Transcript
Bio-computational touch - troubling at trans practices Helen Pritchard, High Wire, Lancaster University Abstract This paper focuses on the ‘touch/ing’ of ‘GFP Medaka’, the transgenic fish, to consider the ‘transience of matter’ 1. To grapple with these practices I draw on my engagement in a Toxicology lab from a contingent mix of flashlights, tanks, gallons of water, microinjectors, algorithms, chemical reactions, human and nonhuman bodies, speculative visions and microchips. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism 2, this paper outlines the material-discursive practices through which the differential constitutions of transgenic fish emerge as a way to reconsider biocomputation and trans aesthetics as a practice of intra-action and touch. Spectral Illuminations On the printed pages of a Hong Kong newspaper thousands of ‘transgenic’ fish illuminate 3 the city's harbour. In this spectacular post human vision as estrogenic endocrine disruptors (EEDs) present in the city’s waterways, the transgenic GFP Medaka that swim in the city’s water, respond by expressing a synthesizing green fluorescent protein that emits a lurid array. The two page colour spread is taped to the aquarium wall of the Toxicology lab that I am a visiting as a researcher and when I ask about the article the director is careful to tell me that transgenic fish swimming in the Hong Kong harbour is an imaginary scenario, for now. As we look on at the article, glowing bodies emerge from the page creating what Vicki Kirby describes as a “plentitude of possibilities [with nonhumans] a cacophony of conversation”4 around transgenic practices. The transformation depicted is described to me by a colleague, as not dissimilar to the nightly tourist attraction the ‘symphony of lights’ a post-human laser show in which beams from anthropomorphic skyscrapers reach out to symbolically connect the two sides of the harbour. The lasers represent an illuminated connection between Hong Kong and mainland China5. However here (in the case of the GFP Medaka emerging from ink soaked pages) the illuminated relationalities are not only between two sides of the city, but instead make readable ecologies of invisible waste and toxins from production and consumption. Illuminating the gloopy flow and circulation, that transgresses political borders, a flow of chemical bodies with other bodies, human, non-human and in-human. In the GFP Medaka, intra-action is not restricted to human actions, nor is it distributed across nonhuman and human forms, instead what is at stake is the iterative re-configurings of materiality - what Karen Barad describes as the permanent marks from experimental conditions left on bodies 6. As Kathryn Yusoff explores in her work on the insensible, even if these “material re-combinations”7 “remain immaterial to our perception... marked by various forms of bioaccumulation, chemical disruption, and toxicological inheritances in nonhuman bodies and environments”8, it is through this entanglement of intra-action that the GFP Medaka materialises and as it does it
shifts computational aesthetics, transpractices, indeterminancies and the “multivocality and mutant possibilities”9 for nonhuman subjectivity. Radically Queer In the “agential realist” framework Karen Barad uses the example of quantum physics from Bohr to suggest that in order to give an “unambiguous account of proper quantum phenomena”10 we must also include a description of all relevant features of the experimental arrangement. For Barad, interrogating the details of the experiment (the phenomena) is not merely a way to document the process in order to evidence the relationship between the observer and observed or insure results of measurement. It is the elaboration that “phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components”11. As Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird explain: “Specific intra-actions produce, perform and enact a changeable being, a materiality in continual change”12. Agential realism re-conceptualises the practices and processes through which scientific ‘objects’ and knowledges are created. As a rethinking of agency within practices agential realism demands that it is necessary to understand how the objects of science (such as the GFP Medaka ) are formed through the relations of phenomena. Phenomena are not things or words, but practices and processes, such as the established practices of looking down a microscope, the way in which RNA is injected into a fish embryo or the contaminations and decompositions that take place in an experiment. Agential realism offers an alternative to classical physics, an understanding of the material world as made up of defined ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’. Agential realism positions the material world as emerging from the interplay of relations between loosely bounded entities. Barad uses the term ‘agential’ or ‘agentially enacted’ in place of agency, to connote the complexity and contingency of an agency that emerges from this interplay13. Thinking the bio-computational through agential realism significantly shifts how we might understand a trans practice. As Lucy Suchman observes “this intimate co-constitution of configured materialities with configuring agencies clearly implies a very different understanding”14. Therefore, rather than considering my engagement with transgenic practices as working across “sites where socio-political interests and scientific developments touching ‘life itself’ coalesce”15, in this paper I diffractively read the transgenic and transart practices undertaken in my specific fieldwork as entangled intra-actions16, “radically different, queer” [practices] of touch17. Touch with the GFP Medaka is a ghostly, messy contingent mix of flashlights, tanks, gallons of waters, microinjectors, algorithms, microchips, patents, hardware and software of the material world, in which “particles no longer take their place in the void; rather, they are constitutively entangled with it”18. As Barad describes so much happens in touch “an infinity of others—other beings, other spaces, other times—are aroused”19. Touch, Barad explains, is an entangled tale of “involution, invitation, invisitation, wanted or unwanted”20.
