Schmidt M Grain and Noise Artists in Synthetic Biology Labs 2024

Textbook in PDF format

The collaboration between scientists and artists in the form of Artist-in-Lab residencies may not only cause a productive disturbance for a day's work in the laboratory, but also reveal new ways of understanding. Research and science communication company Biofaction has brought together artists and synthetic biologists throughout Europe in a residence program that spans four truly cross-disciplinary collaborations. The contributors to this volume share their reflections of the dynamic frictions that occurred when their artistic and scientific worlds met.
These stories, where chemistry labs, tobacco plants, genetically edited bacteria, and new-to-nature enzymes collide with music, photography, film, and visual arts, infuse the ongoing dialogue between art and sciences with grain, noise, and synergies.
Introduction
Managing creative disturbances
Creative mis/understandings:
Expectations, outcomes,
and frictions in asymmetric
art/science encounters
Newcotiana
About
Artist x Laboratory
Tobacco: a mass of atoms, a biofactory,
and a generous friend
Tobacco research through different lenses:
reflections on the influences of art in science
Sinfonia
About
Artist x Laboratory
Making music with enzymes
Rewriting the symphony of life with synthetic
metabolism – can enzymes play music?
Madonna
About
Artist x Laboratory
Multiscalar forms of resistance: the molecular switch, the bacterium, the individual and the state
Towards a new covenant with nature –
starred by environmental microorganisms
Artist x Laboratory
Souls from the deep: a survey through
a sticky universe
Breathing life into inorganic alien matter
Afterword
Friction gains in art & science collaboration:
more than noise
Contributors
Image Credits