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Micespace explores the changing spaces and places occupied by genetically-modified mice in contemporary biomedical research. Mice are increasingly on the move in the biosciences: from the internationalisation of science, the changing architectures of the mouse house, to the increasing demands of translational medicine. International mutant mouse repositories have become key sites in the management of these movements, involved in developing, characterising, archiving and distributing new model animals for scientific research.

This website is our own mutated mouse repository: it is offered as an ‘anti-archive’. Micespace is a provocative, messy and speculative collection, inviting reflection and hesitation around what the conventional curation of scientific data may elide, miss out, or skip over: incommensurable logics, unanswerable conundrums, and aporias in meaning.

Micespace features a series of works by Helen Scalway, which have emerged from conversations and collaborations between an artist and a geographer around how to visualize the emerging complexities, relationalities and spatialities of contemporary biomedical research. These experimental visualisations seek to engage some of the developing structures of thinking, spaces of working and ways of ‘being mice’ in the biosciences. They offer different ways of apprehending the complexities of what is being brought together in other more ordered archives of animals.

Helen Scalway and Gail Davies would like to thank to Richard Milne, Cath D’Alton and Sue Rouillard for their help in the development of the images and website. Gail Davies would like to thank the ESRC for supporting the social science research underpinning this collaboration through their funding of the Biogeography and Transgenic Life fellowship and all research respondents who shared their experiences of working these animals.