Cosmopolitical Futures: The Anthropocenic Human in the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Space

The title and concerns of this presentation are focused on recent research and artworks exploring the phenomena of Stem Cells in the Regenerative Medicine Space in the context of the Anthropocenic Human. The processes of explanting cells and tissues, transgenic technologies, stem cell tissue engineering in medicine and cloning not only have deep moral and ethical implications for the meaning of human identity, touching on the deepest aspects of human life; genes, individual organisms and whole new species of trans-organisms have become the subject of the philosophy of ecology, science and biology. My talk touches on the key theoretical groundwork of my arts research practice drawn from Bennett, Stengers, Harraway, Braidotti, and Serres that has led towards a deeper commitment to the significance of the work of Karen Barad, Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy and the History of Consciousness at the University of California who provides theorized descriptions of how quantum entanglement, emergence and matter can equally/usefully frame thinking experiments and novel methods of abstraction in art and biology production. Barad's Agential Realism ontology collapses divisions between mind/matter and meaning between the animate/in-animate and the human and non-human. Barad argues that entanglements of time, space, matter and meaning come into existence through simultaneous reconfiguration and intra-action. Barad proposes that agency does not originate in human intention but resides in all of matter, suggesting that matter bears the mark of human agency in ways that release human intention. My paper and presentation aims to contextualize Barad's ideas to explore and question how artists might apply embodied heightened awareness to processes of perception and imagination to produce humanly comprehensible events. The aim is to begin to unfold the question of how research through art in thinking "in-between" categories might usefully present the paradoxical nature of subjectivity, intuition and intentionality to reveal the hidden processes, tacit acts and cuts across the multiple and entangled ethical realities proposed by Barad's reading and interpretation of Bohr's pioneering work