Considering ‘trans’ as touch “engages us in a felt sense of causality”21. As Barad explains, “Touch moves and affects what it effects”22. It is through this intra-active process of touch and mutual becoming that - GFP Medaka, water pollution, patents and endocrine disruptors come to matter in this engagement. As Barad might ask when the genes of the GFP Medaka mutate, “when they intra-act, when they touch one another whom or what do they touch? and what other infinite configurations of possible others, being and times have always already touched them?”23. To grapple with these questions I draw on my specific fieldwork, through embedded arts practice in a Toxicology Laboratory in 2013. Drawing on the work of Yusoff I consider ‘touch/ing’ of the GFP Medaka as a transformational reorganisation of the possibilities of life, a sphere of aesthetic potentials and possibilities that “govern the sphere of intelligibility in the making of biotic subjects”24. Trans Practices Hird observes that nonhumans have long “been overburdened with the task of making sense of human social relations”25. Indeed many critters have been “enrolled” as sentinels in environmental sensing26 “to detect signs of disturbances that remain indiscernible to humans”27. Canaries, Mouluscs, Lychen, have all been tasked as sentinels, signalling future events or warning us of our environments resulting in new techniques “making it possible to lower the threshold for detecting toxins in air, soil and water, and allowing investigations on the effects of low doses of particular pollutants on the environment”28. Gail Davis also points to the ways in which our understandings of human corporeality and potentiality are increasingly enacted through the individual bodies and multiple forms of a multitude of laboratory mice29. However the GFP Medaka I hold in a pipet or on a slide under a blue fluorescent light, or the GFP Medaka that appears in the Hong Kong Newspaper has not been tasked through the characteristics of a sentinel or those that Hird describes such as family, fidelity, care and sex 30. As the GFP Medaka in the pipet swim towards the solution in the wells, or they emit an excited fluorescent glow, as the light from the microscope passes through them, my engagements with them seem to illuminate Astrid Schrader’s call to “take seriously that science is a material practice to which not only humans contribute”31, together with illuminating the proposition of the nonhuman turn that aesthetics and indeed trans aesthetics is not solely a human endeavour either32. Instead aesthetics emerges as a material-discursive practice from entanglements of humans and nonhumans (including fish, algorithms, water courses, hard drives, microscopes). In ‘Animal Trans’ Hird describes how she shares Haraway’s interest in “in trans species/cendence/fusions/ gene/genics/national that disturb the hierarchy of taxonomic categories (genus, family, class, order, kingdom) derived from pure, self-contained and self-containing nature”33. For Haraway, Hird explains, trans [practices] “cross a culturally salient line between nature and artifice, and they greatly increase the density of all kinds of other traffic on the bridge between what counts as nature and culture”34. Therefore rather than approaching trans aesthetics as “a place of chaos in which form becomes disordered”35, my
engagement with GFP Medaka brings me into touch with a trans aesthetics of affective ecologies (such as suffering, loving, caring, pain and death) shared by humans and nonhumans 36, together with enabling a way to account for our shared “ambiguity/undecidability/indeterminacy”37 in our entanglements with computation. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explains “coming into contact with ‘non humans’ brings us into different ethico-political directions when it involves ‘bio-worlds’”38. However what if we consider these different ethico-political directions for aesthetics as not only coming into contact with, or thinking with nonhumans, but of practices of touch “touching oneself..., or being touched by oneself... or even touch, touching itself”39 as Barad suggests. Aesthetics becomes radically queered and moved towards a trans that Hird describes as “beyond traditional classifications”40. As Barad explains “Touch moves and affects what it effects, touch in its physicality, its virtuality, its affectivity, its e-motion-ality, whereby all pretence of being able to separate out the affective from the scientific dimensions of touching falls away.”41. The GFP Medaka, exposed to EED’s emits an excited fluorescent glow when a blue light is passed through its body. The