Kingdom Dysphoria @ Biofriction

 

   Note: Kingdom dysphoria is an invented transposition of the term ‘gender dysphoria’, which describes the distress and violence caused by binary sex assignment. Kingdom dysphoria would be the harm caused on all living and non-living entities as a result of the assignment of fixed categories, taxonomies, species and kingdoms.


    This workshop can be understood as a situation to inquire into the moment in which the biopolitics and the necropolitics based on life and nonlife is being reformed. Working from the understanding of biology ‘as a field of discourse beyond the living world itself' (Elizabeth Povinelli), we want to actively engage with the spacetime of continuities between the bios, geos and mythos (Sylvia Wynter) as apparatuses of knowledge production and world production.


    To start with, we propose to look back at the 19th century, the moment when the microscopic gaze and miniaturization practices were introduced within Western Science and society , and to unravel their relation to the separation between the geos and bios. During this period, the new access to the microscope outside the science lab, and its availability to non-scientists, generated a practice of looking at tiny things. As people learned to see themselves surrounded by the micro, this access to the world propelled the invention of classification and standards of taxonomic/kingdom separations, which silently informed and became embedded within organizations of life. As this was in some ways a violence enabled by the 19th century version of DIY BIO, we think it is important to understand its continuations in contemporary bioart, biohacking and (free) software development. It was also a historical period of immense information sharing via bio-informatics, which has many affinities with technoscientific practices in the 21st Century that define the separation life and nonlife, and who gets to ‘have a life’.


    Hidden in plain sight, the timescale of the geo did not fit the taxonomic efforts of modern fixations, and as we learned with Elizabeth Povinelli and Kathryn Yusoff, the very ontologies and politics embedded in the geos are those of colonial exploitation of bodies and resources.


    At a macro scale, the geos calls for an attention to matter that is almost still, that inform about the latent damages on the planet. And perhaps at a meso scale, that of the mundane studying with at-hand devices, the mythos needs to be unwritten and rewritten. As speciest, racist and ableist forces switch scales too smoothly, we convoke methods for a trans*feminist f(r)iction to fight what could be named “kingdom dysphoria”.


    Kingdom dysphoria is yet another condition that calls for trans*feminist studying and practice, for letting go of technoscientific binarisms and to problematize exteriorities that are provoked by the cuts of modern apparatuses.


    During the workshop, we propose to engage with scanning practices across scales. We will move between electron scanning microscope practices to meso and macro applications of LIDAR (remote sensing). We want to think of scanning as a mode of time travelling through organic compounds which make visible/stabilize for a moment a computational escape velocity that might switch between so-called kingdoms and beyond (from the vegetal to the animal to the mineral). In this way, we can start building a shared understanding of the mutual affections and transitions of the living and the inert matter at the micro scale. Putting a phenomenology of the mundane and the day-to-day in dialogue with a situated criticism of computational technologies for bio-engineering, this workshop might be a groupal attempt to see what it would mean to switch scales and domains with a queer and anti-colonial politics.
  

+ info about the Biofriction Summer Program: https://hangar.org/es/activitats-recerca-i-transferencia-de-coneixements/biofriction-summer-program/