Special Section:
Probing the System: Feminist Complications of Automated Technologies, Flows, and Practices of Everyday Life

INCUBATOR Art Lab: Reimagining Biotech Futures through Integrated Laboratory Practices

Jennifer Willet

University of Windsor
jwillet@uwindsor.ca

Abstract

INCUBATOR Art Lab is an art and science research laboratory at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. This image/text document explores the invisible integrated laboratory practices developed within INCUBATOR Art Lab that reimagining how scientific research is conducted within institutional settings towards more joyful and inclusive biotech futures. The piece describes new modes of engaging with institutional bureaucracy, designing infrastructure, and community-building efforts that are central to how INCUBATOR Art Lab functions as a feminist bioart laboratory.

Keywords

bioart, laboratory management, art, science, infrastructure, bureaucracy

Introduction

INCUBATOR Art Lab is a cross-disciplinary research group and bioart research and teaching facility housed in the School of Creative Arts at University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, founded in 2009 by me, Dr. Jennifer Willet. INCUBATOR Art Lab houses the undergraduate bioart class BioART: Contemporary Art and the Life Sciences, as well as ongoing student and faculty bioart projects, science and technology studies research, and special events that investigate the intersection of biotechnology, art, and ecology. Bioart is a contemporary art form that uses biology and hands-on biotechnological techniques in the production of artworks.

In 2018 INCUBATOR Art Lab launched a state-of-the-art biosafety level-two (BSL2) laboratory facility dedicated to biological art research with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall separating the lab from the main atrium of the new School of Creative Arts. The new INCUBATOR Art Lab is both a research facility and a multimedia theatre and art venue where audiences can view living biological artworks. Our lab engages in mixed-use research/creation in molecular biology, microbiology, microscopy, and plant and mammalian tissue culture protocols with integrated multimedia, theatrical lighting design, video, and sound capabilities. This new facility provides unique innovations in bioart public engagement: our daily activities are visible to pedestrians as they walk through the building; the facility serves as a gallery where artworks that are unable to leave the laboratory can be safely seen by audiences as well as a multimedia performing arts venue where seated audiences can view theatre and performance events that integrate living biological organisms and the tools and techniques of biotechnology.

The primary research objective of INCUBATOR Art Lab is to devise research/creation methods, artworks, texts, and technologies that serve to engage audiences, species and communities in collaboratively imagining possible biotech futures. This generative process is intended to counter the overwhelmingly pessimistic and corporate cultural imaginations of our environmental and technological future through news media, advertising, and science fiction. Instead, INCUBATOR projects focus on generating alternative and imaginative biotech futures through interdisciplinary research/creation. Our cross-disciplinary research integrates advanced digital and biotechnologies; feminist and post-colonial perspectives; historical, ecological, agricultural, and indigenous knowledges; community engagement; sustainability; love, joy, gratitude, and the acknowledgement of suffering.

This image/text document explores the invisible integrated laboratory practices developed in INCUBATOR Art Lab that support research in generating imaginative biotech futures. Often, the publications and artworks produced by our laboratory are highlighted as our most significant contributions to the field. However, new modes of engaging with institutional bureaucracy, designing infrastructure, and community-building efforts devised by me and the INCUBATOR Art Lab team are possibly even more impactful than our research outputs in transforming how art and biotechnological research is practiced in institutional settings. This document represents an attempt to convey the structural, managerial, bureaucratic operations of INCUBATOR Art Lab as significant social, political, and interpersonal activities within the university. INCUBATOR Art Lab is an example of a feminist response to managing a laboratory research group within a highly regimented, patriarchal, colonial institutional setting.

