Designing Blended Modes of Knowledge Production Inside the “Real-World” of Biosphere 2, 1991-1994

• In Event: Real-World Experiments for Knowledge Production

Abstract

This paper unpacks tensions and revelations inherent in Biosphere 2’s [B2’s] blended modes of knowledge production as a designed ‘human experiment.’ During the enclosure missions from 1991 – 1994, B2 operated as a “real-world experiment’ from within an artificially constructed, materially closed, synthetic ecosystem. Performed by eight Biospherians and approximately 3,500 other species from within B2’s stainless-steel and glass envelope, and ‘managed’ by over a hundred scientists, technicians, philosophers, and storytellers outside, B2 not only functioned as a materialized-imaginary of epic proportions, but simultaneously as an evolving ecology, a life-support system, and an apparatus of quantification that produced millions of data points. As the flagship experiment of the emerging and radical science of Biospherics, B2’s struggle for validation among practitioners of ‘normal’ sciences, circa 1990, is examined. Additionally, the ‘body’ of B2 is analyzed as a laboratory space of inhabitation and ecosystem service production, producing a range of quantitative, qualitative, applied, and surprise knowledges. Finally, the enclosure missions are positioned within trajectories of ‘self-experimental societies.’ Ultimately, B2’s ‘human experiment’ pushes laboratory studies into a novel and entangled terrain of knowledge work, contingent upon an intentionally structured culture that constructed relationships between apparatus, environments, and bodies, guided by a specific intellectual-ethical ethos. These non-normal scientific practices, in combination with a specific set of economic and political circumstances, proved devastating to the legitimization of the B2 enclosure experiments. Nonetheless, this paper posits that their co-produced ‘alternate earth’ contains insights into our accelerating life in the Anthropocene, on Biosphere 1.

Author

• Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo