Online Art Gallery Biography
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A cheesemonger were to offer you brie or a pungent stilton, and just as you reach for it, share a juicy detail—that she culled bacteria from her own armpit to make it—what would you do? Would you turn your nose up and politely decline? Or, what if a pet shop advertised transgenic mice, containing genes from celebrities? Would you be frightened, or more enticed to take one home? “Grow Your Own…Life After Nature,” an exhibition recently at Trinity College Dublin’s Science Gallery, features 20 works—all art projects as much as science experiments—that raise these questions and others just as bizarre. The show’s curatorial team of artists, designers, scientists and bio-hackers made an open call in the spring 2013 for projects that “move the public conversation about synthetic biology forward.” From the submissions, they selected visionary works that together show how a future where we can engineer life to fit our own needs might look and feel like.
“'Grow Your Own’ is all about what happens when you are able to design living organisms. Imagine you are actually able to take some sort of living creature and design it into a product. What would that look like?” says Michael John Gorman, director of Trinity College Dublin’s Science Gallery in a promotional video. In Selfmade, microbiologist Christina Agapakis and scent artist Sissel Tolaas collected bacteria from the mouths and toes (“where you get a lot of diversity,” Agapakis has said) of willing participants, including food writer Michael Pollan. They cultivated that bacteria and yeast in petri dishes and eventually combined them with milk to create farmhouse cheddar and whey cream cheese. Because the end products—actual hunks of cheese on display in the exhibition—are representative of each bacteria donor’s unique microbiome, the creators call them “cheese portraits.”
“We all know that cheese and body smells are very much associated,” says Tolaas, in a video produced in conjunction with the exhibition. Agapakis chimes in: “The bacteria that you find in between the toes is actually very similar to the bacteria that makes cheese smell like toes.”
Artist Koby Barhard’s All That I Am, also part of the exhibition, begs viewers to think more deeply about genetics. He bought hairs of Elvis Presley’s on eBay, had a lab sequence the DNA and another one actually take promotional video. In Selfmade, microbiologist Christina Agapakis and scent artist Sissel Tolaas collected bacteria from the mouths and toes (“where you get a lot of diversity,” Agapakis has said) of willing participants, including food writer Michael Pollan. They cultivated that bacteria and yeast in petri dishes and eventually combined them with milk to create farmhouse cheddar and whey cream cheese. Because the end products—actual hunks of cheese on display in the exhibition—are representative of each bacteria donor’s unique microbiome, the creators call them “cheese portraits.” genetic material from the hair and put it into mice. For the show, the mice are preserved in jars labelled "Elvis 01" and "Elvis 02." “I was trying to see how people would actually perceive it [the Elvis mouse],” explains Barhard in a video.
The pieces are playful, and yet they raise very serious questions. “Do we really want to create this?” asks Gorman. “Just because we can, does it mean we should?” The projects are controversial at their very core. They force us to think about the many potential applications of synthetic biology and stir up ethical and legal debates. Which applications are we comfortable with and which are too Frankenstein-esque for our liking.
Online Art Gallery Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Online Art Gallery Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Online Art Gallery Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Online Art Gallery Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
Online Art Gallery Pintings of Nature Abstract on Canvas for Kids Scenes Love Beauty and Environment Wallpapers Easy Scenery
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