What if?

WHAT IF...insects could diagnose illness? WHAT IF...clouds were modified to snow ice cream? WHAT IF... we lived in a society where our every thought was public?

These are just some of the questions asked in the current exhibition at Science Gallery which probes the space between reality and the impossible and where designers meet scientists to explore the future. IF I was in London I would be attending this exhibition as it's curated by my tutors from the RCA, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.

Anthony and Fiona are know in the design world as the grand masters of creating "Design Fictions". So what exactly is design fictions? It is a kind of storytelling practice as a way of articulating ideas where you craft material visions of different kinds of possible worlds. Through this practice one bridges imagination and materialization by modelling, crafting things, telling stories through objects, which are  conversationalist pieces in a very real sense. These stories may appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else.

Julian Bleecker has just published an essay entitled Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. Its available at The Near Future Laboratory's website.  I'm also keen to read the book "NonObject" Design Fiction. Experience centered design philosophy that explores innovation through design beyond physical boundaries. (should be published in early 2010). In Julian's article he writes about Anthony Dunne's call for mass speculation (in political science, genetics, ethics, economics, pretty much every discipline). Anthony and Fiona taught us that "Today we don't just need solutions, we also need dreams." He is right—designers that are too polite to take chances and postulate wild hypotheses are doomed to simply churn out next year's model. As Julian notes, Dunne's idealized designer functions kind of similar to a science-fiction author, an individual engaged in a projective practice that aspires to produce novelty and innovation rather than style.

Storytelling matters when designing the future even more than the real thing in terms of their ability to inspire the imagination of  people. Ideas are more powerful than a crappy product that aspires to the idea. I label myself as a designer and a storyteller because I see my role as a designer is to share my stories. I'm constantly developing my dreams of "how it could be" into a full story with real life people or objects. A moving story rings true at every level, your more likely to remember a story than a whole page of facts as story's are multi-dimensial, they embody us in space, time, values and emotions, they can reveal aspects of ourselves that are sometimes invisible. 

Story telling is fundamental to what it is to be human. To be a person is to have a story to tell. Every one of us tells stories, every day; story-telling is not something that only "real authors" or "real screenwriters" or "real designer" can do. Every day we make up stories about the things that happen to us, and tell them to our family and friends. 

I will write more about storytelling but for now lets experience some stories.

WHAT IF...Data from our banker, doctor and therapist determined when we should conceive?
by Revital Cohen
http://www.revitalcohen.com/

The promises posed by new reproductive technologies such as IVF, test tube babies and egg freezing, are blurring perceptions of the reproductive cycle amongst women, and consequently, the age of conception is constantly being challenged.

The female body clock relies on moonlight to regulate the menstrual cycle. The use of artificial light and contraceptive hormones, along with the growing pressure to develop a career, are distorting the body's reproductive signals. The artificial biological clock compensates for this increasingly lost instinct.

This object acts as constant reminder of the temporary and fragile nature of fertility. Given to a woman by her parents or partner, it reacts to information from her doctor, therapist and bank manager via an online service. When she is physically, mentally and financially ready to conceive the object awakes, seeking her attention.

WHAT IF...Human tissue could be used to make objects?
by Tobie Kerridge/Nikki Stott/Ian Thompson 
http://www.biojewellery.com 

 

Bone tissue cultivated outside a patient's body will soon be used in reconstructive surgery. As the bioscience behind this application develops, the promise of the technology provokes curiosity and speculation about alternative uses. Biojewellery explores such an alternative, providing couples with a symbol of their love.

Biomedical engineers, designers and clinicians set out to create unique biojewellery rings for couples. Bone tissue was cultured in a hospital laboratory, using cells from chips of bone donated by the couples during wisdom tooth extractions. The bone was combined with silver to create the rings. 

