Theoretical Repertoire 📚 📦
See our theory presentation here
In my research on kit culture, I try to build up a theoretical
repertoire for tuning into what might be going on across various forms
of biological knowledge production, then use this repertoire to make
kits, a kind of critical-making.
These kits then become handy “boundary objects”, objects that people from different disciplines or practices can use or understand, for exploring further and more intimately, growing the repertoire, making more kits with more people and so on. In my case they allow an artist doing research, ‘laypersons’(different ‘publics’) and ‘specialists’(scientists and their students) understand each other.
But also and this is what I now understand as a big part of my artistic practice and the practice of Domestic Science, most commonly the kits and activities I make and facilitate become objects to talk over and around.
I build the repertoire by reading through making, making through reading and talking.
- Review a range of kit and kit like practices that condense into a Library of kits, a kit literature.
- Briefly review literatures of the history of the philosophy of science in response to practices and kits I make with people.
- Review literatures in STS Method, structured by emerging kits.
With this repertoire and armed with my boundary negotiating kits:
- Observe Craft practices in teaching microbiology undergraduates at the Division for Biomedical Life Science at Lancaster University
- Observe me making kits with researchers and students
- Making kits and facilitating activity based on them in makerspace DoESLiverpool and other sites in the worlds related to my art practice.
Imaginaries
STS method includes the use of ethnographic or other styles of ‘case study’. This kit is one such emerging case. Ideas like socio technical imaginaries are relevant when thinking about what is really going on in powerful ideas like Lab on a chip
“Throughout the modern world, science and technology (S&T) are deeply implicated in producing collective visions of good and attainable futures. These “sociotechnical imaginaries” have proved particularly useful for policymakers in late modern societies. Imagined futures help justify new investments in S&T; in turn, advances in S&T reaffirm the state’s capacity to act as responsible stewards of the public good. Sociotechnical imaginaries serve in this respect both as the ends of policy and as instruments of legitimation.
…but other imaginaries are also often at play in the world, based on different cultural understandings of the good life. Public hopes and fears concerning S&T engage in unpredictable ways with forms of imagination current in policy worlds. Publics also construct and act upon their own imaginaries of those in power and hold policymakers responsible in accordance with their tacit or explicit notions of discovery, innovation, efficiency, progress, uncertainty, evidence, argument, value, legitimation.
Another way to understand a concept is to see how it works alongside others….imaginaries help explain why, out of the universe of possibilities, some envisionings of scientific and social order tend to win support over others—in other words, why some orderings are co-produced at the expense of others."
From The Sociotechnical Imaginaries Project
The Lab-On-A-Chip Imaginary
Lab on a chip tech builds an interesting ‘public imaginary’, a narrative for both layperson and specialist, as a form of biological or chemical manufacturing akin to the so called silicon ‘revolution’.
Like Integrated circuits they are very small environments for manipulating and interpreting the behaviour of matter. Like their silicon cousins they generate alot of hype, hope, fear, hard cash and financialisation and hopefully something ‘good’.
Unlike these circuits, lab-on-a-chips manipulate much bigger things than electrons, big, scary molecules just as weird as any tiny quantum packets, but so complicated it can make your head spin as fast as an accountant at the Large Hadron Collider: big proteins like DNA, bioassays and super collaborating symbiotic mega-communities which have the added complication of not only being alive but containing mind boggling histories encoded inside every part of them.
What Lab on a chip imaginaries are made?
- Scalable distributable labs that work ‘on their own’
- Disrupting the field of bio and chemical manufacturing
- Somehow it’s intelligent, and automated
- Labs can work ‘anywhere’
- Labs are small but powerful
- Myths of new biological computers made by existing biological computers
- These are like kits: they package up some bio processes and make them super mobile and easy
- They are going to ‘revolutionise’ access to the industry, which you can see in the Metafluidics\
- Realise the genetics-to-order shop scenes of science fiction like Bladerunner etc.\
- It has all the intersections of biology, engineering, well meaning utility and agency for frugal science in ‘intractable’ places
Invisible Work
“I took exception to a comment on maker education twitter a while back that kits used in tech education workshops are a great idea because they ‘save time’ in workshops; this could not be further from the truth. That well meaning comment unintentionally reveals what’s missing in understanding kits and by extension the whole maker meme and from there, other creative practice that uses technology in social settings: The care, thought, iterative failure, maintenance and communal resilience required for their success.”
This chimes with Susan Leigh Stars description of the invisible work that goes on behind scientific facts and products
“People may see a map of a genome or a syringe full of experimental medication. These are just the end products, however, of a web of relationships, what Lave and Wenger have called communities of practice. Lave and Wenger make the strong claim that membership in these communities constitutes learning and science (Adler and Obstfeld, in press; Bowker and Star, 1999: Chapter 10; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Obstfeld, 2005). These relationships are usually invisible to readers of science and technology (Star and Strauss, 1999; Suchman, 1987).”
(Bryant, Anthony. Charmaz, Kathy ed. (2011) The SAGE handbook of grounded theory Los Angeles: Sage
“Scientific journals are full of articles that delete the development, setting, communication practices, and ‘grunt work’ involved in doing science.”
(Ibid.)
Configuration
Configuration takes these imaginaries further and feel particularly relevant to the ‘invisible work’ and ‘talking’ that are bound up in science, technology and kit making
“drawing our analytic attention to the ways in which technologies materialize cultural imaginaries, just as imaginaries narrate the significance of technical artefacts.”
""Configuration, I have suggested here, is part of a toolkit for thinking about constitutive and generative, reiterative and (potentially) transformative material-semiotic conjoining. In the case of technology, configuration orients us to the entanglement of imaginaries and artefacts that comprise technological projects.
While normative methods are designed to define and police boundaries, configuration as a method assemblage aims to articulate method in a way that opens received and/or congealed relations to being re-enacted differently (see Law, 2004: 84)."
(Suchman, Lucy. In Lury, C. and Wakeford, N. eds. (2012) Inventive methods: The happening of the social. London: Routledge. pp. 62-74.)
Inspiring Interventions
Mikroskopisk PacMan Erik Andrew Johannessen’s high end microfluidics game is worth looking at for a playful exploration. Check out the full video here and read the Vice article if you like that kind of thing. Back in the 1960s when the military funded the shrinking of transistors nobody thought they’d use it for fun with ghosts, stories and pictures of cats, just bombs and tracking communists, but just look at the weird cultures that turned into! I wonder where microfluidics will take us? Should we be even doing this? What knowledge and ‘goods’ does it make?
Helen Pritchard’s Critters on a chip suggests we might get organisms in microfluidic environments writing code and literature.