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