This alternate framework for operating a laboratory is built upon generations of feminist science and technology studies scholars challenging objective rationality, patriarchy, and colonialism in the hard sciences. The works of Lynne Margulies, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer are foundational to my thinking and creative activities, encouraging me to consider the role of the nonhuman and more-than-human as participants, even collaborators, in my bioart research and creation. My fascination with alternative scientific research methods stems directly from Evelyn Fox Keller’s (1983) biography of Barbra McClintock called A Feeling for the Organism. Keller illustrates McClintock’s daily activities building individual relationships with stocks of maize in her research fields. McClintock’s research methodologies—rooted in cultivation, insight, commitment, and subjective experience—are more often linked to domestic activities or creative arts practices than traditions in the hard sciences, and have highly influenced my own strategies in the lab. Deboleena Roy’s Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab mirrors so much of my experiences working in a laboratory environment, including a profound empathy for nonhuman organisms and a willful playfulness and investment in erotic biopower in performing laboratory protocols (2018, 5).

However, it wasn’t until 2016, when I stumbled across Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science, and Love (2016), that I really considered the applied operations of a laboratory also as a site for critical transformation. Jahren’s book traces her experiences working as a female scientist from a fledging grad student to the lead scientist of her own laboratory. She describes in great detail her own challenges with relationships, poverty, mental health, in conjunction with the systemic sexism she encountered in the hard sciences. She outlines very procedural barriers she encountered purchasing equipment, hiring staff, traveling, maintaining a lab on campus, and engaging in field research. Her harrowing accounts align with some of my experiences trying to launch and maintain a significant international art career based on sweat equity and relentless problem solving in a highly competitive institutional environment.

I am also deeply influenced by other research labs and/or research groups I have encountered personally or through conferences and online research that are challenging established hieratical administrative, decision making, and managerial norms. Launched in 2008, the Technoscience Salon (https://technosalon.wordpress.com/) is an intersectional feminist, anti-racist, non-binary science and technology studies inter-institutional organization founded by Dr. Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto) and Dr. Natasha Myers (York University). The Technoscience Salon is committed to building a fluid, collaborative, horizontal organizational and event structure that mirrors the theoretical goals of the research group. They are a long-standing and highly functional model for careful, engaged, critical investment in building a community that reflects the world they want to live in, rather than the world of inequity we have inherited. Similarly, I am influenced by the feminist community-building model presented by Dr. Natalie Loveless and her research group called Co-Lab: Research-Creation + Social Justice Collaboratory (www.researchcreation.ca) founded in 2013 at the University of Alberta. Within the sciences, I have found a collaborator for reimagining scientific research methodologies and organizing principles of a lab within my own institution: Dr. Catherine Febria, Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Restoration Ecology and director of the Healthy Headwaters Lab (www.healthyheadwaterslab.ca). Dr. Febria engages in highly locavore and applied ecological research restoring freshwater ecologies in collaboration with farmers, artists, and Indigenous communities. Her lab is committed to embracing diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives while conducting environmental research towards producing holistic solutions for restoring the freshwater ecology. I am also inspired by Dr. Max Liboiron’s Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (https://civiclaboratory.nl/) at Memorial University in Newfoundland, which posits itself as a scientific research lab monitoring plastics pollution in Canadian East Coast waterways, but also as a scientific methods incubator aiming to bring feminist, Indigenous, anti-oppressive methodologies to the operations of a university research laboratory.

Lastly, I would like to emphasize that the strategies presented in this document are aspirational and in progress. There are many ways that I and our lab fail to meet these objectives, and each strategy for reimagining what a lab is and how it functions is at a different point of manifestation. But if I were to wait until INCUBATOR Art Lab is fully functioning as the feminist art/science institution I aspire it to be, I would never utter a word of this to anyone.

Figure 1. Willet, J. INCUBATOR Art Lab digital collage (2021).

