Team:ArtCenter MDP/Notebook

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research

Week 1-2:
“...[Scientists are] embracing a wider vision of nature managed for a wider array of goals. Instead of focusing on the past, they are looking to the future and asking themselves what they’d like it to look like.”

Because we are outside of the field of synthetic biology we began by immersing ourselves in it, reading: Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature is a Post Wild World, J. Craig Venter Institute's Press Release “First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell,” Oron Catts and Gary Cass's “Labs Shut Open: A Biotech Hands-on Workshop for Artists” to name a few. This helped us gain a better understanding of the emerging research and conversations within synthetic biology. Generally everything we read blew our minds, everything was interesting! So this was really our research challenge as designers, where or what can we most effectively contribute to the field? What conversation can we offer another perspective to? Thank you Christina Agapakis and Ben Hooker for sources.

brainstorming

Week 3-5:

The team collaborated through a series of brainstorming sessions. Each person discussed their research. Through a series of white boarding sessions we developed a set of categories or groupings that helped identify where our research and interests overlapped:


Culture Reserves / Modeling Life:

  • human mediation in nature
  • the managed wilderness, perpetual weeding, perpetual watching
  • generating divergent ecosystems by accident - animals migrate
  • conservation, restoration - we recreate it ourselves
  • site specific
  • what is from scratch?

    • Ecosystem Design / Rewiliding & De-Exticntion:

  • diversity occurs in unfamiliar places
  • extremophiles
  • “sanctuaries”,designing new ecosystems
  • the food chain
  • lack of predators
  • introduced animals are fenced in

    • Evolution / Time & Scale:

  • a slow learning process, we wish we could speed it up
  • compete, react, evolve, migrate and form new
  • a balance of life and death
  • human time vs microbial time
  • what are times for simulation, slow vs fast, the sims
  • lab scale vs life scale
  • evolution and repercussions

    • Coding Life / Using Nature to Carry Out Human Processes:

  • programming nature
  • game interfaces and the sims
  • dna as code/ using digital worlds and code to create
  • unity as our biobricks
  • copy and paste making it easy for people to produce, “childs play”
  • outside the lab, outside the gallery, garage labs
    		•

    questions

    Imagine huge bodies of water, giant ponds and lakes and just below the surface are trillions of organisms working 24/7, eating plant life and producing gasoline. - George Church, envisioning future synthetic biofuel production.

    As we developed our concepts certain questions kept coming up for us:

  • How could we use the process of generating simulations to expose new ecosystems to lead to additional research questions and concepts?
  • What concrete/real projects and behaviors could we use to make an interesting/engaging combination? environments/narratives surrounding existing synthetic biology projects, like electronics into gold, or glow in the dark [insert animal] ect. what happens when you combine these and they exist together in the same place? bacteria spreads.
  • How can we manipulate time? Could we expose future implications from this and design new questions/systems/objects ect. based on a simulation? set real world behaviors to live and exist in a digital environment at human scale?
  • What are the rules of the worlds that we are simulating?
  • Using / starting with UNITY/GAMING ENVIRONMENT can we simulate existing synthetic biology projects created in the lab and release them in a simulated "living" world? Does this help complicate the discussion around synthetic biology projects? What if that project is released into the wild? What are the unexpected new ecosystems / environments / sites / and interactions that would be generated through this simulated evolution?
    		•

    concept development

    Week 5-6:

    We developed a concept focusing on previous work in genetically altered algae for the use of biofuel production.

    design

    The ecosystem surrounding the pool became our site for investigation.

    site visits

    Based on advice from our advisors, we started to grow our own algae as a way to prototype and simulation our localized fuel production model.

    simulation 1

    simulation 2

    Simulation 2

    so.cal. igem meetup

    Over the summer Media Design Practices hosted the Southern California iGEM meetup.

    observations

    You should make use of the calendar feature on the wiki and start a lab notebook. This may be looked at by the judges to see how your work progressed throughout the summer. It is a very useful organizational tool as well.

    insights

    You should make use of the calendar feature on the wiki and start a lab notebook. This may be looked at by the judges to see how your work progressed throughout the summer. It is a very useful organizational tool as well.

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