Crafting with Livings: An Inquiry of Cellular Anthropology Through Laboratory Gestures

Abstract

This text is the result of a research project which began in summer 2015. I spent the past two years visiting various laboratories concerned with questions of life: the Pelling Lab, SymbioticA, the Chooi Lab and the HumAnimaLab. My methods have been highly immersive and at the edges of autoethnography. I have navigated gestures and a cellular anthropology to gain a better understanding of the relations at play within the laboratories I have grown with and learned from. Interconnected moving livings is what I stumbled upon in these spaces of scientific, artistic and, most importantly, embodied exploration. By characterizing these specific biotechnological relations and mediations which are in processes of articulation, I explore the notion of crafting. I draw from the literatures of the anthropology of life, anthropology of craft as well as from craft theory to speak of concurrent laboratory livings as engaging in a crafting with livings.