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Back in July, while i was visiting Documenta 12 in Kassel, i saw a 16-metre-long flower-bed raised above the ground, with 70 packets of seeds sprouting from the grass, each of them carrying worrying labels that documented the latest form of Colonialism: biopiracy.
Biopiracy describes a new form of "colonial pillaging" in which western corporations reap profits by taking out patents on indigenous plants, food, local knowledge, human tissues and drugs from developing countries and turning them into lucrative products. Only in few cases are the benefits shared with the country of origin.
Biopiracy targets particularly countries known for their exceptionally high level of cultural and biological variety: Mexico, India, Brazil, Indonesia and Australia. This process is also referred to as "internal conquest" in analogy to the "external conquest" of colonialism. In her Siegesgärten (Victory gardens, 2007) installation, Vienna artist Ines Doujak criticized the bio-politics of EU and the USA which turn a blind eye on the ruthless economization of nature and of life. The seed packets sprouting from the flower-bed informed visitors about global exploitation, genetic engineering and monoculture. On the front of the packets are photo-collages showing drag queens and kings and fetish secual practices set in exotic natural settings. On the back, the conditions and consequences of biopiracy are described and illustrated using real examples of the practice.
"We fear an increasing dependency on large corporations that seek to control global food production and agriculture by means of patents, from milk to bread and from baking grains to energy plants", explained patent expert Christoph Then (via no patents on seeds.)
This is an eye-opening book (at least for me). I don't think i'll ever shop the same way again. Except that it's not going to be easy. I can boycott a few cosmetics but how could i live without the giant which has been accused of being the "biggest threat to genetic privacy" for its alleged plan to create a searchable database of genetic information: Google? In her book, Doujak retraces many cases of biopiracy, while giving a context for the practice. In 1980, Ananda Chakrabarty became the first person to receive a patent for a transgenic organism, a bacterium he had engineered to digest oil. Previously, life forms had been excluded from patent laws. The landmark patent has since paved the way for many others on genetically modified micro-organisms and other life forms. 5 years later, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office allowed GM plants, seeds and plant tissues to be patented. And by 1987 animal patenting followed. Today even human gene sequences, cell lines and stem cells are permitted. Corporate interests can thus corner life forms for the lifetime of a patent and have a monopoly on their exploitation. With the advent of nanotechnology comes the rise of what the Captain Hook Awards call the nanopirates, those who claim ownership of the molecules and even the elements that everything is made from.
As Ines Doujak writes in the book: There is a clear distinction between research of public resources in the interest of all and corporate theft and privatization of the same resources.
The stories collected by the artists are fearsome, here's just a couple of them: - Genetic material from members of some indigenous communities in Brazil and Venezuela can be purchased for 85 dollars through the Internet. It is unclear whether the samples were obtained with the full and informed consent of the individuals and of the Brazilian government. Another issue is whether there are guarantees in place to ensure equitable distribution of the knowledge and profits generated from the samples.
Some of the cases described in the book are comforting, they show how organized action can reverse unfair processes. That's what happened with quinoa, a plant cultivated in the Andes for 6000 years. In 1994, scientists from Colorado University were granted a patent to a Bolivian species. This means they could also control the rights to any hybrids created using the Apelawa variety, including many traditional varieties grown by peasant farmers in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile as well as varieties important in Bolivia's quinoa export market. As the president of the Bolivian National Association of Quinoa Producers said at the time: "Our intellectual integrity has been violated by this patent," he said, "Quinoa has been developed by the Andean agriculturists for millennia, it wasn't 'invented' by researchers in North America." Protests proved successful: the patent was dropped in 1998. A second case with annulment of a questionable patent concerns the Hagahai people (Papua New Guinea). Their first contact with the outside world was in 1984. Viruses and illnesses resulted in this contact decimated the Hagahai to such extent that they were under threat of extinction. Foreign researchers administered the vaccination needed but also took some DNA samples (without their knowledge). They discovered that the people is immune to leukaemia and degenerative neurological illnesses. The genetic qualities of the Hagahai were patented in the United States. Worldwide protests led to the annulment of the patent. More images |
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The reason for my presence at etech08 this year was the "art fest" that i set up with the super nice and super smart Kati London, an itp graduate who currently works as a senior producer at area/code in New York and as an artist responsible for projects such as Botanicalls Twitter DIY and You Are Not Here. Brady Forrest had the idea to organize this first ETech Emerging Arts Fest and we are infinitely grateful to him. We had our friendly debates and doubts but he is the first person who listened to our complains that artists should be given a voice in all those big technology conferences. The theme of the event was "Awareness" and we selected works that bridged the gap between perception and understanding. In retrospect i realize that Brady selected the geekiest pieces, Kati (who actually did most of the work) chose the playful ones and i went for information visualization. Kati and i invited Brooke Singer to join us for a panel which attempted to illustrate the whole idea of awareness to the conference attendees. Because i'm never really interested in writing about my own presentations and because i've covered the work of Brooke several times (and will keep on doing so in the future), i'll just focus on Kati's talk. She gave me the authorization to publish her slides so here they are:
She compared artists to hackers, they are the one giving the one finger salute to mainstream technology, they have ideas, go against the grain and keep on pushing their own inspiration forward no matter the resistance. Today, we have more and more tools which empower people: OS hardware and software, library, there's also a revival of the DIY culture, Arduino and Processing are increasingly successful, etc. Suddenly being creative with technology becomes possible for a larger number of people. How does this spirit translate when we think about "awareness"? Kati then focused on several projects which, according to her, best embody the idea of awareness. 1. Invisible: Waste processes drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee, by Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley, includes an installation and a diy kit for turning your pee into fertilizer for houseplants.
What happens when we think of our bodies as their own ecosystems? Are they open or closed ecosystems? Where do we draw the boundaries? Before we take medication, do we ask ourselves how it will affect our internal organs, our friendly bacteria? What is our medication's future, beyond our bodies, in the sewage system and out in the waterways we swim in and eventually drink? What are the possible futures of our personal waste? What do sentient ecosystems eat and drink? Human urine is actually sterile (unlike faeces, it is bacteria-free) and it can be a rich food source if it gets into the right part of the right ecosystem. Now, most human urine travels untreated into the waterways and is a significant cause of eutrophication, a toxic condition caused by harmful algae blooms, in the oceans. The excess nitrogen and phosphorus in our urine overfeeds algae and suffocates fish. However, a biological waste treatment process developed at EAWAG Aquatic Research in Switzerland can extract this phosphorus & nitrogen for use as a fertilizer, leaving the rest of urine almost harmless to aquatic life. This kit gives users the opportunity to replicate the technique at home and fertilize their plants with their own pee.
The installation will be on view and the DIY kits will be available at the exhibition FEEDBACK at Eyebeam, March 13 - April 19, 2008. 2. Invisible: Animal Behavior Patterns Joshua Klein built a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins in exchange for peanuts. Crows are surprisingly (for me) intelligent. Their brain/body weight ratios are similar to chimpanzees. Look at the image below, seagulls don't get the vending machines but those smart little crows seem to understand that there's something worth their attention there.
Once he has fine-tuned the vending machine training, his plan is to train crows for search and rescue, picking up trash, and other mutually beneficial tasks (via boing boing). The machine is only the first step in his quest for "interspecies harmony." 3. Invisible: Social Connections
More fun with the video. |
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One more from the work in progress exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London. Tuur Van Balen, student of Design Interactions turned his attention to drinking water. Water service companies add fluoride to the water to reduce tooth decay, in the UK, in the US and other countries. It has also been said that the army in some countries added bromide to drinking water in order to quell sexual arousal amongst male soldiers. Male fish in some area turn female because the oestrogen in birth-control pills ends up in the river.
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment. The first chapter of this exploration of new biological interactions is dedicated to Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the work-in-progress-show at RCA, he offered tap water (kindly provided by Thames Water) and asked visitors to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. He added the samples and postcodes to a map of London which contains biological information. Because i liked his project a lot and wanted to make sure i wouldn't write anything too silly about it, i asked Tuur to give us more details about his research. I'm passing the microphone to him: The installation / intervention in the show is part of a bigger, ongoing project called My City = My Body. I'm interested in how cities are not as much made up by streets and buildings as they are made up by our behaviour and experiences. (The London of a design-student, cycling around from Shoreditch to South-Ken is totally different from the London of a banker in a black cab with his blackberry and a loft in Notting Hill) These experiences are heavily mediated by technology, just look at the way mobile communication networks totally reshaped our cities.