fish is anesthetized, yet still animated, and I am undone42 as I am entangled in fleshy knots with the movement of proteins within the body of the fish. As the microscope focuses on their transparent bodies the customized software that measures the bio array, through size and dark/lightness of pixels, ‘acquires data’ from the bright-field and fluorescence channels of the image. Although the site of processing these fluorescent intensities is between the hard drive and screen my whole body is required to engage in rendering the image and when I look away from the microscope a green blob-like image hovers on my eye lids as a spectropian after-image. Touch brings together and apart in knots of knowing and non knowing this material-configuration. Eva Hayward describes a similar experience on encountering jellies in the state aquarium as she becomes immersed. “More a somatic trope than the metaphysics of identification, immersion produces cohabitation rather than mere representation... As such, the tactile visuality, or fingery eyes, relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance”43. As the GFP Medaka disappear in the darkness, I am left to wonder what of that which is brought into play by these touches, yet is not intelligible within computational ecologies as Yusoff suggests the “temporal or immaterial dimensions of matter” (2013:2) Life Imaging At 6pm Vincent calls my mobile phone whilst I am on route home from the university to let me know that, the GFP Medaka and a number of water and cosmetic samples have arrived from the science park. The fish have arrived at the lab after taking a journey from a location on the border of Hong Kong and China. Vincent explains that the Medaka have lived outside of the university grounds, since their shift in economic status to a commercial service. The GFP Medaka have been patented and are currently on lease to a private company, a bio-chem
testing service provider focused on in vivo toxicity and low cost chemosensing methods screening of both specific and unknown toxic chemicals. Vincent says he will put the embryos in the incubator overnight and then leave them on the bench for me in the morning. On arriving in the lab a stack of clear plastic dishes are on the bench along with a tray of samples and a jar of medaka medium . Vincent tells me that the medium is probably the cleanest water in Hong Kong, cleaner than the water we drink from the university cooler. The lab is busy today and on the end of the bench is a set of tinned meat products, a box of shark fins and a number of machines are spinning or gently rocking samples to mix them. Vincent asks me if I have ever used a pipet before and says he will have to give me some undergraduate training. Vincent takes me through the process of using a pipet to move the fish into the wells and sketches out on a piece of paper the arrangements for them. As I draw my first pipet, Vincent says he is impressed at my pipet skills and that I might have some potential, he seems relieved. The sequence involves gently allowing the fish to swim into the pipet and then out again into the well, whilst taking care not to touch the pipet on any other surface. We place six fish in each well. Each sequence is followed by disposing of the plastic pipet into the bio refuse bin on the bench and then repeating the process. The sequence has a particular rhythm to it which is marked by clicking the disposable part of the pipet into the bin. As I repeat the sequence and as the GFP Medaka swim from the pipet into the well they become a space where pollutants are contained and performed, they become a specter for a nonhuman environment. Whereas the founder fish that swim in the tanks under the care of Sister Ha might “hint at their non-captive selves”44, the Medaka embryos that lie anesthetized in the well, sometimes in front of me on the bench and sometimes at a cool temperature in the incubator whilst I am asleep or having lunch or watching the resident turtle at my apartment mooch around on the terrace, are only of the lab. In this toxicology lab the discovery of fluorescence protein has meant that the development of fluorescent- labeling techniques, life monitoring of labelled proteins have replaced imaging practices of the past such as staining methods with colour substrates to label targets including expressions of proteins and genes.45 This has led to the development of in vivo imaging as a quicker and cheaper way to image and measure expressions of proteins. The speed of screening which is reduced by 60% is what has led to the GFP Medaka becoming an economically viable service. Engineered as a living environmental sensor the GFP Medaka has been patented to ‘make’ determinate the presence of EED’s in marine water, fresh water, food and cosmetics. By combining the choriogenin H gene (estrogensensitive and liver-specific) found in Medaka fish and a green fluorescent protein gene, the lab constructed a highly estrogen-sensitive artificial gene that can produce fluorescent proteins. The gene was successfully transferred into the genome of Medaka. In the presence of estrogen or estrogenic endocrine disruptors, the transgenic Medaka fish will express this modified gene and synthesise green fluorescent protein in the liver. The ghostly see-through bodies of
