We engaged in several education and communication outreach activities. This page document 2 of them :

• A public event targeted at a young audience for familiarisation with basic concepts in synthetic biology
• A 2-day master class and workshop event around the subject of arts and science

About

In close collaboration with Dr. Helena Shomar, our mentor in the competiton, we organised a 2 day event at the Learning Planet Insittute (LPI) around the subject of Bio-Arts and design. The event was in 2 parts : A master class and a full day of workshop on creative coding.

For the Master Class, we invited :

• NSDOS, a French Electronic musicien who’s work is rooted in techno-bio hacking, martial arts, electronic music, and is directed toward the conception of a new, technologically mediated, sonic order and approach to music. He can’t restrain himself to existing tools and hardware and prefers creating his own media: futurist instruments made of reconverted machines and custom interactive software manipulating living organisms in live performances and music production. His work have been internationally exhibited.
• Liubov Tupikina, a new media artist and network researcher at the Bell La and fellow at the LPI. Liubov work touches upon the questions of critical urban ecology and political systems.
• Leo Blondel, a Life science researcher at the LPI and artist whose work focus on morphogenesis

Around 50 persons came to this event

Fig 1: Cover of the Facebook Event

The master class

The presentations of the guest work were followed by a panel session where members of the audience and our guest discusse questions around the idea of interfacing with biology either in the context of new media arts or urban practices.

Of these conversation, a specific consideration for the need to create tools enabling bio-cultural practices emerged. Indeed if NSDOS praise for the chaotic signals emerging from biological sources in the process of producing music, creating these interface beyond the visual layers (not only using cameras to track motion) and closer to the molecular level, remain extremely challenging. We discussed the opportunity brought by an Electro-genetic toolkit with the audience.

Fig 2: a debugging scene at The ORCA Workshop

The workshop on creative coding

The second part of the event was a full day of workshop on creative coding where 30 participants joined us at the LPI’s Maker lab (a fully equipped electronic workshop) for an introduction to ORCA (an esoteric programming environment designed for real-time live coding music production) taught by NSDOS.
The morning session was foccussed on getting familiar with the programming environment while the afternoon was dedicated on creative exploration. Among things that were tried, a special interest was placed on interfacing with bio-sensors (such as the Moveuino developped at the LPI) and lab equipment (we managed to control an OpenTron cartesian pipeting robot with ORCA through a music production pipeline)

Fig 3: The Masterclass ath the LPI Anphitheater. From left to right: Libov Tupikina, Leo Blondel, NSDOS, Michael Sedbon, Helena Shomar