INCUBATOR Art Lab

INCUBATOR Art Lab was founded in September 2009 in the School of Visual Arts (now Creative Arts) at the University of Windsor. It sounds auspicious, but it was not. The original INCUBATOR Art Lab was an oddly shaped windowless storage room that infected most of my research with a blue/green mould and flooded from time to time. I spent most evenings and weekends in the dank windowless lab, building and learning how to operate various pieces of used equipment. I had help from student artists and scientists who I hired on small contracts to assist with maintenance and operations. It was modest, but the lab had charm, and the students were excited and refreshingly uninhibited. We built a small community with a goofy clubhouse atmosphere. For example, one day while working in my office, a stressed-out grad student ran in to tell me the bioart students had short-circuited the pressure cooker we used to sterilize equipment and endless batches of agar. I told him not to worry, to cut the cord off the unit before disposal, and if they felt like it, to throw the pressure cooker a funeral on the way out to the dumpster: and they did. That afternoon, a dozen art and science students performed a funeral march with accompanying music up and down the halls of the Visual Arts Building before performing an impromptu eulogy by the dumpster in the back lot of the building; it was a fun and productive time.

In 2018, I was awarded a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Art, Science, and Ecology with significant multi-year funding attached (CAD$100,000/annum x 10 years). The CRC program is intended to attract and retain leaders in research to sustain Canada’s research excellence on an international scale. It is a significant accomplishment for an artist to receive a CRC as the chairs are competitive across disciplines and most often awarded to researchers in the sciences and social sciences. In 2021 there are 13 artists holding a CRC out of 2,285 possible chairs across Canada (Government of Canada 2021). Within a very short time span, INCUBATOR Art Lab transformed from a modest DIY art/science lab to a small institute of note. With this transformation has come exciting opportunities: more funding and more space, expanded capacities, more students, some staff—more help! What also comes with this transformation is the need to scale up, take on new responsibilities, and engage in larger institutional and management activities. This aspect of INCUBATOR Art Lab has become a central focus over the last few years. How do I align my unruly activist artistic intentions with the necessary tasks involved in managing infrastructure, budgets, humans, and nonhumans in a laboratory environment? I am trying to think carefully with each administrative step about how I can build a creative space, a community, and an institution that reflects my belief in intersectional feminist principles, empathy across species, radical interdisciplinarity, and love and joy, while carefully navigating stringent institutional policies and procedures.

Figure 2. Willet, J. Interspecies Interrelations digital collage (2021).

Love

In 2012 I completed an artwork called Biotechnology Is a Technology of Love... It is a simple piece. The letters L - O - V - E are cut out of leather and felt scraps and placed into petri dishes, and agar is poured over the letters. Of course, the letters are filled with microbes that bloom overnight in the incubator. The petri dishes are arranged in a similar formulation to Robert Indiana’s LOVE (1967) and photographed. This work came from the startling realization that the time, care, intimate knowledge, and nudging it takes to sustain life in a hostile laboratory environment could be conceived of as a significant act of love. Scientists (and bioartists) are compelled to make substantial sacrifices (in terms of personal relationships, health, quality of life) to maintain research experiments that can be so tedious and often counterintuitive to human vitality. In this work, I am not thinking of the unidirectional love that we might think a scientist could offer their organism of study. Instead, I am thinking of a kind of love that entangles humans and nonhumans in the mutually beneficial and mutually detrimental collaborative relationships. A kind of love that acknowledges suffering and even death. I also wonder in what way (if any) can we speak of the love or care afforded by the nonhuman organisms in the lab—towards themselves, towards each other, towards the humans in the lab. And what of the human relationships in a lab—can they also be guided by principles of love?

This piece serves as a mission statement of sorts as I think through how to build my own lab. What would a lab based on the premise that Biotechnology Is a Technology of Love... look like? How would it function? When I tell people I am building a lab with an ethic of love as a central organizing feature, they are often amused and somewhat dismissive. Love is not valued as a rigorous research methodology. Love is most often understood as an irrational and very personal sensation—something that happens to you, rather than something that is consciously practiced over time. However, bell hooks argues that all great movements for social justice emphasize a love ethic as a transformational force in her book All About Love: New Visions (2001). She describes love not as an emotion but as a practice and a commitment to “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (hooks 2001, 5). She indicates that the work environment is as important as the personal or domestic domain for perpetuating love (of self, of work, of community, of the other) towards combating racism, sexism, dehumanization, and exploitation in our society (63–64). It is also more pleasurable and fulfilling (and possibly productive) to work in an environment where you respect and admire your colleagues, and where you and your contributions are valued and enjoyed. It is from this perspective that I am striving to build a loving work environment for INCUBATOR Art Lab.