What I'm interested in, is how future technologies might influence our urban behaviour. We're on the verge of a new area, an area that relies on the understanding of our body and the understanding of our DNA. What does this mean for the cities of tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? ... The biological map in the interim show was an 'intervention' using the show as a platform to get feedback on these ideas. By gathering urine samples, I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to test the urine samples in the show. As England is the Mecca of Health&Safety, it was a struggle which took me up to Senior Management to even exhibit my project in this form ("Bio-hazard, sir!") Continuing this research, I'm trying to contact a laboratory to look at bacteria, how bacteria could be a possible way of transforming our biological waste into information (inspired by Drew Endy's BioBricks project) and what the consequences in our everyday lives could be... Thanks Tuur!
Images of the project courtesy of Tuur van Balen. |
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Previously: 24c3: The history of guerilla knitting. There's more links and images about the congress on MAKE.
Endy, co-founder of the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), came to Berlin with the hope that "the conferees of 24C3 will help me to understand how to best enable an overwhelmingly constructive hacker culture for programming DNA". Endy campaigns for a more open culture of biological technology, where biological engineering would not have to be confined to the laboratories of high-end industry laboratories. Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer. The DNA sequence information and other characteristics of BioBrick™ standard biological parts are made available to the public free of charge currently via MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Another video features Drew Endy discussing BioBrick standard biological parts and in this podcast he talks about open source biology. Oh! And don't miss the comic he worked on together with Isadora Deese & The MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group: Adventures in Synthetic Biology. |
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Currently at the NTT InterCommunication Center[ICC] in concrete-laden Tokyo is an exhibit devoted to nature’s inter-relationships within the ecosystem we share with plants and animals. Focusing on the interaction between plants, animals and humans, or this ‘invisible communication’ of nature which our senses might not always perceive, the works in the Silent Dialogue exhibition exhibited make those signals visual and audible through the use of biosensors as well as other algorithm-based software programs. Relying on such simulations, the works on display are a true fusion of science, design and art and provide a glimpse into the secret lives of plants while revealing more about the human effect and affect within the ecosystem we share. Investigating how plants, animals, or insects communicate and behave offered new perspectives to the effect of making us more apt to the signals our environment sends in an era of increasing interaction from humans and technology.
Call <-> Response by Tanaka Hiroya and Cuhara Macoto (who are working under the collaborative title, tEnt) simulates a natural environment for birds in an effort to derive and explore how they communicate. Attempting to communicate beyond human language, the software was designed to record, generate and layer simulated bird calls. Here, the coconut shell is fitted with a small speaker which emits varying bird calls via a continuous algorithm-based signal.
One of the most interactive works displayed was Bio Photon: Allelopathy by Ando Takahiro. As plants germinate and grow, photons are emitted from their leaves. They are invisible to our eyes but in his work Ando work visualizes the amount of photons via the discreet sensors which results in a hyper-sporadic display of flickering lights across the dome at light speed, if you will. Ando has intentionally set up two electric-current-generating for us, which upon touching, allow us to feel the currents that we couldn’t otherwise visualize.
Dogane Yuji, a botanist who has focused his research on orchids, collaborated with composer Fujieda Mamoru for Paphio in My Life, where the inaudible sounds of plants are picked up by connected wires then converted to manifest a plant’s ‘voice.’ As plants respond to environmental stress, simulated by varying vibrations induced by the artists’ algorithmic program, the plant’s ‘voices’ vary accordingly. By broadcasting such a dialog, Dogane hopes to bring us closer to plants through this glimpse into their life.
In Orchisoid 03, Dogane Yuji worked with renowned digital media artist Fujihata Masaki (some of his previous works include Unreflective Mirror and Beyond Pages) to better understand adaptation and homeostasis in plants. For this project, several orchids were again wired and set to experience a variety of vibrations from the shifting table they rest upon. The artists concluded that the physiology of the plants changed the same way as human brain wave patterns change in response to stress. And because the orchid’s wave-activity fluctuates in real time, rather quickly, Dogane recognized it as a sign of high-level information processing.
Also on display were Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's installation Interactive Plant Growing from 1992. Touch the plants and watch the screen fill up with a digital cascade of the plant’s leaves; still a great example of physical action into digital realization.
