little people / black and white future (?)
From the blog of Lebbeus Woods comes an entry entitled "Utopia Redux" which features a series of images by Cooper Union student Daniel Meriador. They depict a strange and silent technological architecture of humankind, juxtaposed, or floating whimsically, against degraded or hostile-seeming landscapes. Using photo-montage, the images are disarmingly simple, and almost iconographic. The typical elements of classic science fiction →
The Perils of Progress
There is often a moral dimension to the popular fear and resistance associated with technological, social and environmental change. This kind of fear ("future-shock" immediately comes to mind) involves the struggle to cope with new modes of living, as well as a sense of loss for the old. We can never go back to the way things used to be. →
Digital molecular gastronomy.
A bit of whizz-bangery from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT. It's a 3D printer for printing food, molecule by molecule.
‘Masterworks in Petri dishes’
The NewScientist just came out with a gallery of Microbial Art or view source at MicrobialArt.com
The Workbench
SEEDmag's just featured Martin Chalfie's workbench - an interesting read.. Excerpt: Martin Chalfie is perhaps best known for his Nobel Prize-winning work on GFP, a jellyfish molecule that glows bright green when exposed to blue light. By injecting it into bacteria more than a decade ago to create the first tool for visualizing biological processes in living cells, Chalfie transformed the life →
open systems
By Elizabeth Buschmann We’ve spent the past five days working with pipettes, petri-dishes and the semi-living in a science lab at RMIT. It may have come as a surprise to many of us that a basic understanding of genetics already existed in our minds, whether facilitated by well-informed sci-fi fantasies, a strong math background, or by a basic education in computer →
Day 5 – Friday 20 November
by Girish Sagaram The final day of the SymbioticA Biotech-Art workshop began with a session about plant tissue culture and cloning with Dr. Tien Huynh from RMIT Applied Science. We were given tiny ‘daughter’ plants cloned from a Chinese orchid species and separated them in sterile conditions before planting them in individual sealed jars containing 6 different mixtures of growing media. →
workshop archive
As this week ends, and many many wonderful sources/names etc were mentioned, I would like to propose that we create a running archive from our notes for items such as resources e.g. films, books, materials, researchers......... [this is a great idea. we'll be setting up a resources page that you can hopefully easily get to and add links, references, and upload →
The Bioartist: Jester at the technoscience court?
4 days into DNA extraction, spinal cord cell rescue, GFP transfer, and tissue culture for dummies, I still wonder what roles bioartists can play with respect to science and society? Somehow the image of the jester comes to my mind. A person on a court with powerful hierachies and strict rules that is the only one who lives outside of the →
Day 4 – Thursday 19 November
by Girish Sagaram The first exercise of the day was a practical session in the art of tissue culture. This is where live tissue is grown from cells extracted from either plants or animals. The group was asked to bring in samples of animal tissue to use for this purpose. When animals are killed for human consumption the meat is kept →
Chaos and Control
Daily we are inculcated with the technical need for sterility, precision, and control in the pursuit of creating bio art/synthetic life, genetic twiddling -partly i guess this is to minimize the huge financial and environmental cost of this sort of work and partly to adhere to scientific rigor. Apparently this is how we can obtain outcomes which illustrate or prove →
Public symposium: “Plastic Futures: biological life, art and design innovation” outcomes of BioTech Art Workshop. 20 Nov
Plastic Futures: biological life, art and design innovation A public symposium discussion addressing intersections of biotechnology, art, design and cultural change, and the outcomes of SymbioticA’s intensive BioTech Art Workshop hosted by RMIT University. Friday, November 20, 2009 2:00pm - 5:00pm The Design Research Institute, RMIT University, Design Hub Gallery Ground floor, Building 91, 110 Victoria Street, Melbourne. “We overlook only too often the fact →
Synthetic Death
I'm in a strange emotional space. I'm used to an inner life that's a zigzag ride between certainty and uncertainty. But during these last few intense days these uncertainties are of a different colour. For me the only difference between cooking a chicken curry and working with animal materials in labs is that one activity is labeled 'science' and the other →
reflecting on personal ethics
yesterday we were asked if anyone objects to scientific testing on animals. I do object, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem because I am not categorical or simplistic in my viewpoint - if I was I wouldn't be at a workshop where I have extracted and manipulated DNA, will grow mammalian and other tissue cultures, and clone a plant →
Rhetorical Mines in Public Minds
Titles tend to belie the insecurities of a society when facing new frontiers of possibility. Like the terror that delights when facing the sublime, badges such as 'Genetic Engineering' or 'Synthetic Life' obscure the repressions of failure and the alterity of being that remain, perhaps necessarily, shadowed in their wake of promise. The bridge between Biology and Art is long and perilous, →
Day 3 – Wednesday 18 November
by Girish Sagaram During this week we’ve been learning that many of the popular beliefs about DNA, how it works and how scientists work with it aren't completely accurate. The familiarity we have with the idea of DNA and its association with identity has been formed in part by concepts such as 'DNA fingerprinting' which is used in forensics and mostly →
lab things
This post is a collection of 'things' that play a role in the laboratory work. I will add to this. photos by Pete Waters.
Day 2 – Tuesday 17 November
by Girish Sagaram Whilst the science of genetics has solved many puzzles about living things and how physical characteristics are passed from generation to generation, there are a great many mysteries still to be solved. As the "Ghost in Your Genes" video illustrates, there are epigenetic factors that influence how genes work, meaning DNA and genes aren't the whole story of →
Our Body Is a Planet / Ecosystem (-now imagine the spaces we inhabit!)
The lab exercise on Bacteria in the Environment & Self brought back memories of discussions along the lines of recent shifts in understanding our body/self as a planet or ecosystem, triggered after reading this article from 2007. Must read! An excerpt: "We may not realize it, but each one of us is a walking ecosystem. Minuscule, eight-legged Demodex mites nestle head →
The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes
Oron's recommendation; a perspective on how systems biology is challenging the traditional notions of the 'selfish gene' et al... "The gene's eye view of life, proposed in Richard Dawkins acclaimed bestseller The Selfish Gene, sees living bodies as mere vehicles for the replication of genetic codes. But in The Music of Life, world renowned physiologist Denis Noble argues that, to truly →
All your base pairs…
If you google 'DNA portrait' you get 3,110,000 results. The concept of DNA as 'fingerprint' has taken its place within our culture (TV cop shows for instance) and we've come to accept the idea that it's the key to our existence. The mystique surrounding DNA was the hot topic today as we isolated our DNA and held our very 'identity' in our hands (well those of us that →
Ghost in your Genes
In between microscopic viewing of cell lines being incubated we are watching bits of this movie - on why DNA is far from the whole story of identity. DNA is not destiny.
DNA & Plasmid Vectors
As a traumatised sparrow flew frantically about our heads we spent this morning's session learning about DNA extraction, restriction enzymes and electrophoresis (that is an awesome link - click it, go on). It involved a lot of metaphors: 'nature's scissors' and a rather amusing reference to the equisite corpse. As I write we're about end our discussion of the theory and →