There is a feeling I have sometimes
Something about the unfurling of the universe.
About entropy – family – fraternity – vitalism — biophilia – love.
I have ‘the feeling’ in the Louvre wandering rooms filled with medieval relics and paintings. I have it watching our girls tip their toes in and out of the water on the shores of Lake Huron. I have it often when I am making art. A feeling like I am exactly where I belong. Like I am an insignificant ant in a cosmic colony. In the lab and in the garden while tending to plants, algae, cells, microbes.
The feeling is probably love. But not the kind of love we see in Hollywood films or read about in romance novels. I mean an awesome sensation of love for oneself and all other living beings hurtling through the universe on our shared spaceship earth
I am talking about the kind of love that acknowledges suffering and pain and death as essential aspects of every life cycle. I am talking about a joyous and melancholic kind of love that knows the lover too will die; and all of humanity will also one day end; and our sun will eventually expand into a Red Giant and vaporize all evidence of our Earth.
It is with this feeling — I often think biotechnology might be a technology of love… [1]
As an artist, I have been working creatively with biotechnology for almost 20 years.
Though I have no formal scientific training, I have studied biotech theoretically and through hands-on research at various labs and hospitals around the world. I have worked with many living organisms, including mammalian cell lines, GMO bacteria, algae, fungi, plants, animals, and other humans.
Over the years, I have experienced a biological and sensorial reciprocity in collaborating with other lifeforms, like experiences we all might have while cooking, caring for a pet, or gardening. It has occurred to me through these interactions that biotechnology could be reimagined as a technology of love. Love across species, for human communities, technophilia, and possibly even love experienced by nonhumans. For a long while, I kept this idea to myself. It seemed unprofessional and overly sentimental to dwell on love in biotech research circles.
But since I, myself, reproduced in 2015, my perspective has changed. My commitment to this idea has deepened. I gave birth to premature twins who required intense medical care at the beginning of their lives. While in the hospital with our girls, I had a strange feeling that I was experiencing something like what organisms in my lab might experience. I was poked and prodded, and milked, and instructed in how to hold, touch, and speak to our fragile daughters. All the while, I experienced an overwhelming sense of trauma, and an earth-shattering kind of love.
It is something you cannot understand until you undergo it yourself—the ecstatic commitment and near death sacrifice a living organism undergoes during reproduction. When I look at scientific diagrams of cell mitosis, these images often attempt to communicate the energetic chemical reactions required for reproduction with radiating lines. They remind me of the radiating halos of saints in early religious iconography. These representational traditions combined with a visceral, abject, near-death experience, while living and breathing in a highly institutionalized environment, is how I would describe my experience of bringing new life into the world.
Accordingly, I wonder if the lifeforms that reproduce in my lab undergo similar biological traumas, vulnerabilities, and ecstatic highs. Maybe even love? This experience has changed how I think about the organisms I interact with in my lab, what I ask them to do, and for what purpose.
In the years since, my partner and I have cared for our daughters through various medical interventions, managing their physical and emotional needs, hygiene, and education, all the while knowing that if we do this correctly, they will leave us, and we will all eventually die. Raising children has exposed me to a complicated form of non-romantic, not idealized love that acknowledges boredom, suffering, pain, and even death. This love is a challenging and intentional form of committed labor performed over long periods of time with moments of joy and euphoria. Parallels might be drawn between the durational love and commitment it takes to raise children and the durational love and commitment it takes to build a laboratory.
In 2009, I opened INCUBATOR Art Lab, a creative biotech space, at the University of Windsor in Canada. Over the years I have experimented with various strategies for running a lab on the premise that biotech is a technology of love, a type of love that acknowledges and savors the feeling but is practiced every day as a durational commitment—a responsibility. This proposition relies heavily on notions of biophilia [2, 3] and kinship [4, 5] to describe forms of interspecies love and reciprocity in a biotech lab. I also look to bell hooks, who describes human love as a transformational force for social justice. 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” [6]. Perpetuating biotech as a technology of love is a social and political act, a feminist and postcolonial reimagining of scientific methodology. The work of my lab is not solely rooted in research outputs, but also in reimagining what a lab is, who belongs, and what kinds of knowledge and activities are celebrated.
A large part of propagating love in laboratory practices is in how I interact with nonhuman lab organisms. For several years, I took lab specimens (bacteria, plants, algae, protozoa) on ‘vacations’ to ecological environments outside of the lab, including hiking and camping in Banff National Park (2009-11), hunting on the land with the University of Manitoba Pangnirtung Summer School (2013), and sailing on a tall ship with the Arctic Circle residency (2014). Methodologically, I began to reimagine my projects in the lab as interspecies collaborations rather than the manipulation of organisms into producing predetermined outcomes. I learned to first ask my nonhuman collaborators, “What do you like to do? What are you good at? What do you resist? What harms you?” and allow the answers to those questions to set the parameters for new projects.
In 2018, INCUBATOR Art Lab opened a new biosafety level 2 lab that supports mixed use research and creation in molecular biology, microbiology, microscopy, and plant and mammalian tissue culture. INCUBATOR Art Lab is designed to function as a state-of-the-art biotech laboratory, but also as an art installation, a community hub, and multimedia performing arts venue. The lab is beautiful, a little breathtaking, actually. It is welcoming, with high ceilings, exposed brick, and a crystal chandelier that hangs in the center of the room. It is a transformative technological, cultural, and ecological site that escapes one’s expectations. It reflects the durational love and commitment I have for the humans and nonhuman organisms that make up our research group. The lab has floor-to-ceiling glass windows opening to the main atrium of the School of Creative Arts, modeled after department store windows, shoebox dioramas, and food television sets. We are fitting the space with multimedia and AV equipment, including theatrical lighting, sound, video recording, and projection capabilities to support performances for live and virtual audiences. I write a lot more about the lab in another version of this article in the Cumulus Association Conference Proceedings in 2021 (to be released in April).
The girls are turning seven next month. They are no longer babies or even small children. They are more like astonishingly large poodles who want to be carried up the stairs at night. Seven years is the usual duration of a creative arc for me. This process starts from an inkling in my mind and grows over time into a fully researched, standalone project. I am now starting to make artworks that were conceived after I became a mother. The first is an installation that is also a functioning laboratory called Ovarium—a technical and cultural space, an organ, that gestates and gives birth to bioart, biodesign, and biotech innovations.
As I build these creative environments, my team and I are experimenting with developing kinder, more joyful, less hierarchical methods for managing a research lab. It is a delightful, hilarious, messy, and stressful work-in-progress—a durational time intensive commitment to improve the circumstances we all work under. My hope is that we can learn to care for ourselves and the organisms in the lab as we care for our children—with love.
[1] Willet, Jennifer. “Gratitude Offering to the Organisms.” Performed at the MIT Biosummit, Oct 10, 2020.
[2] Wilson, Edward. Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
[3] Suzuki, David. The Legacy: An Elders Vision for our Sustainable Future. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2010.
[4] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
[5] Haraway, Donna. “Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene.” Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.
[6] hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.
Cite This Essay
Willet, Jennifer. “Biotechnology is a Technology of Love.” Biodesigned: Issue 10, 28 February, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].