Figure 3. Willet, J. Human Communities digital collage (2021).

Human Communities

INCUBATOR Art Lab is a physical set of facilities and a site of interspecies research/creation, but it also a human community based on the model of a scientific research group. INCUBATOR Art Lab values and relies on notions of love, community, diversity, fun, and radical interdisciplinarity as a core values and key ingredients for innovation across the arts and sciences. We employ three part-time staff members (two artists and one scientist); two MFA students with a specialization in bioart (recruited from various interdisciplinary backgrounds); and two to four BSc and BFA students. We also work with regular contractors for accounting, PR, photo/video, and design activities. We meet as a group once a week to manage ongoing lab research projects, produce art exhibits, facilitate the bioart class, and support each other’s professional, creative, and research goals. Everyone is paid reasonably for their time. We do not have volunteers in our lab, and we do not rely on additional hours of unpaid labour from employees, which is very common in both the arts and sciences. We hire for knowledge, skill, enthusiasm, and diversity—cultural diversity, diversity in lived experience, age, gender, education, and disciplinary specialization. Hiring for diversity not only contributes to the social justice goals of lab but also is a valuable research asset fostering excellence in creative problem solving and innovation.

We start each meeting with a short presentation from a lab group member or an external guest on their own research and/or personal hobbies, experiences, goals, followed by a Q and A discussion. Then we move to managing the weekly activities of the lab, including upcoming projects, events, or deadlines; ongoing scientific or creative research activities; and activities pertaining to the bioart class. All members of the lab group are invited to speak at meetings, consult on ongoing projects, and discuss their work loads, duties, and external time commitments. The research group interacts as a whole weekly, but team members also work individually and in variable small groups on multiple projects. Everyone receives public credit for their contributions to artworks, events, lab protocols, class workshops, publications. We are joyous, we are ruckus, we are silly, and we work very hard. Sometimes it is challenging working so closely together. Sometimes we encounter interpersonal conflicts. Sometimes external forces in the larger university negatively impact our work environment (university-wide policies, or difficult personnel.) I have become very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. Also, some team members do not enjoy entanglement or wish to participate in a loving work environment—and find my methodologies an imposition. In which case, it is important to respect that individuals’ boundaries. Sometimes it is just a job, and that is okay too. Sometimes the emotional labor of befriending and supporting students and staff members as they encounter challenges and grow to become their own professional creative / scientific / productive selves is exhausting, and time-consuming, and more work than the research itself. However, I am committed to perpetuating confident yet vulnerable leadership, intergenerational mentorship and support, and kindness, joy, and love in our laboratory community. I see myself as a wedge—as an unruly woman and artist who wedged herself into places where she does not always belong. Wedging myself into scientific communities, institutional spaces, the contemporary art world. I am committed to accessibility, to creating a safe space to have the difficult conversations, and to increasing opportunities for the next generation of trailblazers who have been told there is no space for them in institutional environments.

As INCUBATOR Art Lab matures into a strong community, I am now looking outwards. The next few years we will focus on how can we better connect with our local community, other research groups, citizens, artists, scientists, business owners, local farmers, and Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes Region.

Figure 4. Willet, J. Geographically Specific digital collage (2021).

Geographically Specific

Modernist conceptions of objectivity in laboratory design and operations rely on a notion that a research laboratory is not geographically specific. There is one caveat to this suggestion: in the ecological sciences, often (but not always) laboratories are located in geographic proximity to their research environment. But generally, in the biotech sector, laboratories (much like “white cube” galleries) are not intrinsically tied to the local community, the local ecology, local political, cultural, or economic issues. For example, biomedical research utilizing organoids as model case studies for testing treatment regimens for diseases are practiced the very same whether the research takes place in Canada or in Portugal.