WHAT IF...We could farm medical products on our bodies?

by Michael Burton

http://www.michael-burton.co.uk/
 

Future Farm reflects the current body farm industry of people in severe deprivation using their bodies for income including selling hair, kidneys or incubating other people’s babies. The project focuses on new scientific and technological discoveries that radically change the perceptions of our bodies and extend the possibilities of their exploitation for industry.  With the promises of stem cell technology to create replacement organs and even sperm from adipose fat tissue, Future Farm presents a vision of this where people use their body to produce and sell adult stem cells, to incubate pharmaceutical products, alongside hosting clinical trials.

WHAT IF...We accept co-evolution with bacteria, microbes and parasites as a healthy option?
by Michael Burton

For every one human cell in your body there are ten nonhuman cells - bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes - living inside and on you. They are vital to many of your daily functions. 

The Race responds to this outcome and human metagenomic research to reconsider our approach to healthcare as a co-evolved organism and conglomeration of vital bacteria, microbes and parasites. The project scrutinizes our inadvertent creation of superbugs like mRSA through the misuse of antibiotics to offer alternative enhancements, new behaviors and objects for a more symbiotic future as an extraordinary balanced ecosystem.

WHAT IF...We could use smell to find the perfect partner?

by James Auger

http://www.auger-loizeau.com

Smell has been until recently a neglected sense. The current low status of smell is a result of the re-evaluation of the senses by philosophers and scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Smell was considered lower order, primitive, savage and bestial.  This project explores the human experiential potential of the sense of smell, applying contemporary scientific research in a range of domestic and social contexts. The design concept acknowledges that smell is a complicated sense requiring a level of control for both input and output emissions. This control is then applied to several situations exploring the possibilities and potential of smell as raw information.

WHAT IF...Our emotions were read by machines?

by Bernhard Hopfengärtner

http://www.berndhopfengaertner.net

Facial micro-expressions last less than a second and are almost impossible to control. They are hard wired to the emotional activity in the brain which can be easily captured using specially developed technological devices. Free will is now in question as science exposes decision-making as an emotional process rather than a rational one.This ability to read emotions technologically could result in a society obsessed with emotional reactions. Emotions, convictions and beliefs, which usually remain hidden, now become a public matter. ‘Belief systems' is a video scenario about a society that responds to the challenges of modern neuroscience by embracing these technological possibilities to read, evaluate and alter people's behaviours and emotions.

WHAT IF...We could evaluate the genetic potential of lovers?

by Dunne & Raby.

http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/
 

Evidence Dolls consists of one hundred plastic dolls used to provoke discussion amongst a group of young single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. How will dating change when DNA analysis can reveal the presence of undesirable genes?

Evidence Dolls come in three versions based on penis size (small, medium and large). A black indelible marker is provided to note down any characteristics on the dolls body. Hair, toenail clippings, saliva, and sperm can be stored in the penis drawer.

WHAT IF...Nanotechnology allowed objects to change shape and function as needed?
by Chris Woebken

http://www.woebken.net

Rather than focusing on the current development of nanotechnology, such as creating lighter and stronger materials, this project focuses on exploring its potential further, creating more manipulative prototypes such as organic electronics. 

What does organic computing look like and how will our relationship with these products change? Can organic electronics with biosensors open up new possibilities for sensual and poetic designs? 

Seeds contain material and information needed to grow organisms as well as algorithms for device networking. Using seeds as a simulation for smart dust, it allows one to easily visualize new interactions such as breaking, sharing, throwing away and mining data. These new interactions not only generate new behaviors but also redefine existing stereotypical electronic products.

WHAT IF...We lived in a society where our every thought was public?
by Bernhard Hopfengärtner, Gunnar Green

 Extra Room exists in an imaginary world where neuroimaging is used to ‘read' the human mind. As the mind becomes transparent in this world a new need for protective self discipline emerges. The Extra Room, is built into the basement of a multi storey building, where it is shared by the building's inhabitants. Utilising effects of sensory deprivation and methods used by the military to break someone down, this room enables subjects to adjust their thinking and beliefs. 

