BIOARTS IN SCIENCE-CITYSCAPES ETHNOGRAPHIC FRAGMENTS OF THE NEUROWORLD BIRGIT RUTH BUERGI (M.Phil, Cantab) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPY IN ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2017 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and it has been written by me in its entirety. I have duly acknowledged all the sources of information which have been used in the thesis. This thesis has also not been submitted for any degree in any university previously. ____________________________ Birgit Ruth Buergi First submitted on 13 May 2016 Revised and resubmitted on 2 May 2017 2 In memoriam Zaha Hadid 1950-2016 3 Acknowledgements In January 2012, I joined the Asian Biopoleis: Biotechnology & Biomedicine as Emergent Forms of Life & Practice grant programme as an Asia Research Institute (ARI) Research Scholar. I wish to thank the former director of ARI, Professor Dr Prasenjit Duara, for welcoming me into the community. Funding for the full PhD Scholarship has been provided by The Ministry of Education, Singapore, and the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Division of the Office of the Deputy President (Research and Technology) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Grant Number MOE2009-T2-2-01. The FASS Research Staff Support Scheme funded the two reconnaissance trips of 2012 and 2013, and the FASS Graduate Research Support Scheme has provided funding for a year of fieldwork in Thailand. Travel grants from the Overseas Educational Programmes (OEP), and the Financial Assistance for Conferences for FASS Graduate Research Students scheme, allowed me to participate in overseas symposia, seminars, and workshops in England (Cambridge, Canterbury, London, and Oxford) and Canada (Toronto and Vancouver). The generous support of these institutions, as well as of the Tembusu College Graduate Fellowship, is acknowledged with due thankfulness and gratitude. I renew my thanks to the College Rector, Professor Dr Tommy Koh, the College Master, and Principal Investigator of Asian Biopoleis, Associate Professor Dr Gregory Clancey, and the College community. When the full post-graduate scholarship ended and I was not entitled to work in the host country, friends, and members of St Andrew’s Cathedral (Singapore), supported my living expenses. The generous gifts of Mr Albert and Mrs Esther Lee, Mrs Carol and Mr Martin Riddett, Mrs Rose Thambiah and her husband, Ms Catherine Tholasingam, Mrs Rita Thomas, Mrs Alice Chua, Ms Sarah Yew, and my friend D, have touched me deeply. I thank them infinitely. 4 Collectively, I thank the Chair of the PhD Oral Examination, Associate Professor Dr Daniel Goh Pei Siong, and the external and internal examiners, Professor Dr Ryan Bishop, Dr Annu Jalais, and Dr Mihye Cho, and the three members of the PhD Committee, Associate Professor Dr Eric C. Thompson (Thesis Adviser), Associate Professor Dr Gregory Clancey, and Professor Dr Michael M.J. Fischer for their insightful comments and suggestions for revision. For pushing the study into barely charted terrain and his continual encouragement and engagement with this work, I must thank Mike Fischer separately. I am greatly indebted to him, and to Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, for generously continuing to mentor me from locations both near and far. I want to thank them for their considered guidance, and intellectual and moral support. Our personal encounters have enriched me enormously, and I cannot thank them enough for their contribution to this work. At the University of Toronto, Canada, I thank Professor Dr Zaheer Baber for discussing my initial research plans, and at the University of Cambridge, UK, I thank Dr David Sneath for giving helpful directions on writing up the thesis. Professor Dr Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner at Sussex University has offered generous advice at critical points, and I wish to thank her kindly. For discussing art and science-city architecture in relation to research community building, I am indebted to Mr Lawrence Barth, two US-based architects and lab designers, and a UK-born architect- engineer in Singapore, and his client, a global pharmaceutical company. The Thai- born life scientist at Singapore Biopolis who insisted that her exhibited artwork is unimportant has yet to learn that our first and only meeting decided the course of the proposed research study. I shall tell her. It has been a pleasure to introduce Mike Fischer and Susann Wilkinson, Canay, and Tom Ozden-Schilling from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, to my two main fieldsites in Pathumthani Science City and Bangkok. Their visit to the Thailand Science Park has been greatly appreciated, and 5 their participation in a curatorial meeting has enriched the