Sandbox 01/2017

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For 2017, instead of constantly losing all the links that I encounter over time, I will list anything i encounter here with a small annotation to remind myself of it

Dear Friends, Please join us in an extended moment of suspense: two weeks ago, X was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor and she may be pregnant. This morning a small group of academics, artists, journalists and frog enthusiasts convened in Brooklyn to stage a historical reenactment of a pregnancy test that was developed in the 1930s. We injected one cubic centimeter of X’s urine into a pet adult female Xenopus laevis frog named Loretta. If she is pregnant, the frog will respond to the presence of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) in her urine by laying its own eggs within the next 24 hours. We invite you to follow a live-streaming video of Loretta as she sits in a tank in Brooklyn. You’ll see the white amphibian with distinctive little black claws doing very little. (That doesn’t mean the link is broken; it just turns out that the frog doesn’t do much.) If you see anything odd in the tank, please feel free to comment on the blog—or better yet, call us! We thought this would be a more interesting, communal, and differently synchronous way to think through animal labor, reproductive history, gender norms, and the many other different constellations of kinship, human and animal alike, that get formed in the process of reproducing. And it was a lot more stimulating and interactive than dropping ten bucks at our local drug store for a home pregnancy test. With anticipation, X & Y The e-mail excerpted above initiated the transformation of a private query into a participatory public spectacle. The eighteenth-century experimental demonstrations of London’s Royal Society—where, for example, birds expired within the vacuum of a glass jar—also involved staging spectacles for a live human audience.28 If these earlier experiments were performed for a restricted public of “modest witnesses,” white adult males of the upper class, our own enactment of the Xenopus pregnancy test was open to the more democratic and unruly public space of the Internet.29 While a restricted public gathered to witness the injection of Loretta, the public webcast circulated among an extended network—which included some of our colleagues and children, their friends, and friends of friends—some 130 people according to Ustream’s viewer statistics. Our performance brought the typically private matter of conception to an experimental arena where approaches to witnessing competed with social norms for engaging with art, colleagues, roommates, friends, and strangers.

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