RCA-Curated Synthetic Biology Exhibition Strikes a Chord with Irish Public

Despite being targeted at a 15-25 age group, Grow Your Own, lead-curated by Design Interactions alumna Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, has struck a chord more widely with the Irish general public. Tourists, secondary schools, families and young professionals have been among the thousands of weekly visitors to the venue, which aims to bring scientists together with artists and designers. 

The exhibition, curated by a panel including Design Interactions alumna Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and head of programme, Professor Anthony Dunne, centres on the concept of synthetic biology, and its emergence as an innovative technology – a way of designing and engineering our machinery, our world and ourselves.

Ginsberg has worked with fellow curators Irish biohacker Cathal Garvey, founding director of the Science Gallery Michael John Gorman, and the co-founder and director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London, Paul Freemont – fusing very different viewpoints on what synthetic biology is and should be used for.

Lead curator Ginsberg said: ‘The challenge has been in building a show around a technology, which nobody really knows what it is. Neither is it a didactic exhibition – the Science Gallery doesn’t do panels about DNA.’

She added: ‘We had to present the range of debate. We have the engineer’s view of making biology programmable, repeatable and predictable, but there’s also a strong movement in DIY and making "synbio" more democratic. Coming with all of that are discussions around ethics, politics, safety, control, ownership and the tensions between the institution and the anti-establishment.’

The two-month exhibition features twenty pieces, a number of which use GMOs and are growing in the gallery space, while a community' lab, open to visitors, invites public participation. Newly commissioned and existing pieces include reverse-hacked carnations to modified worms and extremophile bacteria taking gold out of a solution.

A significant number of these are by RCA DI graduates: Ginsberg, Koby Barhad, Tobias Revell, Ai Hasegawa, Charlotte Jarvis, Stefan Schwabe and Agatha Haines. They have collaborated with artists including smell provocateur Sissel Tolaas, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Adam Brown, designers David Benque´and James King; and photographer Vincent Fournier. The Design Interactions programme, led by Professor Anthony Dunne, has been pivotal in cultivating an approach using design as a discursive tool, exploring the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technologies. 

'Speculative designers are particularly adept at confronting us with unexpected futures, and the work of Anthony Dunne and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and many of the designers in this exhibition exemplify this approach,' said Michael John Gorman, director of the Science Gallery. 

Among the exhibition’s more provocative pieces is Ai Hasegawa’s I Wanna Deliver a Shark, a proposal for broody women to give birth – not to their own offspring, which would fuel an overpopulated world – but as a way of incubating endangered species.

‘It’s a touchy subject, especially for a Catholic country like Ireland. It raises issues about surrogacy and what we have children for,' said Sarah Flanagan, lead on the show's mediation team, which acts as a public interface. 

The public has also been captivated by, and confronted with, exhibits that make it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. According to Flanagan, some visitors have been convinced that New Mumbai, a fictional documentary about architectural 'parasites' and the slums of Mumbai – is real. It's this tension between fact and fiction that helps give the exhibits, and their subsequent debates, impact.

According to Flanagan, the public has also 'furious’ about the copyright restrictions around commercially available, GM crops, highlighted by the piece, Flower Commons. Meanwhile, motivations around biohacking and genetic modification – consumerism, industrialisation, or conservation – have also proven topical.

‘People are concerned with the reasons and motivations behind a particular synthetic biology approach. They don’t see any bother with modifying animals to help them adapt to a changing environment, if it’s going to preserve them, but they are against biohacking for the sake of science, for example – the sort of privacy issues that come up in All That I Am,’ said Flanagan.

Ginsberg concluded: ‘Synthetic biology is entering its second decade and is still described in terms of dreams and nightmares – neither of which may come true. But if synthetic biology does power a twenty-first century biotechnical revolution, its effects will not only be scientific, economic and industrial, they will be political, ethical, ecological and above all, personal.’

The RCA’s Design Interactions programme has been working with the Science Gallery as part of a European framework grant, StudioLab – a three-year initiative bridging science, art and design through creative projects.

Grow Your Own at the Science Gallery, Pearse Street, Dublin 2, runs until 19 January 2014. Click here for more details.