INCUBATOR Art Lab challenges the notion that a laboratory can or should operate as if it is within a social, political, and ecological vacuum. Reinforcing geographic blinders to the operations of a lab does not achieve measurable objectivity in research results. Instead, this model prioritizes colonial and patriarchal models for engaging with the natural world. INCUBATOR Art Lab chooses to see our research/creation activities as entangled with our cultural and geographic location in the postindustrial landscape of the Windsor–Detroit region, on the Canada/US border, and at the center of a thriving biological, historical, and cultural ecology. The Great Lakes Region is home to a very complicated history—Indigenous, Canadian, and American history—that is unfurling today in with conflicting economic, ecological, and cultural tensions. How can we build a laboratory and research group that is reflexive and specific to our region? How can we nurture long-term mutually beneficial and meaningful relations with our local community and our local ecology?

We are working on a couple of ways to deepen our connections with the location, the ecology, and the community INCUBATOR Art Lab works within. As part of this work, I have developed a curatorial strategy hosting outdoor art/science events that engage with specific sites, municipalities, ecologies, histories for more than a decade. The next large project in Windsor is going to be called The Invasive Species Fishing Trip (2022), exploring notions of “invasiveness” in the perception and regulation of human and nonhuman migration across borders and boundaries. We will host a number of artists and scientists; research, subsistence and Indigenous fisherman; and social and political theorists studying human transnational migration to spend a week fishing for invasive species together in the Great Lakes. Together, we will have a fish fry, engage in biomonitoring of the waterways, and participate in a multimedia music event. At the end of the week, we will hold a conference and cross-disciplinary discussions on the topic of invasiveness in human and animal migration with an emphasis on the Great Lakes Region as a case study. Projects like this are intended to bring people together from disparate disciplines and standpoints and build trust and shared experiences before entering into complex discussions on challenging topics. It is also a way for INCUBATOR Art Lab to deepen our knowledge and connection with the local environment, the economy, and communities and individuals with whom our research and creative activities intersect.

On the horizon, we have been discussing a speaker / field trip series for the lab group where once a semester we take a field trip to meet with a neighboring business, organization, or community to learn more about the Windsor–Detroit region.

Figure 5. Willet, J. Infrastructure digital collage (2021).

Infrastructure

The INCUBATOR Art Lab built environment is intended as a physical manifestation of our core values and the notion that Biotechnology Is a Technology of Love...

Architectural infrastructure takes five to ten years (or more) to implement. As INCUBATOR Art Lab gained some traction in the early years, I saw our greatest challenge was the dismal facilities we were housed in. It is difficult to find creative inspiration and joy in dodgy digs. It is difficult to command attention and support if your home is virtually condemned. I knew if we were going to attract students, collaborators, financial and community support, INCUBATOR Art Lab had to transform its physical space to align with our creative and professional aspirations. To this end, I have designed and implemented two innovative art/science spaces at the University of Windsor: (1) a BSL2 research laboratory and multimedia theatre and (2) an artist studio and community engagement laboratory. Both of these facilities are unique internationally.

The new INCUBATOR Art Lab is designed to function as an interdisciplinary biotech research lab dedicated to the production of bioartworks. The same space also supports the display of bioartworks and live bioart performances. The design combines laboratory, contemporary art, and domestic kitchen aesthetics. A chandelier hangs at the center of the lab. Modeled after department store windows, shoe box dioramas, and food television sets, INCUBATOR Art Lab also functions as an installation-based artwork—and a social-pratice project—where the lab, and the humans and the nonhuman, and the microbial, molecular, and partial life participants in biotechnology become entangled performers in a strange biotech community theatre.

Figure 6. Willet, J. Infrastructure 2 digital collage (2021).

Infrastructure

In fall 2021, we are opening a second facility: INCUBATOR Art Lab Studio. The studio is a 1,700-square-foot storefront art studio, exhibition space, and community engagemment hub in downtown Windsor, Ontario. The front portion of the studio is a clean public space functioning as a drawing studio, office reception area, and gallery, and site for community bioart workshops. This area contains three chandeliers and a built-in biosafety level-one bioart lab housed in large bespoke greenhouse structure. This greenhouse lab contains a small counter, sink, mini fridge, electrical access, and waste area behind locked doors. The back section of the studio serves as a more functional artist studio, woodshop, and storage area for building large sculptural objects.

