Searching for GloFish™: Aesthetics, Ethics and Encounters with the Neon Baroque

Fluorescent zebrafish are the first genetically-modified animals globally, if unevenly, circulated outside of laboratory environments. GloFish™ were developed in Singapore. They are widely sold as popular pets in the United States, but their public sale is banned in Europe and elsewhere. On the trail of these animals, I trace a fragmentary biogeography through ethnographic encounters in the spaces of scientific research, animal exhibits, pet stores and art galleries, in Europe, the USA and Singapore. At each site, as the colour, light and intensities of neon flicker with the potential for life, and concern for animal lives move in and out of focus, I ask: what is the proper way of knowing and living with genetically-altered zebrafish? To ask the question is to open up a conversation about the changing constitution of science and space, representation and reproduction in relation to these new forms of life. To try to answer it demands attention to a baroque patterning of scientific practices, aesthetic sensibilities, ethical responsibilities and political spatialities. In a discursive arena typically characterised by narratives of linearity – whether of scientific progress or slippery slopes – I suggest the affective sensibilities, theatrical qualities and unresolved elements of the baroque offer powerful, if ambivalent, resources for reflection on the intersection between the animating aesthetics and turbulent ethics of postgenomic life