WHAT IF... We had to rent trees to offset our carbon footprint?
by Dot Samsen
http://www.dotmancando.info 

Carbon credit brings the ‘convenience' back to the ‘inconvenient truth'. Global warming has been driven by capitalism. Now we are trying to solve global warming through capitalism. Is this possible? From an ecological perspective, CO2 is a by-product of the living, either directly or indirectly. From the economic perspective, CO2 may become the world's largest commodity market. What do we consider the price of our own by-products? This project aims to criticize the carbon trading system as well as raise awareness of how good we are at destroying the planet.

Super Human: Revolution of the species.

This month I attended Super Human: Revolution of the species held in Melbourne and Re:live Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology. 

Both conferences presented an inspiring mixture of research projects that engage with topics that include sustainability, live arts and the technological arts of life, both organic and nonorganic,  Augmentation, Cognition and Nanoscale Interventions.

Super Human was spired by the 150th publication anniversary of The Origin of Species, Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, Super Human: Revolution of the Species turns the spotlight on collaborations between artists and scientists and the impact these investigations have on what it means to be human, now and into the future.

Some of the big question that the speakers addressed were -

• How do scientific and artistic bodies of knowledge intersect with human, social bodies? 
• Does art serve simply as a representational tool for the sciences or is there more to the picture than that?
• Does research into bodies and their systems offer an insight into aesthetic, or is confined to the purely functional? 
• How do the media arts change? 
• Through innovation, accident, discovery, mutation or crisis? 
• How did contemporary media arts come to look and sound like they do? 
• What options and potentialities and eccentricities in the history of media have been lost or overlooked or suppressed? 
• What hopes have been realised and which dashed? 
• What is the history of speculation on alternate histories, and how have they altered the course of media art history? 

As there where to many talks to blog, I will post a few of the works from artists I meet and talked to at the conference. 

Drawing Breath
by George Khut with John Tonkin
www.georgekhut.com 

George's art explores our experience of ourselves as physiologically embodied subjects –  our body as a fundamental aspect of who and how we are in the world –  and as a process through which we  become alive to the world inside and around us (the moves we make, the sounds we hear, the things we look at etc.).

Drawing Breath is the name of a series of breath-responsive works developed with artist and interaction designer John Tonkin. A belt worn around the participant’s chest translates breath-related changes in chest diameter to a computer that transforms these movements into a dense array of trailing 3D particles and breath-like noise textures.

You interact with the work by placing your hands onto a pair of wireless heart-rate sensors. These sensors measure moment-to-moment changes in heart rate that can be influenced by breathing and stress/relaxation responses. These changes in heart-rate interval are translated into colours, patterns and sound textures, that you can eventually learn to influence through a combination of breathing and sustained mental/emotional focus. George is also working on the - 

The Heart Library Project

 

The Heart Library Project is a traveling interactive art exhibition that invites you to spend some time observing and reflecting on interactions between your heart, nervous system and mental/emotional focus via sounds and visuals that respond to subtle changes in heart rhythm. The project was designed for presentation in health-care settings (i.e. hospitals), but recent exhibitions have also taken place in art galleries and science education centres. 

After your interaction with the biofeedback part of the work, you are invited to share your experience inside this work with other visitors, through the creation of a personalized experience-map and interview. Lines, textures, colours and words applied by the participant to a generic outline of a human body are used to describe aspects of their experience: sensations, memories, images and patterns of intensity. Participants can then describe how this map relates to their experience, by way of a short interview.

The resulting collection of experience-maps and interviews are displayed alongside the biofeedback artwork, transforming the exhibition into a public research studio, where visitors can explore the diversity of our lived experience of the body: the body as a centre for inspiration, strength, healing and delight.

text and images taken from the artists website.

Emotion Pods 
by Leah Heiss
http://www.elasticfield.com

The Emotion Pods are small interactive elements which investigate social behaviours. The devices all utilise electroluminescent cable which is activated by sensors. Some of the units illuminate when cradled in the hand while others slowly illuminate as darkness falls.

