Evidence, Performing: The Suspect Inversion Center and Deep Woods PCR

This chapter addresses how biotechnological facts are constructed. Whether in courts or in laboratories, facts are formed following controversies and become increasingly stable as advocates (human and non-human) are mobilized and dissenters are silenced. Two of my most performative artworks, informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) methods, demonstrate what Bruno Latour describes as “science in the making,” in the cultural history of DNA. In the Suspect Inversion Center and Deep Woods PCR, I anachronistically reenact the making of O.J. Simpson’s DNA evidence, and the invention of the polymerase chain reaction, twin stories with many points of overlap.