Biomimetic Figurations in Contemporary Biohacking

The Playful Citizen, 2018

This chapter examines the process of image production by open-source microscopes from the perspective of play. The question what happens to images when microscopes move from the lab to open-source hacker spaces is probed by deconstructing the material layers of its production. Politically motivated to democratize science, open-source translations transform the use and function of biotechnology. And while the process of translation may compromise microscopes' scientific capability, they gain in value from experimentation by artists and citizens. As a result, playing with biotechnology is an educative and creative exploration of the use and construction of scientific instruments, where the multi-layered process of making an image becomes observable to the naked eye.

Body & Society, 2024

While anthropological and social studies of the body have extensively explored self-tracking cultures, they have so far overlooked the phenomenon of biohacking, which represents a distinct though overlapping mode of contemporary techno-asceticism with its own set of norms and frameworks for bodily self-use. This article seeks to address this gap by examining biohacking within the context of self-tracking cultures and its simultaneous alignment with alternative health cultures. By analysing a substantial collection of recorded Biohacker Summit presentations, the study argues that biohacking reintroduces a dualistic biomimetic imaginary while simultaneously striving to transcend such dichotomies through a univocal emphasis on information processing. In particular, this is evident in the biomimetic impulse to align their interventions with the principles found in nature and to perceive technologies as subordinate to 'natural' biological processes, the privileging of the human sensorium as a bridge between science and nature, and the ultimate inclination to discard technology in favour of intuition and embodiment. Video abstract available: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/video-antti-lindfors-between-self-tracking-and-alternative-medicine

Theory, Culture & Society, 2014

Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. As part of a broader trend towards the conceptualization and development of a ‘bioeconomy’, we argue here that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ in new ways. At face value, these new approaches to valuing nature may seem less violent and exploitative. Yet, new natures can and are tortured in new ways. We argue that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ through well-worn logics of resource enclosure and privatization, focusing upon two fundamental shifts in how nonhuman life is figured and put to work: (1) the production of nature as intellectual property (as opposed to raw materials); (2) the production of nature as an active subject (as opposed to a passive receptacle or vehicle).

Lessico di Etica Pubblica, 2024

The realm of anthropology and social studies has extensively investigated self-tracking cultures, yet the potential outcomes of the “biohacking framework” remain relatively underexplored. Biohacking embodies a distinctive form of modern techno-asceticism with its unique norms for self-regulation of the body. As will be elucidated, this paradigm establishes novel “spaces of visibility” where information regarding the body and its internal functions is rendered transparent, organized, and shared. Nonetheless, the intricate politics surrounding open science transcend a simplistic dichotomy between transparency and closure. It necessitates a more profound exploration of current transformations not only within scientific research but also concerning its associated epistemological frameworks. Building upon these foundations, this study seeks to contextualize contemporary anthropological approaches to the body within a broader landscape, exploring their alignment with distinct models of information processing and alternative health cultures that may influence typological responses to the dominant paradigm set forth by biohacking discourses emphasizing transparency through data collection.

Project Proposal for my Masters in Anthropology (School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa) www.humanimalab.org www.pellinglab.net

2018

This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault's biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book's approach is captured in the title, which refers to 'the biopolitical'. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the 'metacode of life', which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the 'metacodes' of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences.

DigitCult - Scientific Journal on Digital Cultures, 2023

This article researches what body descriptions are present within Swedish biohacking, what roots they have, and what overlaps they create between biohacking and other philosophical, political, and scientific discourses. As biohacking has become an increasingly popular subcultural influence in contemporary culture, not least when it comes to individual responsibility for ones health, the aim of the article is to show what other discourses are imported into the health discourse via the use of body descriptions. The study focuses on the most well known and influential Swedish biohacker, and the analysis is based on her use of body descriptions when communicating to her followers. Her use of body descriptions leads to transhumanism where the biological body is seen as a computer, libertarianism where the body is a stage for health entrepreneurism, and synthetic biology where the biological body is placed within a post genomic culture.

Journal of Political Ecology, 2018

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for ...

Digital Culture & Society, 2015

Studies of media and ecology are often reduced to questions of representation: understanding the cultural mediation of nature means looking to screen based content. However, given recent work in materialist media studies from Doug Kahn, Lisa Parks and Eugene Thacker in particular, a new possibility comes into view. We now know that before nature is mediated through culture, it is often passed through layers of technology. With that in mind, this paper offers a radical rethinking of the technological mediation of the ecological. Through a study of the technical apparatus as an active system of knowledge, two different sections of the paper will illustrate the 'tool-kit' that makes possible a technical study of ecology. The first looks to historical developments of hardware such as the telegraph, radio, and satellites to pinpoint examples where media technology has been used to pick up signals from the natural world. Framed by the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk, it explores the way nature has been given form through its transduction into communication systems. The second section of this paper, addressing ecology on a different register, looks past the surface of digital media to the manner in which ecologies are mediated via computer code. In this section, by conducting a reverse-engineering of the software based eco-media videogame Mountain (O'Reilly, 2014), we encounter the ecological structure of code systems which could be applied to other data visualisation systems. These two methods of analysis suggest the possibilities of a technologically focused study of eco-media: in coming to grips with both global and internal ecologies through what Sloterdijk terms 'air conditioning' systems -the material processes that provide the atmosphere of everyday life -we investigate the possibilities for innovative, post-human, approaches to a natural world entwined with media and technology.

Aresty Rutgers Undergraduate Research Journal

Biohacking refers to optimizing one’s body through modifying biology. In the 20th century, do-it-yourself (DIY) biology emerged as a type of biohacking involving biotechnology. Current high- healthcare costs promote DIY -biology insulin and EpiPens as ways to challenge norms in healthcare, thus serving as forms of activism. Biohacked insulin is part of the #WeAreNotWaiting movement to support improved treatment of Type 1 diabetes, whereas biohacked EpiPens allow people to make lifesaving autoinjectors at low costs. Social media acts as a catalyst and aids in the spread of insulin and EpiPen biohacking as activism. In 1979, Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress proposed four principles that continue to guide decision-making in clinical medicine: beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, and justice. This paper applies these principles to explore whether the benefits of performing DIY biology outweigh the potential health risks. Examining biohacking with a biomedical...