Biohacking and the Molecular Limits of the Body in Life and Art

Description:

‘Biohacking’ denotes a field or practice that engage biomedical and technological innovations to ‘hack’ bodily processes in ways that enhance or change the body’s functionality and performance. Such body enhancement practices have a long history of use in military and sports contexts. But what is significant is that, in recent years, body enhancement practices and technologies are increasingly finding their way into more mundane settings, such as workplaces, universities, and the home, as things like psychostimulants become seen as necessary to cope with the demands and stress of everyday life. At the same time, we also see the rise of experimental and artistic explorations of biohacking technologies (in fields like bioart and DIYBio), but unlike the ethos of productivity in everyday engagements, the arts are often grounded in a different style of ethical thinking premised on the idea that our bodies and beings are porous, shared, co-constituted by and through the entities involved in the situations we inhabit, and which inhabit us.

This PhD project will involve the exploration of the different ethical and political stakes of biohacking across everyday and artistic realms. The PhD will probe the extent to which these new technologies are inciting new terms and frames through which we perceive our biological existence; what ethical and political questions about how we regulate and conduct our lives are they forcing us to pose, and what values are they forcing us to reconsider? And how might artistic biohacking entail the creative repurposing of contemporary technologies might allow us to imagine new and better ways of living with technology and indeed with others (human, nonhuman, animal) in the twenty-first century.