the GFP Medaka produce green fluorescent proteins to ‘hold’, ‘signal’ and most slippery, unknown, unquantifiable, un recognizable, unmatchable and untraceable to be made determinate by algorithm. The expression of fluorescent proteins, when the adult GFP Medaka is exposed can be seen by the human eye, simply by shining a torch, however in the embryos used for in vivo testing the process is optimised to produce computational arrays that are only visible when processed by algorithms. These algorithms are a series of agentile cuts, “based on our ability to manipulate virtual objects we cannot see”46. However as I move the GFP Medaka from petri dish to pixel, I am entangled and undone with the processes of “condensation, contamination, translation and transformation”47. These processes of translation and transformation that the GFP Medaka undertakes highlight the tensions of sensing technologies and sentinels that promise to make the invisible the visible. As Wendy Chun explains, the idea that information [and here I substitute computation] makes the invisible visible is in conflict with the actual operations of computation. As for “computers to be a machine that makes things ‘transparent’, the fact that they ‘compute’, that they generate images, models and texts, rather than merely represent or reproduce what exists elsewhere must be forgotten”48. Conclusions : Bio-Computational Touch It could be argued that the GFP Medaca that materializes on the screen in front of me, or the set of numbers in the spreadsheet, or typed onto this page emerges from an intertwining of biology and computation. As Chun notes that the “history of computing and the history of biology are littered with moments of deliberate connection”49, in which computational processes are compared to biological ones. For example the notion that the body processes are softwares, algorithmic protocols or, and this is the example that Chun cites, that hard drive storage is similar to memory50. In the case of the GFP Medaca I would argue that its materialization is part of a wider drive towards the computation of nature that follows a logic that everything (including human and non human) bodies are computational and have the potential to compute. This “code as logos”51 could be said to be part of “a wider drive towards a biopolitical progammability” - a logic that Chun argues “reduces ‘life’ to code”52. However as Barad describes “life, whether organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate, is not an unfolding algorithm... electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there”53 and therefore I have attempted in this set of notes to illuminate that in the case of the GFP Medaka its own touch makes it impossible to reduce it to code or a predefined ‘experimental’ object. Distinguishing between life and life as code, obscures what Hird has described as “the very real and energetic invention and use of technology by nonhuman living organisms (termite high-rise cities include ‘birth chambers, hatcheries, the insect equivalent of schools, hospitals, honeymoon quarters, workshops and morgues’ all under sensitive climate control) as well as the extent to which so-called human technologies actually mimic technology already invented
by other species”54. To consider the GFP Medaka as a drive towards life-as-code also obscures how we might consider nonhumans as a creative force in the production of code, as co-writers in computational ecologies 55. Instead the GFP Medaka I discuss is “in its iterative materialization is a dynamic play of in/determinacy. Matter is never a settled matter”56. So therefore what I want to suggest is not that the entanglement of biological and computational programming and their histories are not present in the GFP Medaka I hold in my pipet but that this entanglement, as Barad suggests, is a form of touch, which presents a different kind of causality57. The GFP Medaka is not a life reduced to code, it emerges from phenomena of trans practices that we might consider transgressing the biological and the computational “testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being”58. Matter is not automatically compliant to codely textual bodies of map functions and integers, but instead is a trouble that emerges through a trans practice of intra -action and touch - and it is these entangled practices that in turn trouble at the potentials and “possibilities for biotic subjects”59, “the sensation of contact and “the greeting of the stranger within”60. Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the support of the RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1 and visiting research fellowship at the School of Creative Media , City University, Hong Kong. Notes 1 Karen, Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012.) :209 2 Karen, Barad.Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, (2007) 3 The image is titled with a play on words “ Fish Illuminate, Harbour is Dirty” translation by Winnie Soon. 4 Vicki, Kirby.'Natural Convers(at)ions: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?', in Alaimo S; Hekman S (ed.),Material Feminisms, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, USA, pp. 214 - 236. (2008) :17 5 See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Symphony_of_Lights. 6 Karen, Barad.Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, (2007) :119 7 Kathryn, Yusoff. Insensible worlds: postrelational ethics, indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2) 208 – 226. (2013) :239 8 ibid :221 9 ibid :230 10 Karen, Barad.Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, (2007) :119
11 ibid:33 12 Noreen, Giffney. Myra, Hird, Myra. eds: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) : 286 13 Jane,Prophet, Helen Pritchard. Performative Apparatus and Diffractive Practices: an account of Artificial Life art, forthcoming 14 Lucy, Suchman, L. (2005). Agencies in Technology Design:Feminist Reconfigurations. Retrieved from http:// www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/research/publications/papers/suchman-agenciestechnodesign.pdf :6 15 Maria, Puig de la Bellacasa. Ethical doings in naturecultures. Ethics, Place and Environment 13(2):151169. (2010) 16 Karen, Barad.Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, (2007) 17 Karen, Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012.) :209 18 ibid:210 19 ibid:206 20 ibid:207 21 ibid:208 22 ibid:208 23 ibid:215 24 Kathryn,Yusoff. Insensible worlds: postrelational ethics, indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2) 208 – 226. (2013) :210 25 Myra,Hird.Animal Trans in Giffney, N., Hird, M.: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :229 26 Madeleine,Akrich,Michel Callon,and Bruno Latour. “Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs. ” Paris: Presses de l’Ecole des mines (2006) cited in Christelle Gramaglia,Sentinel Organisms: “they look out for the environment!”, Limn issue 3, Limn (2003) 27 ibid 28 Christelle Gramaglia,Sentinel Organisms: “they look out for the environment!”, Limn issue 3, Limn (2003) 29 Gail, Davies. Mobilizing Experimental Life: Spaces of Becoming with Mutant Mice. Theory, Culture and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science (2013) :3 30 Myra,Hird.Animal Trans in Giffney, N., Hird, M.: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :229
31 Astrid, Schrader.:Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science 40(2) 275–306. (2010) :277 32 Kathryn, Yusoff. Aesthetics of loss: biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects.Transactions of the Inst tute of British Geographers vol. 37, (4) 578-592. (2012) 33 Myra, Hird.Animal Trans in Noreen,Giffney. Myra,Hird.Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :231 34 Donna Haraway 1997: 56 cited in Myra,Hird.Animal Trans, in Giffney, N., Hird, M.: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :231 35 Jean Baudrillard, Jean. Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art, Interntional Journal of Baudrillard studies Volume 5, Number 2. (2008) 36 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Ethical doings in naturecultures. Ethics, Place and Environment 13(2):151169. (2010) : 159 37 Karen Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012.) :212 38 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Ethical doings in naturecultures. Ethics, Place and Environment 13(2):151169. (2010) : 159 39 Karen Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012.) :212 40 Myra, Hird.Animal Trans in Noreen,Giffney. Myra,Hird.Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :231 41 Karen Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012.) :209 42 “that knotted thing we call the body has left; it is undone”. Donna, Haraway. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (2008) :163) 43 Eva, Hayward. Sensational jellyfish: aquarium affects and the matter of immersion, differences, Vol.23(3) (2012) :174 44 ibid: 174 45 details from the labs research methodology 46 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, (2011) kindle edition: 293 47 Emile Devereaux and Helen Pritchard, Transgenic Swimming Pools: Testing Bodies in Art and Science Experimentation, Renew Festival Proceedings, 2013 48 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, (2011) kindle edition: 293 49 ibid:1502
50 ibid: 1502 51 ibid:1519 52 ibid:1522 53 Karen Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012): 207 54 Linda, Margulis. and Dorion, Sagan. Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origins of Species,New York: Basic Books (2002) cited in Myra,Hird.Animal Trans in Giffney, N., Hird, M.: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. (2008) :242 55 Helen, Pritchard. “Thinking with the Animal Hacker, Articulation in Ecologies of Earth Observation,” in A Peer Reviewed Journal about Back When Pluto Was a Planet: The Reinvention of Research as Participatory Practice, edited by C Anderson and G Cox. Berlin/Aarhus: transmediale/darc, Aarhus University, (2013). 56 Karen, Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012) :214 57 Ibid: 208 58 Ibid: 208 59 Kathryn,Yusoff. Insensible worlds: postrelational ethics, indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2) 208 – 226. (2013) 60 Karen, Barad. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, (2012) :206 References Akrich, Madeleine. Callon, Michel. Latour, Bruno. Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs. Paris: Presses de l’Ecole des mines 2006. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Barad, Karen. On Touching -- The Inhuman That Therefore I Am," in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, v.23(3): 206-223, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art, Interntional Journal of Baudrillard studies Volume 5, Number 2. 2008. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, Kindle Edition 2011 Devereaux, Emile. Pritchard, Helen. Transgenic Swimming Pools: Testing Bodies in Art and Science Experimentation, Renew Festival Proceedings, 2013. Giffney, Noreen., Hird, Myra. eds: Queering the Non/Human, Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Gramaglia, Christelle. Sentinel Organisms: “they look out for the environment!”, Limn issue 3, Limn (2003) Davies, Gail. Mobilizing Experimental Life: Spaces of Becoming with Mutant Mice. Theory, Culture and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science 2013. Haraway, Donna, J. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2008.
Hayward, Eva. Sensational jellyfish: aquarium affects and the matter of immersion, differences, Vol.23(3) 2012. Hird, Myra: Animal Trans in Giffney, N., Hird, M.: Queering the Non/Human.. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Kirby, Vicki.'Natural Convers(at)ions: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?', in Alaimo S; Hekman S (ed.),Material Feminisms, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, USA, pp. 214 - 236. 2008. Margulis, Linda. and Sagan, Dorion. Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic, 2002. Pritchard, Helen. “Thinking with the Animal Hacker, Articulation in Ecologies of Earth Observation,” in A Peer Reviewed Journal about Back When Pluto Was a Planet: The Reinvention of Research as Participatory Practice, edited by C Anderson and G Cox. Berlin/Aarhus: transmediale/darc, Aarhus University, 2013. Prophet J, Pritchard H. Performative Apparatus and Diffractive Practices: an account of Artificial Life art, forthcoming Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Ethical doings in naturecultures. Ethics, Place and Environment 13(2):151-169. 2010. Schrader, A.:Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science 40(2) 275–306 2010. Suchman, Lucy. Agencies in Technology Design:Feminist Reconfigurations. Retrieved from http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/research/publications/papers/suchman-agenciestechnodesign.pdf, 2005. Yusoff, Kathryn. Aesthetics of loss: biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects.Transactions of the Inst tute of British Geographers vol. 37, (4) 578-592, 2012. Yusoff, Kathryn. Insensible worlds: postrelational ethics, indeterminacy and the (k)nots of relating” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31(2) 208 – 226. 2013.