The Emotion Pods question how the adoption of new ways of connecting might impact upon our relationships with each other and our technologies.  Also by Leah -

The Diabetes Necklace

 The Diabetes Neckpiece is a wearable applicator device to apply Nanotechnology Victoria’s NanoMAPs to the skin. NanoMAPs are small (10 x 2mm) circular discs which have an array of micro needles on their surface. They allow for pain-free delivery of insulin to the body, replacing syringes. The Diabetes Rings work in conjunction with the Diabetes Neckpiece. The rings are designed to keep the nano engineered insulin patches against the skin once they have been applied. They are designed as discreet housings for therapeutics. Philosophically, they question how we might ‘enable’ our favourite jewellery/artefacts with functionality above and beyond the aesthetic

Micro'be
by Donna Franklin 
http://bioalloy.drobel.com.au

 The fashion that starts with a bottle of wine...

The Micro‘be’ project investigates the practical and cultural biosynthesis of microbiology – to explore forms of futuristic dress-making and textile technologies. Instead of lifeless weaving machines producing the textile, living microbes will ferment a garment. It smells like red wine and feels like sludge when wet, but the cotton-like cellulose dress fits snugly as a second skin. The material is very delicate, comprising micro-fibrils of cellulose. The colouration of the fabric will depend on the wine used, red wine - red fabric, white wine or beer - a translucent material. A fermented garment will not only rupture the meaning of traditional interactions with body and clothing; but will also examine the practicalities and cultural implications of commercialisation. This project redefines the production of woven materials. By combining art and science knowledge and with a little inventiveness, the ultimate goal will be to produce a bacterial fermented seamless garment that forms without a single stitch.

Another living art piece by Donna is  Fibre Reactive. Fungi, a material that has traditionally been used to dye cloth for centuries, is living in symbiosis with a dress. The living garment is encrusted with growing funghi. The project aims to raise questions about the commodification of living entities, the implications of manipulating living organisms and the production of biological art.

I will be blogging in the next couple of months more projects that are pushing the creative boundaries in material design.

The Electric Retina
by Jill Scott
http://www.jillscott.org

I'm facinated by Jill's work. On her blog she regards "the body" as "the society" and both are interfaces with players and interactive communities, who live not only in the evolving zones of physical reality but also in high-tech-spheres. Her works involve the construction of interactive media and electronic sculptures based on studies she has conducted in neuroscience.

The Electric Retina combines retinal research and interactive media art with metaphorical associations about visual perception. The work, a media- sculpture based on the study of photoreceptors and their neural behaviour, enables viewers to gain a greater understanding of how our visual and cognitive reactions are affected by genetics, disease and degeneration.

E-skin
http://www.e-skin.ch

Jill is also work on "E-skin" which is a set of wearable interfaces, which constitute our past and present http://www.e-skin.ch attempts to electronically simulate the perceptive modalities of the human skin: pressure, temperature, vibration and propioception. These four modalities constitute our biggest human organ, constantly detecting and reacting to environmental realities. The interfaces explore the cross-modal potentials of tactile and acoustic feedback, the enhanced orientation of cognitive mapping and the need to embody the interaction in the digital environment.

The Synthetic Kingdom
A Natural History of the Synthetic Future 
by Daisy Ginsbury

http://www.daisyginsberg.com 

BIOELECTRONICS: LUNCHTIMER
Using a synthetic oscillator called a REPRESILLATOR, these living timers are programmed to express the pink protein DsRed2 at lunchtime.

CMYK PLAQUE

Full set extracted from a 34-year-old man with poor dental hygiene. Replacing artificial colours, modified E. coli self-organise into dot-shaped biofilms used in pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs.

POLLUTION-SENSING LUNG TUMOR

Terminal pathology from female smoker, 64 years of age. Analysis identified a novel species of silicon fabricator containing DNA from Japanese carbon monoxide detectors (manufacturer’s DNA tag intact). A double disease: her lungs grew carbon monoxide-sensing crystals in response to the presence of pollutants in her lungs.

How will we classify what is natural or unnatural when life is built from scratch? 

