Biopower Unlimited!

subRosa impersonated a “Biopower Team” of consultants and performed an intervention at the Art and Tech Fair of a large public university. Our team created a booth where participants could complete an online biopower profiler that enabled them to compare how they allocated their labor power and leisure time—their total biopower. A team consultant helped participants analyze their results and gave advice about empowering life changes (such as considering athletic scholarships as form of labor instead of or in addition to it being leisure time).

In collaboration with students, faculty, and community activists, subRosa also designed a consciousness-raising map revealing the intersections of biological/agricultural/digital technology cultures on the BGSU campus, in the town, and in the surrounding animal Phactory Pharming enterprises which the team had documented. The map raised critical issues personalized by the biopower questionnaire, and was distributed campus-wide via “mooing” mailbox-kiosks. The biopower team also conducted a graduate colloquium and video screening on the issues of biopower and technology on campus.

  • 23rd Annual New Media & Art Festival, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, October, 2002

Additional images from the performance can be seen in The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life.

A portion of the map is reproduced in Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism.

This project has its own web site.