ABSTRACT
Working as an artist in scientific laboratories means that I rely highly on institutional bureaucracies to support my artwork. As a result, my creative practices are highly regulated and institutionalized. Some of my most significant achievements as an artist and researcher in the bioart field are bureaucratic ones. Performances and text documents that are only ever read or seen by very small audiences – health and safety officers, grant administrators, park wardens, and ethics review boards. These administrative activities have become a central component of my artistic practice. I can feel these skills and actions inscribing themselves into my creative work, my thought processes, and inscribing my body with the logic of institutional systems. In this chapter, I will chart the reification of an unruly artist as she is transformed by the institutional processes, and she is subject to over fifteen years of working at the intersection of art and science. This trajectory culminates in an artwork where regulatory skirting becomes the subject of the artwork itself. Feasting the Lab (2018) was a cabaret staged in January 2018 in celebration of the opening of the new INCUBATOR bioart lab in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor. For one night only, before the lab was certified, we did everything in the lab that would normally be prohibited in a scientific environment. This project manifests for viewers, the bureaucratic processes, and restrictions of human and non-human interactions in scientific institutional environments, and the extent to which artists can circumnavigate those limits through administrative gymnastic tactics.