Synthetic Biology is turning to the living kingdoms for its materials library. No more petrochemicals: instead, pick a feature from an existing organism, locate its DNA code and insert it into a biological chassis. From DIY hacked bacteria to entirely artificial, corporate life-forms, engineered life will compute, produce energy, clean up pollution, make self-healing materials, kill pathogens and even do the housework. Manufacturers will transcend biomimicry, engineering bacteria to secrete keratin for sustainable vacuum cleaner casings; synthesise biodegradable gaskets from abalone shell proteins and fill photocopier toner cartridges with photosensitive E. coli.

Meanwhile, we’ll have to add an extra branch to the Tree of Life. The Synthetic Kingdom is part of our new nature.

Biotech promises us control over the natural world, but living machines need controlling. Biology doesn’t respect boundaries or patents. And in simplifying life to its molecular interactions, might we accidentally degrade our sense of self? Are promises of sustainability and unparalleled good health seductive enough to accept such compromise?

Science as the artists muse.

We are entering an era in which artist inspiration comes, as never before, from the discoveries of modern science. Just as religious and mythological source had influence art before and during the renaissance, countless artists are now being moved by the need to capture the complexities and mysteries of modern world. If art imitates life, then art is an expression of beauty, the tragedy  and the complexity of human condition. Central to imitating the human condition is the need to explore our sense of place and purpose in the world. If the discoveries of science were detached from this calling, then one would never expect science to inspire creativity in the artist.

In many ways science and art are profoundly similar. The best of each rise up from the depth of human creativity, nurtured by an individuals commitment to and passion for the discipline.  In other ways science and art are profoundly different. Science is viewed as empirical and objective, art and speculative and subjective. It is easy to make the assumption that art and science contradict one another.  Yet in spite of this, artistic and scientific practices have many commonalities, collecting, archiving, observing, speculating, abstracting, modelling, experimentally examine and using analogies and metaphors. 

 The theories and discoveries of modern science will, prove limitless in their potential to inspire human emotion and wonder. So while the artist and scientist approach to  creativity, exploration and research can be seen in different ways and from different perspective, when working together they can open up new ways of seeing, expiring and interpreting the world around us.

This month i will blog a few examples of the many projects  that are created in a scientific context, the lab. Artist who are discarding more traditional materials for those of living cultures or transgenic organisms.

The tissue Culture and Art Project
by oron Catts and Ionat Zurr 

http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au

A prototype of stitch-less jacket grown in a technoscientific Body

By growing Victimless Leather, the Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A) Project is further problematising the concept of garment by making it Semi-Living.

The Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalised cell lines which cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stich-less coat like shape. The Victimless Leather project concerns with growing living tissue into a leather like material.

This artistic grown garment will confront people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protective and aesthetic reasons and will further confront notions of relationships with living systems manipulated or otherwise. An actualized possibility of wearing ‘leather' without killing an animal is offered as a starting point for cultural discussion.

Skin and the supple boundaries of self. 
by Peta Clancy. 
http://www.petaclancy.com 

C-type print, from the series "she carries it all like a map on her skin


Peta Clancy holding a bacteria drawing from "Visible Human Bodies"

The series, Visible Human Bodies where developed during the artist's residency with the Cell and Gene Therapy Laboratory at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. Visible Human bodies a series of photogrpahs of human figures drawn in Petri dishes using live bacteria. To make the figures Clancy dots pathogenic bacteria into a nutrient agar and incubates the dish for several days to allow the figure to grow. Like the latent photographic image, the figure drawing only becomes visible after a process of development in a suitable environment. Constantly changing as it grows, the bacteria can cause the figure to mutate in unexpected ways. These Visible Human Bodies consequently remind us that even in controlled environments, the body remains vulnerable and volatile - constantly transforming itself within ways which are beyond our control.

Her work also investigates the relationship between skin and the self by focusing on the delicate skin of the eyelids and lips. Notions of the eyes as windows to the soul, or the mouth as a space through which our emotions and thoughts are conveyed, problematically maintain the binary opposition between the body's inside and outside that Clancy seeks to unsettle in her work. To Clancy, her sense of bodily presence is embedded in the skin. As an organ of perception and communication the skin gathers and stores a range of emotional and corporeal sensations. "she carries it all like a map on her skin" address how these sensation inscribe themselves in the skin to form a map of physical and psychological traces on the body. Wether her engagement is with the skin or the microscopic forms that can so profoundly affect our lived experience, her photographs challenge us to consider some of the many ways that our sense of self is continually formed and reformed in a dynamic relation between culture and the body.

