Outreach

Brian and the Film Festival

In the early days of our project, when the end of Summer seemed impossibly far away and we could afford to spend time Googling things vaguely related to iGEM all day, we came across something rather interesting. BIO-FICTION, a film festival dedicated to Synthetic Biology that had been quite successful in 2011. Some of the previous entries ranged from the highly relevant iGEM entries, to the fantastic, to the just plain surreal.

And they were accepting submissions for 2014. With a deadline in ten days.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we entered,” we laughed. “Hahaha.”

Two days later we had a script. Seven days after that we had acquired a digital camera, and two days after that we had thrown together a stop-motion animated cartoon which we hoped would encapsulate our project.

Brian the bacterium had been born.

Brian was an Escherichia coli bacterium who just wanted to be able to talk to his buddies so that he could become more intelligent. He was the face of everything we were trying to achieve and was briefly our mascot. And we submitted him, questionable MSPaint edits and off-colour jokes and all.

Fortunately, we were then told the deadline would be extended until the end of August, and with the time available we were able to do our idea slightly more justice. Gone were the old-school white board animations – Brian was brought to life with a fancy digital white board, and he’d never looked better. On 31st August, we sent the new and improved Bacteria to the Future (we’re hilarious, it’s OK, we know) off to Vienna.

We’ve since learned that the judges have accepted our short film for screening, and will be judged in the actual event 23-25 October. As of the wiki freeze that is still in the future, but keep an eye out – Brian could make it big!

Here he is:

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Art

Getting an artist on board was something everyone had been keen to do from the very beginning, but since no artists actually applied for the team, that seemed to be the end of that plan. Fortunately, one of our supervisors was able to get his hands on an artist who was keen to work with us.

And so we met Frazer Salter, a local artist and graduate. Frazer was interested to learn what our project was trying to do, and to give his own interpretation of it. So we got together, chatted for a bit and we went our separate ways. Three weeks later, we were invited to his studio to see the finished piece for ourselves.

This was it. Frazer had decided to create a piece of art which expressed the field of Synthetic Biology as a whole, in new and unfamiliar ways. It was a man-made object, the frame of a boat, with a natural object, a tree, combined into one semi-synthetic statement. The boat had tendrils wrapped around it, so that it would continue to grow and essentially constitute a living object with an engineered function.

The art was shown in a special exhibit in August, which we were lucky enough to be able to attend.