For a glance into the secret lives of mushrooms, Michael Prime affixed bio-sensors to various kinds of locally grown mushrooms to reveal a dialog we perhaps thought never even existed. From their docile setting in an aquarium, the bio-receptors broadcast the sounds of pulsating waves of noise through speakers in the installation space. The result- a surprising continuous drone that shifted tones rather sporadically revealing a brash, trance-like state of mushrooms- fascinating, surreal and surprising. Until February 17, 2008 at the NTT InterCommunication Center[ICC]. All images Courtesy of ICC. Fresh from our fruit & veggie aisle: Life Support Systems - Vanda, Night Garden, Post Patman, Upside Down Mushroom Room, Regulated Fool’s Milk Meadow, Living Letters, Real radish races on the net, Flora fights back, Plants racing for survival, etc |
Just as i was panicking that i wouldn't be able to post anything today because i had spent most of my time doing some silly shopping, enters 
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The birth of the category was motivated by the fact that people attending the festival were sometimes wondering where was the interaction of some pieces shown under the Interactive Art label, a clearer set of criteria was needed which would of course disqualify some interesting art pieces. The creation of the new category was thus the most obvious solution. Jens Hauser, art curator, writer, and member of the jury gave an insightful introduction to the category. It was one of those "Focus or take notes" talk. So i dropped my pen but here´s a few points: The results of a search of the word "hybrid" on google demonstrates that the biological origins of the term are increasingly used metaphorically and replaced by cultural examples of hybridity (cars, clothing, etc.) He pointed and discussed Brian Stross´ essay The Hybrid Metaphor From Biology to Culture. Hybrid Art received 470 entries for its first year of existence. The category is dedicated specifically to today’s hybrid and transdisciplinary projects and approaches to media art, focusing on the process of fusing different media and genres into new forms of artistic expression as well as the act of transcending the boundaries between art and research, art and social/political activism, art and pop culture.
Symbiotica offers undergraduate courses, postgrad programme, hosts individual short and long term research projects, workshops, "Friday Meetings. Symbiotica is also a founding partner of BEAP and pursues the research of Tissue Culture & Art Project. Some of the projects developed with the help of SymbioticA include: a dress made of fungi by by Donna Franklin (image on the left); BioKino, the Living Screen; collaborations with Adam Zaretsky, the Critical Art Ensemble, etc. Dr. Stuart Bunt, scientific director of SymbioticA, and Oron Catts explained how SymbioticA started as an artist in residence project and grew into a more stable structure as they were gaining recognition all over the world. They applied for more grants and had other artists come over to work with them. Interestingly, Ionat Zurr explained that they applied both to the art school and to the science school. The art community didn't accept them, it was the science school which gave them support. What makes their work appealing for the science world is that artists get more freedom to explore. In science you have to work towards an end point, to "cure", it´s not about doing research anymore, scientists are "problem solvers". Therefore, explained Dr. Stuart Bunt, artists are stimulating fits in this ethos. The critical edge they bring help scientists justify and constantly evaluate the scientific process. Artists often come up with provoking pieces which reminds scientists of the unease to work with living beings.
SymbioticA is very far off the radar, it is located in Perth, "the most isolated big city in the world", which apparently provides the artists with more freedom.
For the ars electronica exhibition, SymbioticA brought some artists with them (more info about these works will follow). The form of display used doesn´t go very well with the rest of the usually very "please touch and have fun" ars electronica exhibition. For example, one project was hidden behind the heavy door of an incubator. Occasionally the door would be open and visitors who happen to wander around could have a peek, this aims to be a reference to the occasional opening up of the scientific world. One of SymbioticA´s aims is to bring scientific discussions out of the laboratories and bring the debate out in public rahter than wait for tabloids to give their own take on it. Catts also insisted on the fact that although many the works developed within their structure might seem to be subversive, all of them comply fully with the rules and requirement of science. That makes their approach more powerful and gives them more freedom to work and exhibit without the fear of being censored for some procedural reason. rebel.tv has a video of Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts during the gala ceremony. Images from SymbioticA´s exhibition at ars. |
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Since its foundation in 2000, SymbioticA has enabled dozens of artists to engage in and comment on "wet technologies" while complying strictly with scientific requirements. The collaborative structure produces new cultural experiments in the field of neurosciences, molecular biology, anatomy physics, anthropology and ethics.
