Making_Life

Lasipalatsi Näyttely gallery, May 2015

Your Synthetic Future

(At the Speed of Light)

Custom made hardware, Zeiss microscope with sample, computer, custom made software

Thierry Bardini, Laura Beloff, Erich Berger, Cecilia Jonsson, Antti Tenetz

During the 2010 world cup final of soccer, Paul the octopus foretold the victory of Spain over the Netherlands, as it had successfully predicted the outcome of all seven of Germany’s matches during the competition, thus proving once again, if needed, the excellence of octopomancy…

This piece modestly proposes to add to this longlasting series of well-established cultural practices, through the careful staging of magnetobacteriamancy (MBM hereafter).

In fact, we built a biocomputing machine that, without any human interpretation required, answers directly to the questions raised by the contingent futures of synthetic biology.

It was crucial to us to eliminate the human source of errors, the ideologies, the conservativeness and the resistance to change, and to let life itself answers these questions. Our device is thus an automatized mantic machine: there is no human mediation, no operator, between the answers provided by the machine and the truth seeker, the questioner.

Also, it seemed only fair that it was one of the most basic life forms on Earth, but also the beast of choice, the model organism of synthetic biology, i.e. the prokaryotes bacteria, that provided the answer.

more…Making Life Essay