Alessandro Delfanti / Interview |
T|G[s] Installment #1: DIY BIO/TECHNOLOGY-inc. GENETIC REIFICATION PRIVATE APPROPRIATION ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION |
Over all, the now enriched and reinforced biotechnologic complex took the lead role as 'the promising life science', mining the numerous/mutative meanings of ≤life≥ into new legal, ethical, commercial and geopolitical grounds. Is not surprise that inside the wide gamut of specialization in life sciences, biotechnology fullfilled the qualities to become a convenient stock market profile discipline, due to its power to potenciate cheap costs of production, speculative profiling based on microscopic logics, the full + limitless manipulation of living organisms, government control, entreprenurial investing, unavoidable genocentrisms, pharmaceutical targeting, etc.
Inside the broader spectrum in which biotechnology is unfolded, consumed and validated, Alessandro Delfanti's research takes a deep understanding of how biology and its extended knowledge is distributed and redesigned outside the approved spaces traditionally destined to be applied.
T|G[s] had an interview with Delfanti in 2014 to talk about a prophetic dialogue he had with Steve Kurtz (founder member of Critical Art Ensemble), biohacking, amateur biology/DIYbio, privatization of genetic material/wetware, pharmaceutical/data surveillance, hacker cultures, biocapitalism, new strategies in the use of scientific information and many other subjects developed widely in his book Biohackers. The politics of open science.
What impression leaves you this diagnosis conversed four years ago in relation to the current situation of politics in life sciences?
■▀ Alessandro Delfanti: I believe that those ideas were well timed and captured the transition of biotechnology towards today's model, embodied by synthetic biology and rooted in a culture of entrepreneurialism which values distributed innovation and production as a change towards a neoliberal biomedical sector. Kurtz was signaling that the use of DIY approaches to biotech as a form of critique of the industry was being replaced by forms of DIY biology that are integral to neoliberalism. Indeed, especially in the US several DIY communities and groups have strong links with the world of startups and venture capital.
|
■"GenTerra" (2001-03), Critical Art Ensemble and Beatriz da Costa." Performed at the Natural History Museum, London; Gallery Oldham, Manchester; St. Norbert Art & Cultural Center, Winnipeg, and Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble. GenTerra was a live exploration of the variety of discourses on transgenics in relation to environmental risk and human health policy. Participants manipulated transgenic bacteria in an effort to develop a more nuanced understanding of risk assessment regarding the uses of recombinant DNA." | The Arts Catalyst© 2002 |
How these technologies are applied in the production of scientific knowledge in the field of Open Science and Peer-to-Peer dynamics?
▀ TEXT/S
■ BIOHACKERS: THE POLITICS OF OPEN SCIENCE
![]() ■ Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science ■
"Biohackers explores fundamental changes occuring in the circulation and ownership of scientific information. Alessandro Delfanti argues that the combination of the ethos of 20th century science, the hacker movement and the free software movement is producing an open science culture which redefines the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and commercial companies. Biohackers looks at the emergence of the citizen biology community ‘DIYbio’, the shift to open access by the American biologist Craig Venter and the rebellion of the Italian virologist Ilaria Capua against WHO data-sharing policies. Delfanti argues that these biologists and many others are involved in a transformation of both life sciences and information systems, using open access tools and claiming independence from both academic and corporate institutions."
Publisher: Pluto Press | 2013
|
■HACKING GENOMES. THE ETHICS OF OPEN AND REBEL BIOLOGY
Publisher: International Review of Information Ethics © by IRIE – all rights reserved www.i-r-i-e.net ISSN 1614-1687 |
|
■▀ AD: I believe that hacker cultures have been contaminating scientific cultures and are now part of them. Hacking is a very broad and diverse set of subcultures, but characteristics such as openness, distributed innovation or distrust for institutions are sort of cultural and rhetorical tools that some scientists are playing in the public sphere in order to re-position themselves in the world of contemporary science and in relation to the market. As it happens in hardware and software development, hacker politics can be ambivalent and support both oppositional practices directed towards goals of collective liberation, and the disruption of old monopolies in order to open new markets. Biocapitalism is interested in hacking because it is one of the fuels of digital capitalism.
|
▀▊"Open Science is sort of an umbrella term of course, because it can include different practices, social groups and phenomena... for example i would include alternative licenses for distributing scientific information and knowledge, open source of scientific data, open access to scientific scholarly publications, new forms of cooperation enacted through the internet, and new forms of inclusion straight of citizens in the scientific enterprise" - Alessandro Delfanti |
❝...CORPORATE AND ACADEMIC ACTORS HAD A FOUNDATIONAL ROLE IN THE EMERGENCE OF TODAY'S DIY BIOLOGY. I BELIEVE THIS IS A COEVOLUTION, AND THE RESULT IS THAT DIY AND OPEN BIOLOGY ARE RE-MORALIZING BIOTECH [...] SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY IS A PROJECT OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL RE-POSITIONING OF AN INDUSTRY THAT WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE BAD IMAGE ASSOCIATED WITH PATENTS ON LIFE, MONSANTO'S MONOPOLY ETC. ❞ |
▀■ TG: In Is do-it-yourself Biology being co-opted by institutions?, you analyze the revolutionary value of biology according to their alliances and codependency with government and state agencies, as well as three major areas: scientific institutions, market and the state. Is there a real project of emancipation within movements derived from DIYbio? What is the effectiveness of these intentions? Are the contributions of DIYbio a real change in the democratization of knowledge? |
|
▀■ TG: Are there chances to know if Open Science is having a proto-institutionalization process, or is a movement that is committed to the resistance to the privatization of commons?
|
■▀ AD: I would tend not to collapse open science in a single entity, as several different actors and practices are involved. That said, if by 'open' we mean the problem of property and the role of open source in biology: yes, open science resists older forms of accumulation based on information privatization through intellectual property rights. Yet if we focus on licenses we miss out the emergence of new forms of appropriation which are based on computational power, service providing, organization of online platforms for data sharing and the like. These are just different forms of private profit that rely on a more dynamic but probably not less exploitative mode of accumulation.
|
CREDITS |
|
|
ALESSANDRO DELFANTI (IT):
ASSITANT PROFESSOR OF CULTURE AND NEW MEDIA, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO WITH APPOINTMENTS AT THE INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION, CULTURE, INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY AND THE FACULTY OF INFORMATION. IN THE PAST HE HAS WORKED AND TAUGHT AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS, MCGILL UNIVERSITY AND UNIVERSITY OF MILAN (AND VISITED OR STUDIED AT SISSA, UCLA AND EDINBURGH). HE ALSO HAS A DOCTOR DEGREE ON VETERINARY MEDICINE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF PARMA. HIS RESEARCH IS FOCUSED AT THE INTERSECTION OF DIGITAL CULTURES, SCIENCE COMMUNICATION AND SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES. AS A JOURNALIST HE WRITES ABOUT SCIENCE POLITICS AND DIGITAL CULTURES FOR SEVERAL ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. |
PHOTOGRAPHY + IMAGE
|
|
|
|
|
VIDEO
|
|
- GENTERRA (2001-03), CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE & BEATRIZ DA COSTA | THE ARTS CATALYST© 2002
- BIOHACKERS: THE POLITICS OF OPEN SCIENCE (EXCERPT) | SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY© 2014
BIBLIOGRAPHY
|
|
|
|
|
▀■^THIS INTERVIEW WOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE CONSTANT COMMUNICATION, HELP AND WILLINGNESS OF ALESSANDRO DELFANTI
2018 |