In a speculative future illuminated by feminist technoscience, IMARA—the Interstitial Machine for Aggregate Reparative Anatomies—emerges as a radical tool for worldbuilding and challenging the boundaries of identity, bioethics, and bodily autonomy. Developed by WhiteFeather Hunter as part of the NEW SUNS project (Artengine, Ottawa), with support from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (Alarcón Lab), IMARA represents both a functional hacked bioprinter and an artistic intervention for crafting futures where biotechnology is democratized, accessible, and transformative. The NEW SUNS project is a collective worldbuilding initiative that transcends the limits of patriarchal and extractive systems, proposing alternative ecologies of care and collaboration. Installed within the NEW SUNS exhibition (Ottawa Art Gallery), IMARA is contextualized as a practical tool and a critical object, designed to provoke dialogue and explore the boundaries of biotechnology. It engages with themes of fertility, regenerative technologies, and embodied materiality, using bioinks and stem cells derived from easily accessible sources. Drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and her unpublished Parable of the Trickster, IMARA envisions futures where adaptability, hybridity, and transformative resilience are central to survival. In the world that IMARA inhabits, some humans have been in a cryogenic sleep ("cry-bernation") as the world collapsed around them. Upon revival, they discover that cytotoxic cryopreservation chemicals have caused certain organs or body parts to atrophy. These cryodamages led to the development of IMARA, which provides custom 3D bioprinted anatomical tissues and organs to replace those that have atrophied. These choices are multi-speciated, allowing humans to hybridize with other organisms, such as amphibians, tweaking the boundaries between self and other and fostering new modes of coexistence and renewal. This presentation will highlight IMARA through documentation images, didactic videos, and discussion, examining its design, role in speculative worldbuilding, and implications for creating accessible, inclusive biotechnologies.
Dr. WhiteFeather Hunter is an internationally recognized Canadian artist and researcher, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. She holds a PhD in Biological Art through SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia, and an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University. Her doctoral thesis, “The Witch in the Lab Coat” was a TechnoFeminist negotiation of science biocultures by using ‘taboo’ materials such as menstrual fluid in tissue engineering protocols; this included witchcraft as performed resistance to medicalized control over women’s bodies. Her recent project, Sentient Clit—The Pussification of Biotech explores 3D-bioprinting clitorises with menstrual stem cells differentiated to neuronal types, to produce synthetic clitorises that respond to stimuli. The project was awarded an Ars Electronica 2024 S+T+ARTS Prize jury nomination. WhiteFeather exhibits internationally, recently (solo) at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (Cornwall, UK), MKII (London, UK), Plexus Projects (NYC, US), Ectopia Lab (Lisbon, PT), SomoS Arts (Berlin, DE), and Duende Art Museum (CH). She is hosted at prestigious international biolabs, such as the Gulbenkian Institute of Molecular Medicine, uLisboa, University of Ottawa Heart Institute, and DZNE German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. She presents at high profile festivals, conferences, and residencies across the globe, recently delivering a keynote address for the Future Humanities Institute, University College Cork (IE). She is published in peer-reviewed journals and books in Australia, UK, Greece, France, Denmark, Canada, and USA, with forthcoming publications in Austria, Australia, and the UK.
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