bodies unlimited subrosa
I subrosa Strategies and tactics for becoming feminist scientists The history of Western science assumes a universalized male subject and normalizes a patriarchal and capitalist point of view. Feminist scientist Sandra Harding has written that a feminist science that takes gender into account posits a different world, and imagines a science built on different social relations.
The researcher’s/artist’s body (our bodies) and biotechnology in everyday life is the subject and object of inquiry, knowledge and observation. The body in feminist science and the feminist researcher’s body are situated in an inquiry about the post-human body: the distributed body, the socially networked body, the cyborg body, the gendered body, the student body, the citizen body, the prosthetic body, the medicalized body, the dis-eased body, the virtual body, the commodified body, the data body, the flesh body, the thinking body, the war body, the ageless body, the beautiful body, the animal body, the laboring body, the spiritual body, the art body.
How to do science as feminists? How to do science differently? How to merge live art practices, everyday life, specialist and amateur fields of research and practice? What is our (soft) power of resistance? What is it we wish to resist? How can we implement resistance to the patenting and commodification of all life? How do we channel our curiosity into creative thinking and work? What are the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy become normalized in the production of knowledge? Should there be sites of resistance and how might they work? How to produce new knowledge together? How to produce a collision of received knowledge, and mix things up to produce new questions and new methods? How do we change each other and our world? How do we re-imagine ourselves as a new species in newly emerging global scenarios? If biotechnology represents an unprecedented change in the understanding and manipulation of life forms, in which direction do we want it to take us?
subRosa´s workshop Bodies Unlimited! introduces tactics and strategies for interdisciplinary knowledge production, research, creative experimentation, response and representation. Combining visual presentations and discussions with hands-on activities, demonstrations, and “drifts,” the participants take part in subRosa's collaborative and interdisciplinary art making process, working from theory and research into practice and vice-versa and experimenting with interdisciplinary knowledge production.
Activities include: visual presentations and discussions around biotechnology, recombinant DNA, genetic engineering, intellectual property and patenting of life; keeping shared lab-books; observing and doing basic processes as fermentation, culturing bacteria, molds, and yeasts, simple DNA extraction or making a high-powered magnifier from a web cam; imagining impossible tasks like responses and representations of new species and new biological scenarios; generating questions; discussing histories of scientific methods of inquiry (hypothetical, experimental, etc); generating ideas and generating responses to ideas.
Bodies Unlimited! workshop was held by subRosa at Soft Power, a programme of cultural activities on life sciences and biotechnology curated by Maria Ptqk for BilBAK (UPV-EHU) in Bilbao, November 2010.
http://www.amarika.org/softpower
The researcher’s/artist’s body (our bodies) and biotechnology in everyday life is the subject and object of inquiry, knowledge and observation. The body in feminist science and the feminist researcher’s body are situated in an inquiry about the post-human body: the distributed body, the socially networked body, the cyborg body, the gendered body, the student body, the citizen body, the prosthetic body, the medicalized body, the dis-eased body, the virtual body, the commodified body, the data body, the flesh body, the thinking body, the war body, the ageless body, the beautiful body, the animal body, the laboring body, the spiritual body, the art body.
How to do science as feminists? How to do science differently? How to merge live art practices, everyday life, specialist and amateur fields of research and practice? What is our (soft) power of resistance? What is it we wish to resist? How can we implement resistance to the patenting and commodification of all life? How do we channel our curiosity into creative thinking and work? What are the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy become normalized in the production of knowledge? Should there be sites of resistance and how might they work? How to produce new knowledge together? How to produce a collision of received knowledge, and mix things up to produce new questions and new methods? How do we change each other and our world? How do we re-imagine ourselves as a new species in newly emerging global scenarios? If biotechnology represents an unprecedented change in the understanding and manipulation of life forms, in which direction do we want it to take us?
subRosa´s workshop Bodies Unlimited! introduces tactics and strategies for interdisciplinary knowledge production, research, creative experimentation, response and representation. Combining visual presentations and discussions with hands-on activities, demonstrations, and “drifts,” the participants take part in subRosa's collaborative and interdisciplinary art making process, working from theory and research into practice and vice-versa and experimenting with interdisciplinary knowledge production.
Activities include: visual presentations and discussions around biotechnology, recombinant DNA, genetic engineering, intellectual property and patenting of life; keeping shared lab-books; observing and doing basic processes as fermentation, culturing bacteria, molds, and yeasts, simple DNA extraction or making a high-powered magnifier from a web cam; imagining impossible tasks like responses and representations of new species and new biological scenarios; generating questions; discussing histories of scientific methods of inquiry (hypothetical, experimental, etc); generating ideas and generating responses to ideas.
Bodies Unlimited! workshop was held by subRosa at Soft Power, a programme of cultural activities on life sciences and biotechnology curated by Maria Ptqk for BilBAK (UPV-EHU) in Bilbao, November 2010.
http://www.amarika.org/softpower