It's not easy being green.
by Eduardo Kac. 
http://www.ekac.org/specimen.html

 

Eduardo Kac engineered this transonic bunny with scientist Louis_Marie Hondebine and Patrick Prunet at the Biology of Development and Biotechnology Unit. Kac implanted and enhanced GFP gene in an albino rabbit, which normally has pink eyes and white fur, under and ultra violet light the rabbit glowed bright green. Unfortunately the research laboratory which censored the rabbit and refused to let Eduardo keep it. The artist then starts a campaign to liberate the rabbit and have it live with him in Chicago. My favourite action is the Alba Flag (2001) which he installed in front of his house to mark her absence.

2000 was a rather trubled year, people in France were still talking about the infected blood scandal , the mad cow disease, people were afraid of a future made of cloning and health uncertainties, digital doomsday, etc.The press jumped on the story but was actually more interested in the conflict between the lab and Eduardo than in the project itself.

Specimen of Secrecy is about Marvelous Discoveries is one of Kac's latest works. For the series, the artist made some "biotopes", living pieces that can be hanged on the walls of a gallery like a painting. Except that the works are living, they change during the exhibition in response to internal metabolism and environmental conditions, their exoskeleton is the frame. They are both subjects and objects. Each of them constitutes a self-sustaining ecology comprised of thousands of very small living beings in a medium of earth, water, and other materials. If you provide them with light and water, their color explode. The rabbit never left the laboratory but the bacteria of Kac's Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries could leave the lab, they are pet bacteria.

Hullabaloo and Oblivion

In NATURE? 

by Marta De Mendezes 
http://www.martademenezes.com/

Marta De Mendezes creates live butterflies with wing patterns never seen before in nature. The artist achieved this by interfering with the normal developmental mechanisms of the butterflies. The butterflies are simultaneously natural (their wings are made of normal live cells, without artificial pigments or scars) but designed by an artist. This work was performed during a residency in Paul Brakefield’s laboratory at the University of Leiden, in The Netherlands. The work was exhibited for the first time in Ars Electronica 2000, Linz, Austria.

Independant, emerging + experimental arts festival 1st - 5th October 2009

Newcastle Australia 1st - 5th OCTOBER 2009

http://www.thisisnotart.org/
http://www.electrofringe.net
http://criticalanimals.org/
http://soundsummit.com.au/
http://www.youngwritersfestival.org

I’m trembling with excitement, that warm fuzzy feeling at my first downunder festival! No wellies needed! Its going to be sunshine on the coast in Newcastle. Ok not the prettiest of shore-lines but it’s a beach and a supercharged convergence of writers, performers, thinkers, independent and industry musicians, creative researchers, electronic artists, dilettantes, and DIY culture makers in a showcase featuring over 400 local, national and international artists.

It has exhibitions, screenings, performances, panels, workshops, talks, gigs, interventions, live art and special events in five days of creativity and absolute madness! See you there.

Counterpoint, gray dawn and architect's brother.

Photographic images by Robert and Shana Parkeharrison.
http://www.parkeharrison.com

These images transcend a time or place, yet they tell a story that seems magical, they appear strange, wondrous and weird. They lay for careful analysis, the contrast and manipulation of reality, show in an extraordinary way - where anything is possible, yet they also seem to warn us of something, a post–apocalyptic moment. Concepts from our own world in new ways.

So while I’m trying to bridge my own concepts for a potential PhD subject, I can honestly say, I’m struggling with the weight of possibilities. I’ll take some respite from the suffering with these beautiful images. Supposedly narrowing the many themes that interest me is the hardest part of the PhD. So as I gather my own fuzzy logic, moving further to the edge of chaos in hope that some novel idea may present itself or at least an emergence of self-organised thoughts I’ll take inspiration from these images.