S03E35: Affect as Contamination

What this episode covers

How do artists engage living bodies as creative material? How do they engage our ideas and assumptions of what we consider a body to be and what a body can do? How do they challenge the principles of what life is and the relations we take for granted?    For this podcast, we invited philosopher, researcher and labour organizer Mijke van der Drift to engage with Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, lecturer and researcher teaching contemporary philosophy and art-science at AKI Academy of Art and Design ArtEZ. Thinking through the lens of contamination, Agnieszka's recently published book Affect as Contamination: Embodiment in Bioart and Biotechnology uses bioart projects as provocative case studies to rethink affect and bodily practices. Departing from her book, they reflect upon the desire for transformation and the need for its control in our daily infrastructures, ranging from biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries to food production and healthcare.    What ethical frameworks are needed to organize and guide our actions when confronted with hard questions and uncomfortable situations that come up when engaging living matter as a creative material? How do we recognize what needs to change and for whom? Can ethics and art prompt us to become more joyful and accountable to transformative processes of justice?   We invite you to listen to this conversation and reflect upon the risks involved when artists experiment with bodies and living matter, and to think through which 'anchors' can orient us through the transformation that life inevitably begets.   Show notes   -       Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin, May the Horse live in me! https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/blood-1/may-the-horse-live-in-me-#:~:text=The%20performance%20May%20the%20Horse,an%20injection%20of%20horse%27s%20blood.   -       The Center For Genomic Gastronomy, Smog Tasting: Smog Synthesizer https://genomicgastronomy.com/work/2015-2/smog-synthesizer/   -       Adriana Knouf, Xenological Entanglements. 001a: Trying Plastic Variations https://tranxxenolab.net/projects/eromatase/ -       Be-wildering by Jennifer Willet & Kira O'Reilly, 2017, performance https://waag.org/en/event/performance-be-wildering-jennifer-willet-kira-oreilly/ -           -       Book Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Shizophrenia 1980   -       Bio artist Boo Chapple invited by Prof. Rob Zwijnenberg's honours class Who owns Life? at Leiden University     -       Baruch Spinoza, Ethics https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/#Ethi   -       Špela Petrič, Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis – semiotic triangle, 2015 https://www.spelapetric.org/scotopoiesis -          Sandilands, Catriona (2017), 'Vegetate', in J. J. Cohen and L. Duckert (eds), Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 16–29. https://www.academia.edu/50082847/Vegetate     -       Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin, May the Horse live in me! https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/blood-1/may-the-horse-live-in-me-#:~:text=The%20performance%20May%20the%20Horse,an%20injection%20of%20horse%27s%20blood.   -       Donna Haraway, Respon

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