What is Speculative Biology?
Speculative biology is a multidisciplinary, multimodal, multilayered often multinational knowledge production system, that lies at the intersection of speculative design, synthetic biology and cultural criticism. Speculative biology involves the design of tissues,organs, organisms, biological systems, ecotypes and ecosystems in order to catalyze creative critical thinking. Most importantly, speculative biology is an art form, or an artistic research practice that aims to extend beyond the relatively narrow scope of the contemporary art world. Speculative biology simulates futurities.
Critical design is a term commonly used by Anthony Dune and Fiona Raby , designer duo, founders of the design interactions department at the Royal College of Art, London. According to Dune and Raby, critical design’s role is to tackle with or to challenge misconceptions around objects of everyday life. Today most objects we interact with are products. Design as a field specifically industrial design, which Dunne and Raby are tightly — historically if not epistemologically and aesthetically- connected to is about creating objects that can be mass-produced with ease and that can functionally and aesthetically speak to a large number of people. Although its roots are in mass production and consumerism, critical design emerges as a counter movement. The goal of critical design is to problematize our relationship with everyday products by creating alternative experiences. In that sense, its primary goal is to add criticality to the user experience. By creating alternative scenarios, critical designers, open up a platform for discussing cultural conventions or simply start cultural inquiry. this is exactly where critical design and speculative biology overlap. Yet critical design is design criticizing itself. Critical design is industrial production reflecting back on consumerist lifestyles it has yet created together with objects and systems that make such lifestyles possible. As critical as it can be, critical design still operates within the paradigms of industrial capitalism offering more products or design solutions although the products are anti-products, or design becomes anti-design.
Moreover Dune and Raby clearly state that their practice is not art. They insist that when the work is considered art, the designer sacrifices on the cultural impact of the product. This is exactly where critical design and speculative biology parts ways.
The second field that speculative biology springs from is synthetic biology. Synthetic biology which is closely connected to bioinformatics, genomics and molecular biology, envisions organisms “not found in nature.” Synthetic in synthetic biology , colloquially known as synbio, implies synthesis of new genetic code, that leads to new tissues, organs, systems — simply put recombinant genetic information- purposefully crafted to serve specific functions. In his seminal text from 2007, British physicist and visionary thinker Freeman Dyson, coins the term “domesticated biotechnology.” “… once in the hands of housewives and children, designing genomes will be an art form just like painting or sculpture.” Synthetic biology is nothing but designing genomes.
Dyson establishes a parallelism between the history of personal computing and the future of synthetic biology. He observes that physical technology became highly ubiquitous: computers, cameras, GPs and such becoming an inevitable part of our lives. He brings up Hungarian-born American mathematician and computer scientist Von Neumann’s failed vision, where computers were to stay centralized. What happens instead is that computers became widely distributed and widely accessible to the larger public. Today carrying a mobile device in our back pocket that is more powerful than the guidance computer used to send Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, is nothing special.
Dyson believes that biotechnology must/will follow a similar trajectory becoming more and more accessible and ubiquitous. he makes an analogy between computer games and biotech games where children the first generation to grow up surrounded with biotech, will be competing with their own designed organism. In Dyson’s biotech future, there are forests with tress bearing black silicon leaves and entire ecosystem of synthetic species that inhabit this dark forest. he claims that this biotech future might be an opportunity to resuscitate rural economies that took a huge blow as a consequence of urbanism, industrialism and such. he is aware of the fact that designing new life has deep cultural consequences such as ethical conundrums but he lightheartedly leaves this daunting task to future generations who will be inhabiting this biotech future.”…our children and grandchildren will answer these ethical questions” he claims.
Moving from 2007 to 2015 we witness the rise of iGem projects an organization that supports synthetic biology projects by students of biology aged between 25 to 18 ir younger, which as of today has more than 150 teams worldwide. During iGem competitions these teams gather and present their “synbio” projects from plastic eating bacteria to genetically modified vaginal yeast that can prevent contraception. Calling themselves “bio-hackers” this young bio-movement take us to the early days of “hacking culture” computer hackers who take great pride in speaking the language of the machine better than the machine itself. Who are “bio-hackers” speaking the language of the genome with such ease and aplomb, if not the bio-curious grandchildren that would make Freeman Dyson proud?
The third field that influence speculative biology is cultural criticism. Cultural evolution is faster than genetic evolution. A mutation is a sudden random change in the genetic material of a cell that may cause it and all the cells derived from it to differ in appearance and behavior from the original. This changing structure of the gene if inheritable makes up the building block of Darwinian evolutions. The idea of natural selection is based on mutations that spread through the population over successive generations. I will skip the debate around memes versus genes ( Blackmore, Dennett) as the atomic unit of cultural evolution. I would rather like to introduce the notion of cultural mutation. Can cultural criticism be a way of detecting cultural mutations specifically those that cause neoplasms growth to threaten our cultural well-being? What are some cultural mutations of the malignant kind? What are cancerous tumors of culture?
An example can be plastics, the hyper object of the throwaway culture, the connective tissue of excessive consumerism. Timothy Morton, an advocate of Dark Ecology as opposed to Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology defines the qualities of a hyoerobject as exceedingly pervasive , omnipresent, inescapable and imperceivable. Unlike a regular object, a hyper object exceeds beyond the limits of perception, one cannot grasp it fully. A hyper object is perceptually elusive due to its massive scale and complexity. Styrofoam a type of plastics is an instance of an hyper object according to Morton.
