Lab-From-A-Chip Speakers notes go here.

"A lab-on-a-chip is a device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit of only millimeters to a few square centimeters to achieve automation and high-throughput screening." _{via Wikipedia}

What am I trying to do? Pass round the foldscope, checkout LabFromAChip

Features

• Hard silicon timer chips, the logical oscillating workhorses that make the world tick!
• Stretchy see-through silicon polymers!
• Lithium!
• Model Organisms, Biology’s non-human collaborators!
• Leeuwenhoek Microscopes made of paper with lenses ground in China on a tape reel just like electronic components!
• The redundant media of Vinyl records!
• Diodes!
• Feminist technoscience!
• Critters that move like animals but eat like plants!
• Making moulds from the capitalist ruins!

World-to-Chip DIY

Bridging The World-To-Chip Barrier

“Microfluidic devices are an enabling technology for many labs, facilitating a wide range of applications spanning high-throughput encapsulation, molecular separations, and long-term cell culture. In many cases, however, their utility is limited by a ‘world-to-chip’ barrier that makes it difficult to serially interface samples with these devices.”

_{(Longwell, Scott A, and Fordyce, Polly M. 2019. micrIO: an open-source autosampler and fraction collector for automated microfluidic input–output London Royal Society of Chemistry)}

...outside of the “secluded research” (Callon et al. 2009) of the lab: what that entails and what that might mean.

Make a series of tasks/goals/motives/activity to 'tune in' & 'unpack' lab-on-a-chip technology 💬

Exploring by doing; "re-empracticing science". Use 'domestic' surplus as lab; 'research in the wild/kitchen'

Bring electronics and living things together to talk about the pesky 'externalities' of technology

As an artist I tacitly & intuitively facilitate activity (making, talking, playing) that explore ideas and practices. STS has made me notice differently

I think I'm using STS theory and method to build up a 'theoretical repertoire' 📚

"ANT is not a theory. It offers no causal explanations and no consistent method. It rather takes the form of a repertoire...The point is not to fight until a single pattern holds, but to add on ever more layers, and enrich the repertoire. One might say that...researchers involved in ANT are amateurs of reality. Their theoretical repertoires allow them to attune themselves to the world, to learn to be affected by it” (Mol, A. 2010)

What's in the repertoire?

• Infinity of Traces/Implosions/Github
• ANT & Case studies
• Imaginaries
• Configurations
• Hybrid Forums

An infinity of Traces:
"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory."
Antonio Gramsci - Quaderni del carcere / The Prison Notebooks

Harraway and Dumit, Implosion Projects:
"Objects like the fetus, chip/computer, gene,...is a recent construct...(this) does not mean to be unreal or made up... Out of Each of these nodes or stem cells, sticky threads lead to every nook and cranny of the world. Which threads to follow is an analytical, imaginative, physical, and political choice. "

Always be Inventorizing:

Github culture's verbose documentation in DoESLiverpool is, for me and my practice a form of inventorizing of traces and implosions; the key to critical making identities

Lab On A Chip Imaginaries ⚗️ 💻

• Scalable distributable labs that work ‘on their own’
• Disrupting the field of bio and chemical manufacturing
• Intelligent, and automated
• Can work ‘anywhere’, small but powerful
• New biological computers
• Makes bio-tech super mobile and 'easy'
• ‘revolutionary’ access to industry, bio-prospecting
• It has all the intersections of biology, engineering, well meaning utility and agency for frugal science in ‘intractable’ places
• Realise the genetics-to-order shop scenes of science fiction like Bladerunner etc.

Discussions 💬

• Wait labs need people to fiddle around and do labor don't they?
• Should we always be disrupting & scaling-as-usual?
• They are no more intelligent than algorithms: we all know they are not automatic and encode human values (or not)
• You need the social and economic capital to get them going and keep them running. Bigger things required are hidden...
• They are computing...sort of. Are they thinking or just doing accounting
• Not that easy...
• One persons access is another's exclusion
• We've heard this before...
• Well meaning agency can lead to colonial extraction...

Realising scifi dreams

Configurations
"In the case of technology, configuration orients us to the entanglement of imaginaries and artefacts that comprise technological projects...configuration as a method assemblage aims to articulate method in a way that opens received and/or congealed relations to being re-enacted differently" (Suchman, L. 2012)

Re-enacting differently

Handheld version

SourdoughBreadBoy

Got repertoire, got workshop, time to unpack... 💬

Unpacking 💬

• "Staying with the trouble" using things already-dug-out-of-the-ground: surplus electronics and vinyl records rather than expensive photo-lithographic structures
• Exposing supply chains and histories of the day to day materials used in microbiology and electronic practice
• The kit is a boundary object for critical approaches to bio-technology with science students and scientists

💬

• Why put algae in electronics? Why bring up annoying externalities excluded from manufacturing?
• Using well known integrated circuits attracts technologists: It starts conversations and hybrid forums
• You need to make a million of them before people can afford to access them… etc
• How do we protect rivers and communities from the market imperative to make 555 timers for £0.30?
• A 'good' chip and a model organism needs to be isolated from the world to be obedient modest witnesses...
• What more complex microbiomes could future chips host?

What's the difference between Metafluidics here and Metafluidics there?

"Not to show that my history is better than yours, my history is worse than yours, I'm the victim and you're somebody who has oppressed people and so on, but rather to understand my history in terms of other peoples history, in other words to try and understand... to move beyond, to generalize, one's own experience to the experience of others. I think...the great.. goal is in fact to become someone else, to transform (one)self from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without supressing the difference." Edward Said