Arctic ice is melting quicker than previously predicted (Harvey 2023). In addition to the threat of sea-level rise, climate change promotes the reemergence of ancient viruses and the spread of novel or mutated viruses through new and existing vectors (Traavik 2014). Following the COVID-19 pandemic, The Guardian, describing a scientific study about viral spillover in the Arctic, proclaimed that the “next pandemic may come from melting glaciers” (Geddes 2022). Now, biological scientists are flocking to discover and study long-forgotten extremophiles, microbes either trapped or living in Arctic ice and the past and present ecologies that house them (Salazar 2017).
Bioartists, who use biological materials and methods to query the very notion of life, have recently been doing fieldwork in the Arctic alongside these scientists. Two ontological zones are divided between those who describe the world as it is (scientists) and those who socially construct the world through representations (artists) (Latour 1993). Yet bioartists have unearthed new ways of seeing the science, not only as representation but also as discovery. For instance, the bioartist Joel Ong (2023) repurposed a genetically modified microbe, P. syringae, originally used to create artificial snow (Snowmax), to generate ice and clouds in a terrarium. What if this approach could be scaled up to replace inorganic compounds, like sulfuric acid, in geoengineering projects to mitigate solar radiation and offset climate change?
The dialogue works both ways: chemists are examining the skies in famous paintings to understand the historical dispersal of atmospheric particles that block sunlight after major volcanic eruptions (European Geoscience Union 2014). At times, bioartists and scientists collaborate. Bioartist Joe Davis and molecular biologist Dana Boyd encoded E. coli DNA with a binary representation of the rune for the Germanic goddess of life and earth as an interstellar message mirroring the plaque on the Pioneer 10 Spacecraft launched in 1972 (Rosell 2017).
My ethnographical examination of the fieldwork practices of scientists and bioartists working in the Arctic asks the following questions: 1) To what extent are these different forms of knowledge production enabling breakthroughs? How do scientific methods elucidate microbes, and how are bioartists using them to make microbes productive rather than dangerous? What practices and ways of seeing contribute to these breakthroughs? 2) How do those perspectives create productive tensions? Do scientists believe that bioartists see something they themselves are unable to see? How have they processed that?
In developing a model bridging these two distinct epistemologies, the project will explore the implications for projects addressing anthropogenic climate change. It will shift attention away from observing microbes to working with microbes.