Plastics a syntehtic polymer, first shows up in mid-19th century when Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh makes ebonite from natural rubber. In 1905 Belgian-born US chemist leo Bakeland invents Bakelite. 1930s welcome PVC and nylon, the latter causing public hysteria among women both in Europe and in the States right after the introduction of nylon stockings. During World War II, the genealogy of synthetic polymer experience a cambrian explosion, polyethylene(ICI), polyurethane(IG Farbenindustrie), silicone(Dow Chemical) joining the family. Yet the sudden invasion of everyday life by plastics, is a postwar phenomenon. It has more to do with fabricated desire for plastics than the physical need/availability of the polymer.
Starting from 1950s disposable consumer goods, made of plastics had been promoted in lifestyle magazines such as Life or House Beautiful which proudly states that “ You will have a greater chance to be yourself than anyone else in the history of civilization.” Thanks to the introduction of plastics in our lives we are more ourselves than anyone else( individualism on steroids.) Another article from 1953, titled “Throwaway Culture”, states that by using throwaway goods a housewife can save up to 43 hours on household chores — which she could then spend on consuming more goods. The text is accompanied with a photograph of an atomic family (father, mother, daughter) celebrating plastics by literally throwing plastic cups, dishes, forks, clothing and more to air. One ironic detail in the staged photograph is the daughter’s face obscure d by a flying piece of plastics. The human child, our future, is obscured by plastics.
Flash forward some 60 years and not only our houses but our oceans are filled with plastics. Captain Charles Moore in his book the Plastic Ocean beautifully demonstrates how North Pacific Subtropical Gyre one of planet’s biggest aquatic ecosystems have been distressed by polastics. Pacific Trash Vortex (PTV) the colloquial name given to the gyre is nothing but a floating nexus of plastic waste, a man-made extreme environment, a biofact as in a biological entity that forms as a result of human intervention and last but not the least a hyper-object soup. Captain Moore in a video interview holds a jar filled with plastic particles. While wearing a hat that reads “die trying”, he makes a simple yet grim statement :” the ocean has turned into a plastic soup, this is the soup.”
To better illustrate speculative biology’s position toward the prospect of “designing solutions” to technologically induced catasrophies, we shall stay in this plastic soup, namely our oceans.
Vile Flusser, in Vampyreteuthis Infernalis, a cololaboration between artist Louis Bec and himself, talks extensively about the lord of a dark abyssal world, the vampire squid. Untroubled by micro plastics, or other plastic debris %60 of which sinks to the benthic area of our oceans, Vampyroteuithis Infernalis, drifts in the unknown,its alien environment and alien anatomy in oprefectv contrast with the terrestrial homo-sapiens. Fluster, uses the vampire squid to reflect back on the human.
In Flusser’s writing the squid’s feelers, genitalia,and brain becomes intellectual tools to dissect cultural norms. “His Newton is Freud, his Jung is Einstein” claims Flusser for the vampire squid. he goes onto explain how the squid experiences the world as purely sexual with its genitalia placed right by its feelers,and how vampire sexuality is complete as opposed to the human which ignores the female. Fluster and Louis Bec -through highly detailed illustrations- build the vampire squids a semi-fictional creature whose skin becomes a surface for cultural criticism, rendering the vampire squid speculative biological. The vampire squid inhabits an ocean which is yet uncontaminated with plastics,the squid does not swim in the anthropocene. Flusser’s squid is not an ingredient in a plastic soup.
An Ecosystem of Excess
An Ecosystem of Excess is a collection of taxa that emerges in the plastisphere. Coined by Linda Amaral Zettler and her team in their 2013 Biology Letters paper, “Life in the Plastisphere”, the term means”…a microbial community of autotrophs,heteretrophs,symbionts,parasites” that dwell and potentially metabolize micro plastics found in PTV. Starting with this definition of the microbial ecosystem , EOE envisions organisms and the interrelations between them. Extrapolating from the bacteria that has already emerged in the plastic soup, EOE proposes insects,reptilia,aves and enigmatic taxa that can sense and metabolize plastics.EOE imagines future life in the plastisphereand renders this life visible by artistic methods. The way EOE approaches a massive environmental problem exemplifies a speculative biological direction in regenerating Zylinska’s concepts of inventiveness and criticality. (what are Zylinska’s concepts again???)
I would lie to present EOE first as a cultural solution, which offers design solutions in and of itself. EOE reverse=engineers the cultural explosion of plastics. Within less than 70 years, plastics have entered every aspect of our lives including our food-chain and bloodstream . This was only possible through a cultural transformation(I avoid using the words reform and revolution) Would that be possible to “reverse” this transformation, to build cultures or futurities that can address technologically-induced catastrophes? Can we build a future -in less than 70 years- that decenter the human(Grosz) or put the human in its place next to the animal, which offers more life to all?
Or shall we be “tolerating insipid environments” or “ a life that is not exactly death?” (Carson)
EOE creates affect, emits affectivioties and transforms by combining cold data with warm emotions.In this sense, EOE is an aesthetic axiom, one which states that it is through the artful orchestration of affect that one can warp, bend, deform, distort even disfigure a culture to build a e new one.
