Recent workshops on making penicillin at home and research on how to clone one’s own body have opened up a relatively unexplored field of DIY practices related to experiments with the body. On the other hand, similar experiments are often associated with AI in science fiction movies and novels.

One well-known self-surgeries under “real-life conditions” was performed by Leonid Rogozov. In 1961 during his expedition to the Antarctic, which at that time was not really an inhabited place, Rogozov performed an appendectomy on himself. While humanity dreams about space travel, we often forget to ponder the question of “What if…?” What if there is no chance of asking another for help fulfilling one or the other task? What if certain experimentation is restricted by law? There are also other related questions, like “How far can I experiment with my own body?” or “To whom do parts of my body belong if they are detached from my body?

This new workshop series on self-repair is a reference to non-traditional contexts where certain social considerations are excluded under certain circumstances, or to the contexts of malfunctioning systems, especially of those related to one’s own body. The Self-repair series is about an ability to identify and to fix one’s own systems. Self-repair is also about experiments that might not be tolerated by society and that might instead be considered unethical.