H U M A N

Human Practices

Entering the 21st century, all kinds of science and technology develop rapidly. But problems quickly became apparent: China's focus on fast-paced scientific research led to a lack of public reflection on technology and a lack of communication between scientists and the public. Scenes like this have led a large part of the public to imagine synthetic biology at odds with the facts, either associating it with Frankenstein or biological weapons, or to be extremely superstitious about biotechnology. In China, while GM technology helps mankind solve problems, it also faces a crisis of trust from the public. For the younger generation, there is a clear dividing line between humanities and science education in Chinese university education, making it difficult for each to have an effective dialogue.

In a way, artistic creation has unique value to science. Synthetic biology is a promising discipline, but as mentioned above, it has also aroused controversies in philosophy, ethics and other fields. New media art has a lot of cooperation with science and technology in recent years. Due to its pioneering nature and landscape nature, new media art can arouse public opinion and reflection on science and technology in a safe range and make the public calmly face the controversy that science and technology may bring. Art can be the first to touch the boundaries of thought that science cannot.

Likewise, science has a redemptive power over art. As art practitioners, we are keenly aware of the problems in the Chinese art world, that is, many works of art place too much emphasis on the critical and conceptual nature of the work, which leads to the inability to bring people emotional experience and moving. Art is Mired in emptiness. Nowadays, the scientific style is just a different kind of "sensory hair generator". The new technological revolution can bring new creative inspiration to art practitioners. The new materials and technologies brought by synthetic biology can provide materials for art creation.

Integrated

Human Practices timeline

The timeline not only explains what our hp is doing at a given moment, but also clearly reflects the feedback we receive from the outside world. Through continuous questions and feedback, our understanding of the project values has grown, and we have made continuous adjustments in our hp work and experimental work.

A

At the beginning of the project, the students of the School of Fine Arts were keenly aware of the open prospects of technological art as a new wave and wanted to make a proposition related to synthetic biology and related to art. Initially, we wanted to create a work of art that utilized synthetic biology technology to promote the connection between technological art and the general public. With this as the core of our team's humanistic concern, we began to form a team at the Academy of Fine Arts and recruit like-minded partners.

B

From October to November 2021, the initiator of CAFA-China，Shen Cong, started to advertise at the Central Academy of Fine Arts by giving a recruitment lecture.

Immediately afterwards, Mr.Zhijie Qiu gave a lecture called "Synthetic Biology Map" open to all Academy students in the classroom of the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. These two lectures opened up the possibility of combining synthetic biology and art for students of the Academy, and also provided a good model for the combination of technology and art.

C

The CAFA-china2022 team met for the first time on January 29, 2022, but how the project would be realized was still a question for us. At the same time, as an iGEM team composed entirely of artists, we knew very little about synthetic biology and did not know enough about the shapes and characteristics of microorganisms to know what could be done with them.

D

In order to solve the problem of art students who do not understand synthetic biology, from February 8 to March 18, 2022, we contacted Ms. Siyu Han from Bluepha Microbiology Lab to learn about synthetic biology.

2022.3.4, we invited Haoqian Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Bluepha Microbiology, to give a lecture on "Synthetic Life - Heavenly Creations in the Age of Life Technology" to introduce the penetration of synthetic biology into all aspects of society today.

In mid-April, we had an initial theme: to use synthetic biology to modify the behavioral patterns of a certain bacterium and then integrate them to form a microscopic theater of drama.

E

- On April 30,2022, we invited Mr. Hu Yilin, Associate Professor of the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University, to present a lecture on "Public Understanding of Science: Science and the Public in the Age of Acceleration".

After talking with Mr. Hu, we realized that the relationship between science and the public is not a one-way output of science popularization, which made us more cautious about science popularization and pay more attention to its authenticity and its suitability and interactivity with the audience.

F

From April 24, some team members came to the Blue Crystal Microbiology Lab in Beijing to learn about the operation of the experiment.After this period of training, we developed a more confident visualization of the possible effects of the experiments and developed a series of possible themes and experimental lines for the "Theatre of Life".Technically, we interacted with the Once team to collect microbial species with interesting behavior and easy editing.

At the beginning of May, we cooperated with two teams, Tsinghua and Peking, and the alliance was named "Tap Synbio-art Creation Workshop", and shared and exchanged ideas with each other.

G

On May 7, 2022, Mr. Hanbin Deng, professor of Hainan University, theater actor and director, gave a lecture on "About human 'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' - Art and scientific thinking Dialogue and Cooperation". After talking with Mr. Deng, we realized the differences between artistic and scientific thinking, and that to bridge these two types of thinking, we need to share and respect each other's knowledge and methods on both paths. And it is easy to have a bias in the artworks of science and technology art, that is, the discourse in a work always favors one extreme of science and technology and art, while the other end has to resign itself to a subordinate position. We need to recognize and break this situation, so that we can promote the "harmony" between technology and art to the public.

H

It was also gratifying to see the initial results of our education and communication efforts, as the WeChat official account "CAFA iGEM", continued to receive illustration submissions from students and alumni of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

In order to further expand the impact of our publicity work, we conducted a multimedia campaign, producing videos to upload on Bilibili and posting the content on international social and media platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram.

I

After the experimental route was decided, we went to Shanghai in August to discuss the project values and the rationality of the experimental design while advancing the implementation of the experiment. During the project, we met people from various industries, listened to their sharing and suggestions, and made improvements to the project.

Our collaborators were very helpful during this period. Bluepha and BNSC_China provided us with a lot of help during the experimental process,such as discussions on HP.

In terms of visual presentation of experiments, After much discussion, we decided to use the blue solution as tears in the experiment, and introduce the mythological pattern and context of the Eye of Horus.The visual beauty of the spectacle is contrasted with the microscopic "tragic" death of life, which provokes people to think.

J

Note: More details of the lectures mentioned above： Education and Science communication

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