Playlist
This documentary explores the ideas and people behind Synthetic Biology a new engineering discipline which makes genetics function like lego bricks, and turns DNA into a programming language like binary code.
Let me show you my world of the synthetic future. A fluorescent animated slideshow of reverie, which depicts a future with glowing trees, a cure for HIV, biological spaceships, and organ harvest.
The transmutation of mind and matter was a subject of research in the field of alchemy [Magnus Opus] and it continues nowadays through the sciences, which explore the nature of consciousness, the creation of A-life, synthetic and systems biology. 'The Pursuit of Anomalous Mind Habitats' is an attempt of the mind to expand, mutate and change its abode. This intelligence is constantly facing the desire and need to cross the boundaries of the human body in order to extend the possibilities of sensing and performing. It needs to adapt and survive in unknown conditions that it has never encountered before. The human body is not always able to perform the actions demanded by the mind. Consequently, intelligence enacts a transmutation of the body through the metamorphosis of organic and synthetic matter.
Inspired by science and video games, Macrostructure is the first episode in a micro-series and story world entitled "What If You Created Artificial Life And It Started Worshipping You". We are taken on a 3D animated journey through a world inhabited by synthetic life forms and the self-aware machines who manufacture, control, and recycle them.
Main objective of this project was to explore how food could evolve in the future from developments in emerging technologies. With this project I proposed a future where food shifts towards being a channel of aesthetic experiences: What if food were consumed alive, as a fictional character? What if food was able to play with our cutlery and create hyper-sensations in our mouth? Synthetic biotech has already started to create artificial life in organic forms, breathing life into artificial digestible forms no longer resides as a mere fantasy. Could this be an opportunity for us to venture into the fictional realms, through physical yet real interactions with nutritional consumables which offers a new dimension in our culinary experiences?
iGEM or 'the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition' is a worldwide undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Each team is "given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells." (http://igem.org/About)
Quanticare is a project developed in partnership between Amy Congdon, who acted as project facilitator and designers Ann-Kristin Abel and Jenny Lee, and the 2012 NRP-UEA iGEM team, with the aim of exploring the ethical implications of Synthetic Biology. The collaboration allowed the students to think about the wider context of their lab work and allowed the designers to explore what potential new materials and techniques they could be using in the future. The resulting film explores the potential future uses of the science the iGEM team have been working with, namely that of Nitric Oxide sensing. The team worked throughout the summer on developing a new method of quantitative computing using bacterial sensors, which has implications for cancer detection and treatment. The film presents a future with highly sensitive disease monitoring and personalised healthcare provided by the imagined company 'Quanticare'. The intention of the project was to explore the implications of this technology by presenting viewers with a way in which it may impact on their lives.
Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.
Influenced by the Japanese Metabolism movement in the 60's and 70's.
The video also envisions future possibilities with AR (Augmented Reality).
Music specially composed by Daisuke Tanabe.
Filmed in Osaka, Japan.
BioFlaneur takes on board the important and emerging topic of personal bio-privacy in the era of big data, social networking and hackers.
Recent developments in the field of microbiology and synthetic biology expose facts from the "micro world" which previously were unknown. That means, following scientists from the University of Oregon and Human Microbiome Project, that each location in the world as well as each of us, can be identified by very unique microbial environments. The above mentioned research is still in the middle of development but since we managed to discover so much about the invisible environments of ours, what would it mean, in term of social behaviour and interaction in public spaces, if those technologies and data uncovered by it, become stored and commonly accessible… ? This short film speculates on the future of invisible, biological data of humans and spaces. Will anything change in our understanding of privacy in public space, when what is invisible becomes uncovered and starts to identify each of us?
The title takes its inspiration from the 19th century Parisian flaneur, often mentioned by Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire. A Flaneur is an urban explorer, who, by wandering around streets, discoverers new stories and affairs… BioFlaneur is the 2050 equivalent of the 19th century dandy. Instead of just walking around, the BioFlaneur uncovers modern stories and characters through simple bacteria sample scans, taken from the surface.
In this slightly absurd, exaggerated and imaginative way, this film aims to provoke a question about our awareness of personal, online privacy and its future, which together with new bio-technologies shares more and more facts from our life.
E. chromi is a collaboration between designers and scientists in the new field of synthetic biology. In 2009, seven Cambridge University undergraduates spent the summer genetically engineering bacteria to secrete a variety of colored pigments, visible to the naked eye. They designed standardized sequences of DNA, known as BioBricks, and inserted them into escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria.
Amy Karle is an artist who has always been fascinated with mysteries of the body. (http://www.amykarle.com) Her most recent work uses the building blocks of life: cells. As an Artist in Residence at Pier 9, Amy collaborated with Autodesk to create "Regenerative Reliquary," a sculpture consisting of 3D printed scaffolds for cell growth in a bioreactor. The intention is that stem cells seeded onto these scaffolds will grow into bone. She hopes that this project serves as a foundation for further exploration and opens conversations about the awe and mystery of life, transhumanism, synthetic biology, the future of medicine and implants, and things that could be made from the building blocks of life. For those who wish to experiment, Amy has shared her workflow with open source instructions @ (instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Scaffolds-for-Cell-Culture).