II. Discussion

Essay in Interplay published by Caldo Worldwide


2024.11.15



Essay by Wendi Yan

 “Speculating An Affective Gaze in Scientific Practice” traces the thinking and making of Biotopy. 

Wendi Yan lays out the three guiding questions for Biotopy:

1) How can we harness crowd curiosity in knowledge production?
2) How do we bring biotic agents into playful interactions?
3) How might we practice a different scientific vision and, in turn, a more expansive scientific self?

Each question points to discussions in a specific topic: citizen science games, human-biology interactions, and scientific objectivity. Biotopy is a node between conceptual threads, which asks what emerges in the middle of the set of axes, spectrums, or contradictions between play and science, the biological and the digital, the objective and subjective.







“Biotopy designs a science fictional experience aiming at cultivating a new sense. Call it an aesthetic sense, an epistemic sense, or something else entirely. Through this new sense, Biotopy re-ontologizes the actors and relations in the epistemic practice of microbiology.”