POSTGENOMIC WITNESSES

Abstract

In 2013, Gail Davies and Helen Scalway launched Micespace.org, an interactive web-based art and research project that uses the platform of a mock mouse model repository to visualize the complex spatial and digital networks of the postgenomic sciences. The website creates an immersive experience of the process of researching and purchasing a mouse model from a genetics repository – one can tour laboratory plans, browse stock and purchase mice, or review genetic security protocol. Functioning as a mock-mutant mouse repository, Micespace.org disrupts narratives of transgenic mice as uncontested scientific objects that bear and bear witness to human disease. Micespace.org uses speculative visualization to allow us to witness the institutional spaces of the postgenomics laboratory where the bodies of mice are transformed from biological beings into scientific data, from animals to scientific objects. In this paper, I suggest that Micespace.org satirizes contemporary forms of bioscientific witnessing and testimony that are built into the apparati of postgenomic consortiums – where massive amounts of data are collected to construct and disseminate animal bodies that can more completely model the human biological system. However, mice have their own genetic make-up that is just as complicated as humans. This means that the genetic similarity that scientists cultivate within transgenic mice through gene splicing, knocking, and immune manipulation, is never complete and what we are left with are genetically fragmented creatures that bear witness to the contradictory relationship between humans, animals, and the genetic science. This paper has two central arguments. First, the website exposes the epistemological processes involved in making mice into models of human bodies that support narratives of bodily similarity between humans and mice to sell them as model organisms. Second, to better understand how the mutant mouse repository functions, I conceptualize it as an archive of forced bodily similarity, to grasp the immensity of the project to make mice as close as possible to us. The enduring questions that guide this paper are how do we bear witness to mutant mice in repositories and how can we comprehend mice themselves as witnesses to this endeavor?