Speculative design as thought experiment

publishedVersio

Public Reasoning in "Post-Truth" Times: Technoscientific Imaginaries of "Smart" Futures

Our current “post-truth” era seems to some extent to be a moment of competing realities, where future imaginations are no longer shared within society. Among the many optimistic narratives and imaginaries of progress, growth, control, and rational order manifesting themselves in contemporary society, those of “smart” abound – especially in relation to technoscience. Although deeply value-laden, desired “smart” futures such as “smart grids” or “smart cities” seem to gain traction and become dominant (or even hegemonic) prospective futures. These constructed “truth regimes” are typically characterised by lack of context and particularity, fuzziness, standardised subjects, and a bracketing of contingency. This chapter presents a critique of such “smart” imaginaries, examining the logics behind them and their role in contemporary society. Some of the ways in which they normatively reduce space for democratic engagement are isolated, but in the end, it is argued that in the contemporary post-truth “times of interregnum”, there is also opportunity for alternative imaginaries that might open up new spaces for public reason to thrive.publishedVersio

On Cultures and Artscience. Interdisciplinarity and Discourses of “Twos” and “Threes” after Snow’s Two Cultures

At least since C.P. Snow’s seminal Rede lecture The Two Cultures, the idea of a significant difference in kind between the natural sciences and the arts and humanities has been prevalent in Western culture. A gap has been perceived to exist not only in methodology and theory, but more fundamentally, in understandings and worldviews. This has resulted in a dichotomous debate both in academic and media discourses. As a reaction to this, and parallel in time, some actors have strived to achieve a ‘third culture’. This is a common attitude in the still emerging field of ‘artscience’, whose actors seek to combine the advantages and knowledges of the sciences with those of the arts and humanities. Researchers from every concerned field have contributed to the exploration of the interface between ‘art’ and ‘science’. However, I argue in this article that the very term artscience, in simply joining together the words ‘art’ and ’science’, is reenforcing an old notion of a binary opposition between these two fields. The idea of ‘two cultures’, still implied within the image of a ‘third culture’, disguises the plurality of perceptions and approaches within and across fields. While useful in pointing out lack of communication between fields, it tends to overemphasize divisions, ignore complexities, and, in some cases, leave out important parts of the picture. I suggest that the discourse of the ‘third culture’ and the term ‘artscience’ may jointly occlude the multiple possible constellations of practitioners, roles and approaches, and may be a potential limitation to interdisciplinary collaborations

Living Machines: Metaphors We Live By

Within biology and in society, living creatures have long been described using metaphors of machinery and computation: ‘bioengineering’, ‘genes as code’ or ‘biological chassis’. This paper builds on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) argument that such language mechanisms shape how we understand the world. I argue that the living machines metaphor builds upon a certain perception of life entailing an idea of radical human control of the living world, looking back at the historical preconditions for this metaphor. I discuss how design is perceived to enable us to shape natural beings to our will, and consider ethical, epistemological and ontological implications of the prevalence of this metaphor, focusing on its use within synthetic biology. I argue that we urgently need counter-images to the dominant metaphor of living machines and its implied control and propose that artworks can provide such counter-images through upsetting the perception of life as controllable. This is argued through discussion of artworks by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, by Tarsh Bates and by Ai Hasegawa, which in different ways challenge mechanistic assumptions through open-ended engagement with the strangeness and messiness of life

Amplifying Ambiguities: Art on the Fringes of Biotechnology

Abstract of PhD thesis, printed in the journal as the top-rated abstract of 2017

Brain, rockstar, self? Narratives of an extended body in Guy Ben-Ary’s CellF

Exhibition catalogue essay for TodaysArt Festival, Den Hague, discussing philosophical questions of Guy Ben-Ary's neuro-synthesizer artwork CellF

Fringe Biotechnology

Recent amateur and alternative uses of wet laboratory biology techniques have been called by many names. However, none of the terms currently in use include institutional, entrepreneurial and amateur engagements in biotechnology with non-scientific aims. In this article, the author introduces the more comprehensive concept of fringe biotechnology. While 'DIYbio' has in recent years become a term that covers a wide range of hobbyist approaches to biotechnology, it still excludes several other alternative biotech practices, such as amateur and artistic activities in institutional labs and educational facilities. This seems to imply a continued fundamental divide between the inside of academic and corporate science, and the outside, comprising public, social and cultural uses of the technologies. The author suggests that the term 'fringe biotechnology' opens up for studying biotech activities across the inside-outside divide, and presents a range of examples of fringe biotechnology