On the eve of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, Chinese researcher
He Jiankui unveiled in a press interview the sensational birth of the first genome-edited babies, which have a modified
gene that apparently makes them immune to HIV.
This transgression of ethical standards and scientific
agreements marks not only the transition of Biology from an analytic to a synthetic science, but also the change of the human
body from a read-only to a read/write medium. Georg will talk about strategies and tactics to counteract CRISPR-edited futures
and will suggest possibilities for artistic responses to our shared mutated bio-future.
Georg Tremmel, lives and
works in Tokyo, Japan. He studied Visuelle Mediengestaltung (Visual Media Studies) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna
and Computer-Related Design (Interaction Design) at Royal College of Art in London. In 2001 he started collaborating with
the Japanese artist Shiho Fukuhara and in 2005 they founded BCL as an artistic research framework to explore the relations,
congruences, and differances of biological and cultural codecs through artistic interventions and social research.The projects
of BCL oscillate between proto-speculative design and conceptual BioArt; the artistic themes range from the mixed metaphors
of biological and computer codes to the legal and ethical frameworks governing life, the uneasy relationship of biohacking/biodesign/biowarfare,
and the connections between radiation, mutation, and genomics.
Currently Georg Tremmel is a project researcher at the
Laboratory of DNA Information Analysis at the University of Tokyo and visiting researcher at the metaPhorest Art & Science
platform at Waseda University. He is also the founder of BioClub, a community bio lab in Shibuya, Tokyo.
https://www.bcl.io