>>Critical Zones<< Discussion of the film •Story Telling for Earth Survival• ZKM||| Karlshure
>>Critical ZOnes<<
Discussion of the film:
Story Telling for Earth Survival
ZKM||| Karlshure, June 2020
With: Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel
Christina Agapakis: What Happens When Biology Becomes Technology?
In her art and scientific work, Christina Agapakis blurs the boundaries between nature and technology to practice a new kind of engineering, taking into account both human and cultural forces.
“We’ve been promised a future of chrome — but what if the future is fleshy?” asks biological designer Christina Agapakis. In this awe-inspiring talk, Agapakis details her work in synthetic biology — a multidisciplinary area of research that pokes holes in the line between what’s natural and artificial — and shares how breaking down the boundaries between science, society, nature and technology can lead us to imagine different possible futures.
Why you should listen
In the lab, Christina Agapakis has worked on enzymes involved in the production of biofuels and mapped the evolution of microbial communities in the soil. As an artist, she’s isolated halophilic bacteria from California’s Salton Sea and made cheese from bacteria living on human skin.
As creative director of the biotech firm Ginkgo Bioworks, Agapakis works to establish more open, equitable and renewable technologies.
Andrew Pelling: This scientist makes ears out of apples
TED Fellow Andrew Pelling is a biohacker, and nature is his hardware. His favorite materials are the simplest ones (and oftentimes he finds them in the garbage). Building on the cellulose structure that gives an apple its shape, he “grows” lifelike human ears, pioneering a process that might someday be used to repair body parts safely and cheaply. And he has some even wilder ideas to share … “What I’m really curious about is if one day it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen,” he says.
Why you should listen
Scientist, professor, entrepreneur and TED Fellow Andrew Pelling has built a career on unapologetic curiosity, creativity and serendipity. He is a professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa where he founded and directs a curiosity-driven research lab that brings together artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers. The lab uses low-cost, open source materials and methods to explore speculative living technologies of the future. He has created human body parts from plants and grown living skins on LEGOs — innovations with the potential to replace prohibitively expensive commercial biomaterials.
Pelling is cofounder and CSO of Spiderwort, a company developing innovative plant-derived biomaterials and medical devices for reconstructive surgery and regenerative medicine. He also founded pHacktory, a street-level research lab in Ottawa that amplifies community ideas through a potent mixture of craft, serendipity and curiosity.
Pelling’s work has been in the international media spotlight for many years and recognized in outlets such as Wired, Huffington Post, NPR, Scientific American, Popular Science, BBC, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle and others, as well as numerous highlights in the Canadian media and Scientific media. He was named a TED Fellow in 2016.
Ellen Jorgensen – What you need to know about CRISPR
Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public. Should we bring back the wooly mammoth? Or edit a human embryo? Or wipe out an entire species that we consider harmful? The genome-editing technology CRISPR has made extraordinary questions like these legitimate — but how does it work? Scientist and community lab advocate Ellen Jorgensen is on a mission to explain the myths and realities of CRISPR, hype-free, to the non-scientists among us.
Why you should listen
In 2009, after many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotech industry, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, Jorgensen founded Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Despite criticism that bioresearch should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive, providing educational outreach, cultural events and a platform for science innovation at the grassroots level. At the lab, amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen’s own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily. Fast Company magazine named Genspace one of the world’s “Top 10 innovative companies in education.”
What others say
“Ellen Jorgensen is helping to democratize biology—making it less the purview of academics and Big Pharma and more an enterprise accessible to anyone who wants a hands-on scientific experience.” — Discover Magazine, October 2011
Ellen Jorgensen – Biohacking, you can do it too
Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, bringing scientific exploration and understanding to the public. We have personal computing — why not personal biotech? That’s the question biologist Ellen Jorgensen and her colleagues asked themselves before opening Genspace, a nonprofit DIY bio lab in Brooklyn devoted to citizen science, where amateurs can go and tinker with biotechnology. Far from being a sinister Frankenstein’s lab (as some imagined it), Genspace offers a long list of fun, creative and practical uses for DIY bio.
