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

Links, etc

Xenopus

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.

DD: Interestingly when I read this I thought: I remember bringing up the issue of the isolating sticks of paper and plastic and if there were other methods of testing for pregnancy which were more open or performative - at a synbio workshop. These stupid kids dismissed it as something "only sluts" would be interested in, which shocked me, since reproductive health is something people should take charge of. I was so turned off by their closemindedness and lack of foresight on the importance of the knowledge of pregnancy and how this affected lots of women - to the point that I didn't really want to work in their teams anymore.

The Object as Reality Check

What can be gleaned from material culture, then, that current political discourse fails to register? Fundamentally, Adamson argues, the objects have an indisputable material presence which renders them useful touchstones in a debate that is generally conducted in the immaterial realms of social media, fake news, and instantaneous opining. “Material objects are facts in the world,” says Adamson. “We’re living in this giant distortion field, and the tendency to interact with one another immaterially through online platforms has made the distortion much more powerful and pervasive. It strikes me that the material realm is a series of hard facts and the digital realm is a world of spin, fiction, claims, and counterclaims – but also of creativity.” Below, Adamson discusses four objects or object types examined in the Objects of Dispute seminar. “These material artefacts have a factual basis and if we do justice to them, it helps give us an armature for challenging this post-truth situation,” he says. “Although it’s a terrifying situation that we’re in, it’s not unprecedented. It’s an important moment for historians to say: OK, there’s a pattern here. It has particular qualities now because of digital information economies, but you can also see a lot of resemblances. If we don’t want to go down the road of fascism, we need to engage in some pattern recognition and judge our counteractions accordingly. It’s a matter of being thoughtful and analytical as well as emotional.”

Consumption

The Gift of Death By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012:

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
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