encounter with the Bangkok-based artists significantly. I thank all participants for their valuable contribution, Bai Cha for her much appreciated assistance, and the RMA Institute, Bangkok, for hosting us. The dedicated commitment, remarkable outspokenness, and directness of the participating artists, together with their patience, originality and imagination in relation to this experimental research must be highlighted and credited separately. For their individual contributions, I would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Max Coppeta, Leo Fernekes, Piyatat Hemmatat, Roslisham Ismail, aka Ise, Jitti Jumnianwai, Prapon Kumjim, Simona Meesayiati, Be Takerng Pattanopas, Subsaeng Sangwachirapiban, Eiji Sumi, and Noraset Vaisayakul. Panatchakorn Prudence Viratmalee, aka Punch, who joined the group exhibition project recently, helped with Thai/English translations in the later part of the fieldwork. I thank her for her research assistance. The Office of Contemporary Art & Culture, Thai Ministry of Culture, has expressed interest in collaborating with the Shadows and Light: Art in the ‘Age of the Brain’ group exhibition. I thank the directorship and the Centre for Contemporary Art and Culture, Bangkok for organizing a meeting to present and discuss the project proposal. The ethnographic inquiry into the cultural pockets, forming a place where art and science meet, started with a handshake and a gift. I thank Dr Kritsachai Somsaman and Dr Namchai Chewawiwat of the Science Media Division, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Thai Ministry of Science and Technology, for the three science fiction comic books used in the oral defence of the research proposal. Their help and the help of Ms Sasithorn Teth-Uthapak to get a collaborative book project with the Cartoonthai Institute, Foundation for Children underway has paved the way for penetrating into the social life of PS-City and its surrounding art world. I thank them for endorsing the production of a bilingual and annotated sci-fi comic anthology, and the cartoonists for the art work. The editorial 6 support of Mr Sujjaporamst Voravuj and Dr Arlène Bastion is acknowledged and I thank them and Ms Namaporn Sukhanenya for translation work on the first draft. In Thailand, I collectively express my gratitude and thanks to the numerous scientists, engineers, and university, science and innovation policy administrators and advisers at offices and agencies under the Thai Ministry of Science and Technology. Especially, I thank them and the receptionists, museum, and security guards encountered during early fieldwork for letting me into their life worlds. Khun Chaon has been remarkably patient with my overly loaded daytrips undertaken to bring PS- City onto the physical map of the Thai science and technology history. I thank him for his unrelenting humour and for driving us safely through the accident-prone road corridors and congested traffic. Lucia, my long-time friend and former work colleague at the Asian Institute of Technology, has offered help whenever needed, and I want to thank her and her family for their kindness. In Singapore, I collectively thank the clinical and lab-based scientists who invited me to visit their premises in the bio-corridor. They were among the first research contacts to introduce to the field-based investigation the strenuous demand of flexibility, which global researcher mobility engenders. Mirrored in the ‘flexi sockets’ and other lab accessories that encapsulate the Zeitgeist of this milieu in its striving for excellence and success, their casual comments on their working environment drew my analytic attention to the aesthetic dimension of science-city cultures. I thus must give credit to the scientific researchers at the Centre for Translational Medicine of NUS, and unnamed private and biomedical and life sciences institutes inside Biopolis and nearby. At the Department of Sociology, NUS, I thank Professor Dr Chua Beng Huat for approving the Graduate Students Research Seminar (GSRS) on Thursdays that I initiated, convened, and chaired over three years (2012-2015). My thanks to the numerous local and foreign participants and the Administration Office for their technical support is reiterated here. 7 In lieu of presenting an oral fieldwork account to the Department, I brought ‘the field’ to the Visual Turn GSRS series. The research has benefitted noticeably from the roundtable discussion that threw light on the precariousness of bioartist networks in much of Southeast Asia, and lack of institutional support for art practitioners experimenting with epistemic objects of the life sciences and biomedicine. The NUS libraries have been a valuable resource. My special thanks go to the book acquisition team of the Central Library, and especially