Science is a public good. It is usually performed with means acquired through public funding, and is meant for very human endeavors like understanding self and surroundings, and sometimes creates technology in return that leads to improvement of human lives, non-human lives, and the environment they inhabit. (Not always are we successful there).

Doing science always seemed like a performance, moving objects and materials across. Isolating, tearing, teasing, mixing, isolating, viewing, manipulating, and other ‘verb-ings’ were a way of life, particularly in the reductionist work I did when I was in the laboratory. In this project, I turn my gaze as an outsider to a fly facility that creates mutagenic flies for use by other scientists and laboratories. In this process, which is novel to me, I try to understand the performance, the habits, the idiosyncrasies, and the craft of people that make the mutant flies through participant observations, sketches, pictures, and conversations.