Why you should listen
In 2009, after many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotech industry, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, Jorgensen founded Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. Despite criticism that bioresearch should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive, providing educational outreach, cultural events and a platform for science innovation at the grassroots level. At the lab, amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen’s own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily. Fast Company magazine named Genspace one of the world’s “Top 10 innovative companies in education.”
What others say
“Ellen Jorgensen is helping to democratize biology—making it less the purview of academics and Big Pharma and more an enterprise accessible to anyone who wants a hands-on scientific experience.” — Discover Magazine, October 2011
Louise Fresco [Wageningen University] – We need to feed the whole World
A powerful thinker and globe-trotting advisor on sustainability, Louise Fresco says it’s time to think of food as a topic of social and economic importance on par with oil — that responsible agriculture and food consumption are crucial to world stability.
Louise Fresco shows us why we should celebrate mass-produced, supermarket-style white bread. She says environmentally sound mass production will feed the world, yet leave a role for small bakeries and traditional methods.
Why you should listen
As food, climate and water crises loom, Louise Fresco is looking hard at how we cultivate our crops and tend our livestock on a global scale. An expert on agriculture and sustainability, Fresco shows how cities and rural communities will remain tied through food, even as populations and priorities shift among them.
A former UN director, a contributor to think tanks and an advisor to academies in Europe and the United States, Fresco has noted how social unrest is made worse by hunger, poverty, environmental problems — and modernization. Responsible agriculture “provides the livelihood for every civilization,” Fresco says, but adds that mere food aid is not a solution to world hunger. She hopes that smart, local solutions for food production will improve war-torn areas and ease the pressures of regulations on production.
Fresco teaches at the University of Amsterdam, writes on policy and economics for the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad and is also a popular novelist.
What others Say
“There is no technical reason why we could not feed a world of nine billion people. Hunger is a matter of buying power, not of shortages.” — Louise Fresco, NRC Handelsblad
Koert van Mensvoort – Meat the Future
As the planet’s population speeds towards 9 billion, it becomes impossible to continue consuming meat like we do today. Some scientists believe in vitro, or cell-cultivated, meat is a sustainable and animal-friendly solution. But, before deciding if we are willing to eat meat from the lab, we need to explore the food culture it brings us. Dr. Koert van Mensvoort takes the stage to explain exactly what in vitro meat is, alongside an entertaining exploration into its creative potential – including Dodo nuggets and meat ice cream.
Suzanne Lee – Grow Your Own Clothes
Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based material that can be used like fabric or vegetable leather to make clothing. The process is fascinating, the results are beautiful (though there’s still one minor drawback …) and the potential is simply stunning.
Why you should listen
TED Fellow Suzanne Lee is a fashion designer turned biofabrication pioneer who is nurturing a global community of innovators growing materials.Suzanne Lee is the founder and CEO of Biofabricate, a platform nurturing collaboration for design and biology to grow the future of sustainable materials for consumer products. Biofabrication is highly disruptive new technologies enabling design to intersect with the building blocks of life itself. For the last five years, Lee has been the chief creative officer of Modern Meadow, a New York-based biotech startup growing collagen to manufacture animal-free bioleather materials.
Lee’s groundbreaking book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe, was the first to articulate the future of fashion through science and technology. It remains a key text for designers, scientists and engineers wanting to glimpse the future of wearable technology.
Suzanne Simard – How trees talk to each other
A forest is much more than what you see,” says ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery — trees talk, often and over vast distances. Learn more about the harmonious yet complicated social lives of trees and prepare to see the natural world with new eyes.
Why you should listen
A professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences in Vancouver, Suzanne Simard studies the surprising and delicate complexity in nature. Her main focus is on the below-ground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate underground inter-tree communication and interaction. Her team’s analysis revealed that the fungi networks move water, carbon and nutrients such as nitrogen between and among trees as well as across species. The research has demonstrated that these complex, symbiotic networks in our forests — at the hub of which stand what she calls the “mother trees” — mimic our own neural and social networks. This groundbreaking work on symbiotic plant communication has far-reaching implications in both the forestry and agricultural industries, in particular concerning sustainable stewardship of forests and the plant’s resistance to pathogens. She works primarily in forests, but also grasslands, wetlands, tundra and alpine ecosystems.