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This project explores how pigeons can serve as a (open source) platform and interface for synthetic biology in an urban environment. By modifying the metabolism of pigeons, and specifically the bacteria that live in their gut, synthetic biology might allow us to add new functionality to what is by many seen as flying rats. This would happen through feeding the pigeons special bacteria and would be as harmless to them as eating yoghurt is to us.
The first part of this project consists of a contraption that would allow these pigeons to become part of your house, part of the architecture. This pigeon house is attached to your windowsill and allows you to feed the pigeons, separate and select them and direct them through different exits.
Further on, the project will proceed investigations into pigeon-metabolisms and attempt to create bacteria that would allow a pigeon to defecate biological soap.
Synthetic Biology's potential to make healthcare more personal and participatory might turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists; constantly monitoring and tweaking our body. It might even allow to externalise our immune system by outsourcing metabolic processes to external micro-organisms. These micro-organisms, for instance yeasts, sense and diagnose anomalies in our body to produce and deliver chemicals accordingly. Such a Synthetic Immune System would be tailored to one's genetic predisposition, age, lifestyle and therefore risk.
Only a small amount of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we swallow are taken up in our bloodstream, most of them pass through our bodies into the city's wastewater. Since wastewater treatment plants are not designed to remove pharmaceuticals, the contents of our medicine cabinets eventually end up in the drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food we eat and the drugs we take.
I branded tap water from three different areas: Notting Hill tapwater benefits from the highest density of organic shops, tapwater in the city of London is enhanced with various stimulants and Golders Green 'produces' a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.
This branded tap water was then sold on a sunny Saturday morning on Broadway market and people were asked to also put their tap water on the map, speculating it's special qualities. On the project website, people also added stories about their tap water to the map. The result is a new map of London, revealing potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.
This is part of the 'My City = My Body' project, a design research project on how the rise of bio-technologies might influence our future interaction with the city. In this part, I created a series of public interventions to critically engage the audience in a future scenario, balancing fiction and reality.
download the big map (A0)
visit the project website on www.londonbiotopes.com
'Urban biogeography' is the study of the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time. Maps and data of these urban biotopes might influence property prices, council tax or the cost of your health insurance. Urban biogeography enthusiasts, both amateur and professional, make use of emerging technologies to measure local city-body ecologies. One of the techniques often used is 'sewage monitoring'. This tool allows one to pump up a tiny amount of sewage into the little bottles and scan it for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, all without even having to lift a manhole cover.
The tool uses synthetic biology* to detect oestrogen, anti-biotics, viagra or prozac: modified bacteria-solutions in the bottles change colour when detecting the chemicals or hormones. Since synthetic biology is both open-source and modular, the tool's functionality can be extended by downloading the DNA code for other detectors from a database on the internet.
This is part of the 'My City = My Body' project, a design research project on how the rise of bio-technologies might influence our future interaction with the city. In this part, I used this speculative scenario and fictional application of synthetic biology as a starting point for collaboration and confrontation with the department for Bioengineering at Imperial College in London. Many thanks to James Chappell and Vincent Rouilly at Imperial college for the bioengineering and introducing me to the wonderful world of Synthetic Biology.
Frank Derryl produces special cells in his body. He inherited this from his father, who mysteriously disappeared after his refusal to cooperate with a big pharmaceutical corporation. When Frank finds out about his special powers, he decides to use them and becomes AntiBodyMan.
Dressed in a suit and mask that help him harvest the antibodies he produces, AntiBodyMan moves around the city to fight the engineered viruses, dna stealing parasites and other pandemics produced by his enemies.
Superheroes reflect on our interaction with the city and embody society's dreams and fears about technologies. This project explores how the technologies emerging out of laboratories today might shape the superheroes of tomorrow.
A big fan of AntiBodyMan, Isaac hardly takes his costume off, even when he goes to the supermarket.
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Thanks to Jamie Tiller for the photographs and Bali Engel for the illustrations.
Download the comic here
My City = My Body is part of ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city. The increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will fundamentally change the way we interact with each other and our environment. Today, DNA is a tool for identification, you can have your DNA analysed over the internet and we are creating new types of bacteria by reprogramming its DNA. But what does this mean for tomorrow? Will we have DNA-surveillance and discrimination? Bio-identities and communities? And what will our new interactions look and feel like?
In search for these new biological interactions with the city, I started looking into Thames Water, London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company'. Making use of the Design Interactions work-in-progress-show, I staged an intervention, creating a map of London which contains biological information. Offering tapwater (kindly provided by Thames Water) I have asked visitors to donate a urine sample and give me their postcode, extending my biological map of London. Collaboration or not, it was often in the questions or laughs afterwards that interesting reactions came up.
[This is a part-time project for Intel, researching and illustrating 'The Future of Money']
When you go out for dinner and you pay the bill with your card, there will always be that awkward moment where the waitress asks whether you want to leave a tip. Compare this to casually leaving the change on the table or tipping a bellboy with a folded note in your handshake. It seems as if the more our money becomes invisible, the more elaborate, orchestrated and explicit the transaction becomes. To illustrate this paradox, I made three filmclips, starring an object which allows you make your electronic transactions more subtle and bring back a bit of the comforting ambiguity of hard cash.
click 'read more' to see the films.
Until now, action to improve the lives of children and young people has tended to focus on the institutional spheres of home and school. Yet quality of life also depends on the access to and quality of shared resources such as streets, parks, town centres and playgrounds. And here, in the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. In the pursuit of sustainable communities and urban renaissance, children and young people are too often left out of the script.
This is the point thinktank Demos makes in their latest report 'Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people'. To launch this report, Demos organised an event with Lord Richard Rogers and the Rt Hon Beverly Hughes MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families.
I was asked to make the content of this report more tangible. Working in collaboration with Revital Cohen, we made a subtle intervention in the street in front of the event. Based on the way the lines drawn on the street tell us how to behave in a public space, we created an abstract pattern of more playful lines. By mixing different game-structures, words and objects, the installation still prompts playful behaviour but doesn't impose a closed set of rules.
In 1950, Alan Turing described what later became famous as the 'Turing test': a proposal to test a machine's intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine has passed the test. Since the 50's, no machine or computer has ever passed the test.
Angelina sings a version of Yesterday, created through several computer-translations. Project with Catherine Kramer and Steven Ounanian.
click 'read more' to see the film
During my internship at Demos, a London based thinktank, I worked on the Bristol Urban Beach project. With the help of 800 tons of sand, some deckchairs and a stage, a ran-down carpark got transformed in a temporary urban beach. The beach was an experiment after the publication "People make places". More than a place, the beach was a platform: access was free and there were a lot of events going on, both organised by Demos and the people of Bristol. To support this, we created a website where people could announce their yoga-classes or exchange pictures.
The beach made all of us think about the value and possibilities of public space, putting pressure on the developer of the site to focus more on the public realm. The Architect’s Journal, a leading independent architecture magazine, wrote an article on the Bristol Urban Beach. It praised the influence of the Urban Beach project on the future development of Redcliffe Wharf, an iconic site steeped in history.
