Nathalie Wind Soelmark PhD dissertation University of Southern Denmark Department for the Study of Culture Academic Advisor: Charlotte Kroløkke 31/10 - 2014 Relational (Trans)formations On the aesthetics of mediated experiences with infertility and assisted reproduction in Video blogs, TV and film documentaries, and installation art Content Acknowledgements i Dissertation summary Introduction 1 I. (Digital) Atmospheres and migratory aesthetics 13 II. Biotechnology 47 III. Aesthetics 68 Conclusion 99 References 107 List of material collection 112 Articles Article 1. “Experiences of Assisted Reproduction in Video Blogs: On the Aesthetic-Affective Dimension of Individual Fertility Projects on YouTube” 116 Article 2. “Atmospheric Video Blogs on Infertility” 127 Article 3. “Relational (Trans)formations. The Matter of Kinship in Technostorks (2006) and The Baby Clinic (2012)” 141 Article 4. “Atmospheres of belonging. The Aesthetic Qualities of the Japanese Installation “wasted” on (in)Fertility and American Video blogs (vlogs) about IVF on YouTube” 161 Abstract in Danish 177 Abstract in English 181 On the cover: Framegrab from LucidIVF - IVF 14-Our Experience~ Embryo Transfer, 2009 Acknowledgements This dissertation is part of the research project “(Trans)formations of Kinship: Travelling in Search of Relatedness” (KinTra), funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research 2011-2014. A very special thanks goes to my supervisor and head of KinTra Associate Professor Charlotte Kroløkke for three challenging years, for taking a chance in letting me follow the aesthetic-affective dimension of mediated experiences of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, and not least for standing by me despite our differences. I also thank her for her support during a critical time without which I would not have crossed the finish line. Many thanks also goes to my KinTra colleagues: PhD Katherine Harrison, Assistant professor Stine Adrian, Assistant Professor Lene Myong, Associate Professor Karen Hvidtfeldt-Madsen, and Professor Tine Tjørnhøj Thomsen for sharing their insights and experiences regarding research on infertility and reproductive technology, as well as complexities and dynamics of kinship practices. A special thank you goes to PhD Katherine Harrison whose encouragement and act as devil’s advocate in the early stages of the project have been greatly appreciated. I am also very grateful to her for making my stay in Linköping as well as my stay in London such lovely experiences. I also thank Professor Anne Scott Sørensen for taking time in her busy schedule to read my articles and project description, and for her thoughtful perspectives helping me clarify the importance of the aesthetic dimension of this project as well as point to fruitful improvements. I also want to express my appreciation to Professor Ole Martin Høystad for his encouragement along the way. I thank Professor Margrit Shildrick for letting me attend her PhD course Body, theory and its medical, technical, and cultural aspects, and to the PhD students at Tema Genus, Linköping University for letting me use their offices and allow me to sit in on their very exiting presentations of their projects, thoughts, and readings of themes so very different from my own project. I would like to express my appreciation to the people at the Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University for their kindness and open-mindedness reflected in their response to my project and talk during a stay autumn 2012. I am also very grateful for the interesting conversations about media, performance, and aesthetics that I had with Professor Johannes Birringer during my stay. Very special thanks goes to Professor Susan Broadhurst whose insight into aesthetics and digital media has been invaluable for the scope of this dissertation. I am grateful to her for taking the time to discuss with me the relevance of aesthetics in relation to media and i biotechnology, and for attending the seminar at SDU on Performance and Aesthetics, 2013 with a very exiting presentation of her work on neuro-aesthetics. I greatly appreciate her encouragements and for seeing the value of my work. Tom and Sonia Bowen-Perkins made my stay in London unforgettable. I got to stay with strangers, but not for long as they, together with the hospitality of their friends as well as their family, made me feel at home. I am forever grateful to them for making the months away from my own family such a lovely experience. I have been blessed with very inspiring fellow PhD students that are due for a special thank you. Thanks goes to PhD Mette Abilgaard for inspiring conversations about phenomenology and technology while commuting. A big thank you goes to PhD Anne Klara Bom for attending the conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies in Paris with me, for always taking time out of her busy schedule to listen and share life experiences with me. Also thanks to my PhD student colleague Maja Klausen, a late but lovely acquaintance, for reminding me what matters and for commutes - just so much more fun when shared. I presented my