Recipes for Technoutopia: On Hospitality, Hope and Infrastructure as Experimental Performance

• In Event: Shaping the Art/Science Field: A Preview of the Handbook for Art, Science & Technology Studies - I

Abstract

This talk exposes the productive power of interrogating infrastructure and its breakdown through experimental performance, drawing from a radical interactive brunch held at the 4S 2017 conference. Through a performance of hospitality, as a corollary to the inclusive open charge of modern scientific infrastructures, we find salient embodied, visceral, immediate and unavoidable realities of infrastructure, where even infrastructures built with the most inclusive of aims, can be undone. While consuming a home-cooked meal around a dressed table, guests explored the entanglements of science, the possibility of inclusion, and the violences of overt discrimination and unconscious bias, and attempted to integrate more sensitivity (and possibly hospitality) to a range of bodies, senses, desires, and self-conceptions at the table. Often subtly connecting to longstanding concerns of STS and feminist technoscience, guests of the brunch interrogated the labor, ethics and promises of infrastructure development as inextricably bound to the dynamics of gender, colonialism, autonomy and sovereignty; articulating the ways in which design can be both hospitable and hostile. Deeply rooted in both metaphor and empirical example, performance art becomes a means of investigating the very present and often difficult-to-confront ethical realities that challenge the intersection of inclusion, local circumstance and the hopes of infrastructure for future-building.

Author

• Stephanie Beth Steinhardt, Michigan State University