[-empyre-] prototypes - diy biology

[Sonia Matos]

Dear Empyreans,

Here Sonia. It’s a pleasure to be amongst the group discussing this very exciting topic. 

For this week's discussion, I propose the following:

The ‘scattering’ of calculations out of black boxes into the world has found in computational DIY cultures new interesting challenges. Starting with various software hacking traditions and further development of free software cultures, this movement has shattered the logic of computation into new open architectures of shareability, openness and free access. More important that the creation of free software as such this same scattering of computations has produced a new logic of research and production. It has instigated new ways of understanding how knowledge might be produced. 

In similar vein, the further scattering of computations from black boxes out into the world has most recently called for a new understanding of life. How is it produced? By whom? And where?

Yes, I am thinking of DIYBio.

While thinking of the free software movement, the new do-it-yourself synthetic biological cultures have also provided means to further subvert the ‘prototype’ as an attempt to move artifactual fabrications into a new logic of experimentation as such, a new meta-machine in its own right. 

To further spark this weeks discussion with pertinent examples, DIY biology projects may vary from building cheaper lab equipment to further perk new means of biological investigation (http://www.pearlbiotech.com/), to bioweather maps (http://bioweathermap.org/) in the attempt to further mobilize environmental sensing, to genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green while signaling the presence of dangerous chemicals (http://vimeo.com/3454392).

Following Sophia Roosth's research at MIT while working in close collaboration with DIYBio cultures, the new logics of biological fabrication has instigated not only the appropriation but also the further subversion of the already canonized engineering principles: the use of ‘standardization, abstraction and decoupling’ into new ‘personalized’ forms of knowledge production (form more information go to: http://diybio.org/2009/11/11/crafting-the-biological/). Here, the once slandered idea of ‘hacking’ is set into a new synergy of appropriation, dismantling and reconstruction. In this sense, we could add to Roost’s remarkable presentation, the new situated logic of biological tinkering and production. And as pointed out by DIY bioengineer Mac Cowell (founder of http://diybio.org/) new DIYBio cultures (and here lets include their same conception of the prototype as such) have taken knowledge production beyond the control and validation by
 academic, governmental and various industrial institutions – the de-centralization of intellectual production and the further ‘cross-pollination of a range of expertise’ (for more information go to http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_biohacking_hobbyist/).

This de-centralization of control can be further sought along the lines of a doubling effect: on the one hand it pokes engineering abstracted procedures on the other it further destabilizes our very idea of the artifact, the machine (natural or synthetic) as a stable like entity. Here, I recall the work of ‘the’ philosopher of the technical Gilbert Simondon (1958), particularly his discussion of ‘abstract technical object’ antagonist to the very idea of a ‘concrete technical object’. In this sense, taking into account and ‘abstract technical object’ is to consider the very necessity of generalizing knowledge, abstracting it along the lines of a black- box procedure, further contemplating the already accepted cannon of the scientist versus all the others who are not part of a particular understanding of ratiocination as such, further demarcating the rigid and formal- logical premise of fixed structures of appropriation. On the contrary,
 the ‘concrete technical’ object challenges this same impossibility, this considering its liveness. As expressed by Simondon: “no fixed structure corresponds to its defined use” [Simondon 1958:11]. Once knowledge is spreading out from it preformatted boxes, this particular investigative exercise opens interesting guidelines for new modes of understanding prototyping as knowledge production, an ongoing attempt to further poke the unknown.

After this warm-up and to finalize my brief intervention, for this week’s Empyre I propose the following discussion: how might synthetic biological concocts shed new light on the concept of the ‘prototype’ as a means for democratizing knowledge productions?

See also Gilbert, S. (1958). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Aubier: Editions Montaigne.




      
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