project at the conference Critical Themes in Media Studies 2013 at The New School, NY as part of the panel Transhuman Becomings, and want to thank respondent Peter Asaro for his thought provoking question on the significance of the aesthetic dimension of biotechnology. I also want to thank the editors of Body, Space and Technology, the editors of the volume on Structures of Feelings in Concepts in the Study of Culture, and the editors of Critical Kinship Studies: Kinship (Trans) Formed for the opportunity to present my work. In particular I want to thank the many blind reviewers of my articles for their suggestions and comments on my early versions of the articles. More than grateful however am I to my friends Tine Lee Hansen, Lotte Buch Segal, Maj Kalfod, Marie Melson, Stine Ryyd, and Anne Marie Jensen who endured my absence of mind as well as more than occasional physical lack of presence the last three years. A special thanks goes to PhD Lotte Buch Segal for her friendship, insights on teaching, writing, and theoretical scopes, for being a pit-bull and for never letting me go. A very special thank you also goes to my sister Sarah W. Christiansen for joining me in London and New York, for the endless hours of listening to presentations and thoughts, and days of joined study in Vanløse. I also thank Morten Jensen, Søren Jensen, and Martin S. Iversen for their friendship, and their technical assistance along the way. My brother Rune W. Christiansen took it upon him to assist me technically in putting the dissertation together at the end, a help greatly appreciated. ii I am not least grateful to my family and my family-in-law for encouragements, for their belief in me, and for their much appreciated help underway that cleared the path for intensive work periods. Two extraordinary people travelled with me all the way: my husband Martin and my son Luka. I am so very grateful to them both for keeping me (in)sane and real, and for their love. iii Introduction The picture above is a video still from a video blog (vlog) that, along with other objects, people, and environments, has been central for this dissertation. It shows a meatloaf, which is what, the context of the vlog reveals, someone’s buttocks looks like after countless injections related to the fertility treatment of in vitro fertilization (IVF). It is a telling illustration of the creative and usually unseen aspects of what comes to matter in kinship practices involving assisted reproductive technologies (ART) presented in an array of media. This dissertation explores the significance of these aspects in mediations of experiences with infertility and ART in vlogs, TV and film documentaries, and installation art. The mediations investigated by this study all to a degree take issue with biotechnology and biomedicine—more specifically ART—and a main argument of the dissertation is that a retheorization of aesthetics is needed in order to address media and art’s ability to make what usually goes unacknowledged visible, audible, and felt. The articles, albeit differently, discuss the relevance of this perspective in relation to media studies, kinship studies, and cultural studies. The dissertation is part of the Danish collective research project “Transformations of Kinship. Travelling in Search for Relatedness” (KinTra), which, for a three-year period (2011–2014), set out to investigate the social meaning and imagining of kinship as they travel through, among others, new media. The research of KinTra centers partly on the staging of the making of kinship and the importance of new media and social network sites for communicating between different stakeholders as well as creating new sites for expressing and negotiating relatedness. This PhD thesis, “Relational Transformations. On the Aesthetics of Mediated Experiences with Infertility and Assisted Reproduction in Digital Media Practices and Installation Art,” reflects this interest in the relationship between bio and media 1 technology, body, and kinship. More specifically, the topic of this thesis, as the subtitle reads, is mediated experiences with infertility and ART. I have chosen to approach this topic by focusing on four material collections that included contemporary film and TV documentaries, video blogs on YouTube, and installation art. American Andrei Kirilenko’s Technostorks from 2006 features three couples undergoing a cycle of IVF, while the Danish TV documentary series The Baby Clinic, which aired in 2012, follows six couples undergoing fertility treatments. The American video blog Lucid IVF by Silvia and Peter contains user- generated, -populated, and -distributed videos (2009–ongoing) featuring their own experiences with infertility and assisted reproduction. Japanese Tomoko Mukaiyama’s wasted from 2009 is an art installation and hence not a digital media production. It features, however, the Dutch documentary film Water Children (2011) by Aliona van der Horst and in this sense is a cogent example of how experiences with (in)fertility and ART travel into media and what this expression is imagined to give appearance to, make experiential, and (trans)form.