995) in the service of economies of biomedical and technoscientific knowledge production (Waldby 2000) to a practice of becoming. I read the SKIN project as rather more Deleuzian, and in that sense, aligns with Kuriyama’s argument that “The meaning of each representation lay entirely in the patterns inscribed within” (2002: 99). What is interesting about the patterning of the SKIN project is that is unfinished. This sense of partial is present in the 220 people words yet to become bodies, but also in the ways in which this project takes to the notion of indelibility (assigned by the tattoo) as further contingency, not a constraint. That being marked as a word is not totalizing; that while these words are written deep into the dermis, the very act of writing, of becoming word is an exercise not in immutability (as with the Visible Human Project) but rather an exercise in shifting embodied possibilities. The stories that these words tell are not bound to Jackson’s telling—to the hands that wrote the words, signed the forms, sliced, diced and assigned their textual transformation; but rather, as these bodies as words, are bodies of potential, tied only to the archive in the sense that they both shape and are shaped by the authorial apparatus of the story “Skin.”

I read this as a significant departure, and perhaps one that aligns interestingly to Duden’s attention to Storch’s interest in collection stories—that “Storch was collecting bio-logies. his way of thinking, oriented toward details and analogies, drove him to gather stories, for the body which he pursued all his life apparently had no norm, it was never complete” (1991: 68).

Further, this sense of partiality draws me back into relation with the epigraph I began with–an indication of the variance and indeterminacy of the body despite efforts to cut, constrain, tack and tame the ever-folding and unfolding variations of bodily beings, returns me now to a quote from Vicky Kriby’s Telling Flesh (1997). I offer this quote as a point of departure into a consideration of the material density of text or potential to render processes of textualization as more than a matter of representation. To this end, I wonder then if the question of asking what stories does the archive, or archived body tell (noting that the material is always already charged with semiotic speech [c.f. Haraway 1992]), rather than asking what stories might we tell with the archive:

“But there is another approach to the dictum ‘there is not outside of text,’ [Derrida] and it comes in the suggestion that ‘the worlding of the world’ as ‘writing in the general sense’ articulates a différential of space/time, an inseparability between representation and substance that rewrites causality. Is as if the very tissue of substance, the ground of Being, is this mutual intertext–a ‘writing’ that both circumscribes and exceeds the convention divisions of nature and culture. If we traslate this into what is normally regarded as the matter of the body, then, following Derrida, ‘the most elementary processes within the living cell’ are also a ‘writing’ and one whose ‘system’ is never closed. This would mean that the body is unstable–a shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written–a scenario where the subject takes itself as it sown object, and where, for example, and image could be said to rewrite the image-maker in a movement of production that disrupts the temporal determination of what comes first. the common understanding of materiality as a rock solid ‘something,’ that is, as the absolute exteriority that qulifies or limits the efficacy of representational practices, is called into question through such an approach.” (Kirby 1997: 61)

[my foot, on footnotes]

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Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Duden, Barbara. 1991. The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsers: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 295-337.

Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. 2002. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York London: Zone).

Waldby, Cathy. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (New York:
Routledge).