MOBILE LAB WORKSHOPOLOGY

Sometimes I tell people I’m an oestrohacker, or that I make freak science , or that I’m a deranged housewife cooking hormones in the kitchen. Despite the embedded sarcasm, it’s how I can communicate a practice which is beyond an artist working in a laboratory who inserts experiments from one white box (the laboratory) into another (the gallery). While it was important for me to “get my hands wet” in laboratory practice, it was equally, if not more important for my practice to “leave” the laboratory and interact with the bodies, environments, and discourses to which it pertains.

Workshopology describes collaborative hands-on experimentation as an iterative process and design strategy that takes feedback from its own mishaps, accidents, and participant experiences in order to develop new methodologies in the future. I first encountered the term “workshopology” during an event called HackteriaLab14 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia organized by the global online network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art and the local Indonesian community, Lifepatch citizen initiatives in art, science, and technology. In the workshops and events I experienced a kind of horizontal knowledge transfer that was without hierarchy of the expert nor the mimicking of typical laboratory design. Related is the ethos of homo ludens, the concept of communal playing, tinkering, and geeking as an important element for intimate knowledge acquisition of the material and the cultural production around it. In my geeking, tinkering, and research, I emancipate the estrogen molecule from its black box, collaborate with people outside my own discipline, and disseminate my findings.

The result of several workshopologies is the Estrofem! Lab , a mobile bio-lab containing tools and protocols to hack the hormones present in our bodies and our environment, creating a potential non-institutional portal for hormone access as well as a cultural dialogue for biopolitics. Often regarded as hobo science, freak science, or public amateurism, the Estrofem! Lab and its workshopologies aim to detect and extract estrogen from "sources with meaning," providing the contextual framework for why we hack estrogen, and why we perform science as citizens and (hack)activists. While we may not be policy makers nor activists on the front lines, hacking together nonetheless constitutes a kind of micro-resistance against the neoliberal patriarchal systems of hormonal control and pollution.