Vital practices: Self-experimentation A Tear ecologies > (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) as artistic and scientific form B Secluded time > (7) (8) (video 1) (9) (10) (11) (video 2) Ana María Gómez López C Mediating vision > (12) (13) (video 3) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) D Strains of speed > (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (video 4) (29) (video 5) (30) (31) (32) E Artificial openings > (33) (34) (35) (36) (37) (38) (39) (40) (41) (42) (43) (44) (45) F Edge conditions > (46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) (video 6) www.experiments.life [email protected] A Tear ecologies At the time of this writing, news outlets worldwide are reporting the case of a Taiwanese woman found to have four bees living underneath her eyelid.1 Only a few millimetres in size and known colloquially as “sweat bees,” these insects were consuming the proteins found within the tears of a woman identified only as He, her family surname. Remarking on the successful removal of each of the tiny specimens by a confounded ophthalmologist, much of the media coverage failed to mention the worldwide presence of these insects attracted to perspiration and other saline bodily fluids, as well as their study by scientists who use their own eyes to attract and feed their apian subjects. One example is Hans Bänzinger, a Swiss entomologist who has researched bee and moth lachryphagy in forest regions across southern Asia since the mid-1960s. In 2009, Bänzinger allowed more than 250 bees to consume tears from his eyes at several sites throughout Thailand, later conducting a similar study between 2013 and 2014.2 Bees imbibed his tears during day-long stretches held over several weeks, most often staying for minutes at a time and proving barely noticeable or producing minimal discomfort. Only on a few occasions were the foraging bees too “pestiferous” to bear for more than a couple of hours.3 Bänzinger’s investigations and their accompanying photo- > (1) graphic records constitute a form of self- experimentation: single-subject research where a person carries out processes within and through their body to gather information on a specific phenomenon, assess a prototype, or otherwise test a hypothesis, remedy, or procedure. Hans Bänzinger’s examination of sweat bees falls into a robust lineage of self- experimenters in entomology. These range from William Baerg and Allan Walker Blair, a U.S. entomologist and Canadian physician who allowed black widow spiders to bite 1 See Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Doctors Discover Four Live Bees Feeding on Tears Inside Woman’s Eye,” The Guardian, 10 April 2019; Tiffany May, “Four Bees Living in Her Eye, Feeding on Her Tears,” New York Times, 10 April 2019; and Timothy Bella, “She Went to the Hospital for an Infection; Doctors Found Four Bees Living in Her Eye, Eating Her Tears,” Washington Post, 10 April 2019. 2 See Hans Bänzinger et al., “Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) That Drink Human Tears,” Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society 82 (2010): 135–150, and Hans Bänzinger, “Congregations of Tear-Drinking Bees at Human Eyes: Foraging Strategies for an Invaluable Resource by Lisotrigona in Thailand (Apidae, Meliponini),” National History Bulletin of the Siam Society 62, no. 2 (2018): 161–193. 3 Bänzinger et al., “Bees That Drink Human Tears,” 164. 3 their hands to examine the effects of their venom in 1923 and distinct operational commonalities between the two contexts, 1933, respectively,4 to Justin Orvel Schmidt, a U.S. entomo- I do not aim to equate or simplify the different ends to which logist who for the last 35 years has been bitten and stung by artists and scientists have used their bodies as a site for approximately 150 different species of Hymenoptera—the intellectual and creative inquiry. Rather, I am driven to advance order of insects that includes bees, wasps, and ants—to create a perspective—now more of a proposition than a definitive a quantitative scale to measure the resulting pain.5 statement—of self-experimentation as a form of knowledge production and a consummate vantage point for embodied Yet Bänzinger’s absorbed examination of tear-sipping bees in research9, one that goes beyond the hackneyed characterization the Thai tropics also allows for comparison with artists who of eccentricity10 or the facile allure of transgression.11 use their bodies to engage first-hand with insect and ecological activity. In his filmSpringtime (2010–2011), Dutch filmmaker > (2) Jeroen Eisinga captures himself sitting in front of the camera while 150,000 bees cover his face and upper body. Viewers witness Eisinga growing concealed by the engulfing swarm, 9 An exceptional document for self-experimentation as embodied philosophical reflection is Paul B. Preciado,Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the his nose and eyes barely remaining clear. Serving as director Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013 [2008]). and subject, for Springtime Eisinga collaborated with bee- 10 See, for example, Mel Boring and Leslie Dendy, Guinea Pig Scientists: Bold Self- Experimenters in Science and Medicine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); keepers from Cahir, a town in County Tipperary in Ireland, as Alex Boese, Electrified Sheep: Glass-Eating Scientists, Nuking the Moon, and 6 More≈Bizarre Experiments (London: Boxtree/MacMillan, 2011); and Trevor Norton, no beekeepers in the Netherlands were willing to participate. Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Eisinga’s restraint in the face of teeming bees—comprising Self-Experimentation (New York: Pegasus Books, 2012). Amidst these conspicuous a total of twenty-five kilograms in weight—exemplifies the titles on self-experimenters as idiosyncratic mavericks or historic curiosities, two book-length studies stand out: Lawrence K. Altman, Who Goes First? The Story of deliberate use of his body both for the creation of an artwork Self-Experimentation in Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and a biological encounter, one thoroughly familiar to api- and Arsen P. Fiks and Paul A. Buelow, Self-Experimenters: Sources for Study (Westport, USA: Paeger, 2003). For two dynamic articles surveying eighteenth- and twentieth- culturists and bee bearders, but that nevertheless requires a century self-experimentation, respectively, see Londa Schiebinger, “Human commanding exercise in surrender. At the time Eisinga per- Experimentation in the Eighteenth Century: Natural Boundaries and Valid Testing,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, 384–408 formed his work, the record for bee-bearding on a person was (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Andi Johnson, “‘They Sweat 350,000 bees, or the equivalent of 39.5 kilograms.7 for Science’: The Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Self-Experimentation in American Exercise Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 48 (2015): 425–454. Finally, for a critical self-reflection on self-experimentation, sees the excellent article by British What follows is an attempt to survey instances of self-experi- dietician Elsie M. Widdowson, “Self-experimentation in nutrition research,” Nutrition Research Review 6 (1993): 1–17. mentation in two distinct fields: single-subject (orn of 1) 11 Recent monographs on “endurance art” offer little departure from earlier studies on studies in human physiology and the life sciences, and dura- performance from the 1960s and 1970s, with the partial exception of works by Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance tional, body-based work in contemporary art.8 In drawing (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), and Lara Shalson, Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). These texts tend to extol the artist’s heroic stamina, martyr-like sacrifice, or iconoclastic extremity —tones that, ironically, do not ring far from the extravagant or feat-like terms in which 4 Allan Walker Blair, “Spider Poisoning: Experimental Study of the Effects of the Bite of scientific self-experimentation has also been habitually presented. For writing on the Female Latrodectus mactans in Man,” Archives of Internal Medicine 54 (1934): “hardship/ordeal art,” see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance 831–843. (London: Routledge, 1993); on “masochistic performance,” see Kathy O’Dell, Contract 5 Justin O. Schmidt, The Sting of the Wild (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of 2016). For a refinement of Schmidt’s “sting pain index” by pain variability of Minnesota Press, 1998), and Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art Since the 1960s honey-bee stings in different parts of the body, see also Michael L. Smith, “Honey (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998). For artists as martyrs, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, Bee Sting Pain Index by Body Location,” PeerJ 2 (2014): e338. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain 6 For more information and still images of Springtime, see http://jeroeneisinga.com/ (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008); Marla Carlson, Performing Bodies in films/springtime. Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists (New York: Palgrave 7 U.S. animal trainer Mark Biancaniello held the world record in bee bearding from Macmillan, 2010); and Karen Gonzalez Rice, Long Suffering: American Endurance Art 1998 until 2014. as Prophetic Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). More recent 8 A notable exception is the edited work by Katrin Solhdju, Introspective Self-Rapports: examples on endurance as extremity include Francesca Alfano Miglietti, Extreme Shaping Ethical and Aesthetic Concepts 1850–2006 (Max Planck Institute for the Bodies: The Use and Abuse of the Body in Art, trans. Anthony Shugaar (Milan: Skira History of Science, Pre-print 322, 2006), a volume which includes texts on self- Editore, 2003), and Dominic Johnson, Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity experimentation by both scholars and contemporary artists.