Windsor, as a postindustrial city with high unemployment rates, struggles to retain its employable youth population, to revitalize its downtown core, and more generally suffers a lack of community confidence in the value of everything Windsor. INCUBATOR Art Lab facilities are designed to inspire confidence, creativity, and joy for INCUBATOR Art Lab team members, researchers, and audiences. But these spaces are also designed to speak to and inspire Windsorites, to build confidence and value in our share experience of living in Windsor, Ontario. These hybrid studio/laboratories are sites for innovative creative work, public engagement venues, as installation artworks stretching the limits of what a lab can look like. These spaces ask users and audiences to push the limits of what types of activities are possible in a laboratory environment. Both spaces communicate to faculty, students, community members, and the local community, “The work you do here is extraordinary and valuable to our community.”

Figure 7. Willet, J. Bureaucracy digital collage (2021).

Bureaucracy

As I’ve written elsewhere, “Some of my most significant achievements as an artist and researcher in the bioart field are bureaucratic ones. Performances and text documents that are only ever read or seen by very small audiences; health and safety officers, grant administrators, park wardens, and ethics review boards. These administrative gymnastic tactics have become a central component of my artistic practice” (Willet forthcoming).

Engaging with bureaucratic processes is a cruel but necessary aspect of practicing art/science research within an institutional setting. I often tell my students that 70 percent of my job is paperwork and meetings, and 30 percent is teaching and creative research. Like most, I do not particularly enjoy the administrative duties attached to my employment, but I greatly appreciate the outcomes (pedagogical engagements, creative moments, artworks, and events) that these stressful and repetitive activities make possible. I have a few strategies I rely on to manage this aspect of my job. I try to keep all engagement with paperwork and bureaucracy to a minimum, and to not compound administrative tasks unless absolutely necessary. I work to complete bureaucratic tasks in an efficient, joyful, and kind manner. I try to be generous with the individuals I encounter while engaging in institutional processes as I have learned that other bureaucrats are often as irritated and constrained by the bureaucracies they serve as I am.

INCUBATOR Art Lab is now entering a new phase where we have become large enough that we need to set written policies and guidelines for the lab. Who has access to our facilities? Under what circumstances? How do we fairly assess priorities for resources? Most recently, and in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, we have decided to write community standards guidelines and set diversity and inclusion policies for the lab group as well as vendors and collaborators, and featured artists and researchers. We have always been deeply invested in creating a reflexive space and supporting Black, Indigenous, and POC, 2SLGBTQ+, and people living with disabilities in our field. But rather than continuing to rely on unspoken goals and goodwill, we need to institutionalize our commitment to transforming institutional racism within the academy. To this end, we struck a diversity committee, we are assessing our past diversity metrics, and are researching role models for accessible and not overly bureaucratic models for evaluating and communicating community standards within our organization. The irony is not lost on me that we have turned to further institutionalization to combat colonialism and racism within the institutional framework in which we work.

We are looking to existing models and documents that seem effective and accessible (and not overly bureaucratic), such as the “Global Community Bio Summit Code of Conduct” (2020) co-authored by members of the Global Community Bio Summit led by David Kong and housed in the MIT Media Lab. I like their publicly accessible four-page Google Doc format, written in colloquial language, with emphasis on building community rather than systems of control or protecting the organization from possible legal action. Their document begins with four tenets for how to conduct oneself at their events: “We will differ on things; Ask questions first; Act in good faith; When in doubt, ask” (“Global Community Bio Summit Code of Conduct” 2020). Other role models from the Canadian arts community include Articule Gallery’s “Open Letter to Artist-Run Centres in Quebec: Moving beyond Statements of Solidarity” (2020) and Eastern Edge Gallery’s “Code of Conduct” and “Safer Spaces Policy” (n.d.) as well at the “2019 Addendum to the 2006 Canadian Human Rights Settlement Agreement” against the CRC program. This aspect of INCUBATOR Art Lab management is “in progress” and we hope to have a first draft of our policies and code of conduct written in fall 2021.

Figure 8. Willet, J. Whimsy digital collage (2021).

Whimsy

Lastly, one of the key strategies I have developed to help myself manage growing institutional and bureaucratic entanglements that are necessary in running a lab is to turn all aspects of my institutional life into artworks. Or at least perform institutional tasks as if they were artworks. I conceive of INCUBATOR Art Lab’s physical spaces as installation-based artworks. I conceive of the work I am doing with the INCUBATOR Art Lab research group and the communities we interact with as a durational social practice artwork. Paperwork, meetings with administrators, grant applications —all of it, I imagine as a grand performance. I choose to perform these duties with joy, creativity, humor, and love.

A significant component of my art practice evokes whimsy and the ridiculous as a propositional strategy for engaging non-specialist audiences in complex discussions about evolving biotechnologies. Whimsy helps to break down barriers, startle our daily performed tasks, and breed an openness to new ideas and new interactions. Working with joy, pleasure, love, fun, and friendship as a research methodology undermines capitalist, patriarchal, colonial models for perpetuating laboratory research practices, postsecondary education, and contemporary art production. The administrative activities I have outlined in this document have become a central component of my research and my artistic practice. I can feel these skills and actions inscribing themselves into my creative work, my thought processes, and inscribing my body with the logic of institutional systems. I can feel myself transforming into a bureaucrat. To counter the calcification of an unruly artist within a regimented framework, I relentlessly pursue fun as a strategy to remediate the effects of performing hundreds of hours of tedious tasks. Additionally, it is more fun for us to work this way. From my perspective, if we are going to dedicate the majority of our waking hours to institutional undertakings, we might as well find pleasure in those activities.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the INCUBATOR Art Lab team members that contributed to this ongoing research: Kadila Adili, Angela Awada, Ashley Hemmings, Domenica Mediati, Hadia Nadeem, Nate Talbot, Aleeza Tariq, Jude Abu Zaineh, Billie Mclaughlin, Philip Habashy, Gillian Hughes, Lisha Lang, Michael Lucenkiw, Lauren Rapp, Justin Elliott, and Hayden Freker. I wish to acknowledge the non-human organisms living and working in the lab right now including a large colony of spirulina algae and 42 petri dishes of GMO E. coli on agar. Thank you to the School of Creative Arts and the University of Windsor for supporting INCUBATOR Art Lab activities since 2009. And a big thank you to our funders including, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chair Program, and The Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

References

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Canadian Human Rights Commission. 2019. “2019 Addendum to the 2006 Canadian Human Rights Settlement Agreement.” May 16, 2019. https://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/equity-equite/2019_addendum-eng.aspx.

Eastern Edge Gallery. n.d. “Eastern Edge Code of Conduct.” Accessed May 6, 2021. https://easternedge.ca/about/eastern-edge-code-of-conduct/.

———. n.d. “Safer Spaces Policy.” Accessed May 6, 2021. https://easternedge.ca/about/accessibility/.

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hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

INCUBATOR Art Lab. n.d. Accessed May 6, 2021. https://incubatorartlab.com/.  

Jahren, Hope. 2016. Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science, and Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1983. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.

Kong, David. “Global Community Bio Summit Code of Conduct (2020).” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkib656c8VcVZ3WH4tlM1F-BU_XV6m9FbHmDolyix_M/edit#.

Roy, Deboleena. 2018. Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Willet, Jennifer. Forthcoming. “Feasting the Lab and Other Projects: Art and Science that Skirts the Limits of Institutional Frameworks.” In the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Star Rodgers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone. Abingdon: Routledge.

Author Bio

Jennifer Willet is an artist and a Canada Research Chair in Art, Science, and Ecology and a Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor (Canada). She is the Director of INCUBATOR Art Lab, the first bioart laboratory in Canada founded in 2009.