Natasha VitaMore, DC The Planetary Collegium, CAiiA University of Plymouth, UK

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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN how biotechnology, generative
media, and other currents are changing creative
inquiry in the arts sciences
Natasha Vita-More, DC The Planetary Collegium,
CAiiAUniversity of Plymouth, UK
Third SENS Conference Cambridge 2007
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN how biotechnology, generative
media, and other currents are changing creative
inquiry in the arts sciences
What is it? A creative, innovative means by which
to
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN how biotechnology, generative
media, and other currents are changing creative
inquiry in the arts sciences
influence people, who influence culture, which
influences society, which influences the world
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
What is the Concept?
Media arts and design are crucial for building
social understanding and open-mindedness toward
anti-aging and extreme superlongevity.
How? Through generative, immersive and
interactive practices.
What does this have to do with SENS? What is the
connection?
Media art and design, by their very nature, are
already anti-aging constituents.
Why? Media art and design cause an emotional
reaction in people followed by inquisitive
inquiry and analysis of the experience.
What are the currents?
Past Decades of work in cybernetics to free mind
of material constraints.
Next Step? Work in biotech/immersive/design
media in exploring freeing the body from time
constraints.
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Why are media designers crucial to anti-aging?
Because of their capacity to move people
emotionally and often change they way people
think about the world around them.
How? By designing and implementing generative,
immersive, interactive experiences.
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Media Arts and Design
What is it?
That area of human physical and mental
experiences which influence environments to suit
individual and shared well-being.
What are its media?
generative, immersive, interactive media

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Tronic Studio LLC, Jesse Seppi, Vivian
Rosenthalwww.tronicstudio.com
Strength lies in ability to apply a conceptual
process to creativity.
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Tronic Studio LLC, Jesse Seppi, Vivian Rosenthal
www.tronicstudio.com
"Building Dreams " generative experience
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Experience to remember.
Ellen Sandor 2001
"Telomeres Project on Imminent Immortality"
interactive experience
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Alvaro Cassinelli Ishikawa-Namiki-Komuro Lab -
The University of Tokyo www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/mem
bers/alvaro/Khronos/
"Khronos Projector" immersive experience
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Alvaro Cassinelli Ishikawa-Namiki-Komuro Lab -
The University of Tokyo www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/mem
bers/alvaro/Khronos/
Visual manipulation of time gives us a first-hand
experience of what it looks and feels like to
reverse aging.
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Experience Design Group at Konstfack
To design time as immersive experience is to
envision, entertain, and forecast events. It is
to influence meaning and modify human behavior.
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BIOART
What are its biomedia?
Cell and Tissue Cultures
Bio-robotics
Synthesis of artificially produced DNA
Neurophysiology
Bioinformatics
Automorph
Homo-grafs
Transgenic
Xenotransplants
VivoArt
Revivification
Biotechnological / medical self-experimentation
Mendalian cross-breeding
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BIOART
Marta de Manderez
Although these patterns are determined by direct
human intervention, they are made exclusively of
normal live cells. As genes from the germ line
are left untouched, the new patterns are not
transmitted to the offspring. Therefore, this
form of art literally lives and dies. It is
simultaneously art and life.
"Nature?"
2000
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BIOART
Eduardo Kac
"MOVE 36"
cogito ergo sum
CAAT 01000011 cCATT 01001111 oCACT
01000111 gCAGC 01001001 iCCCA 01010100
tCATT 01001111 oCACC 01000101 eCCAG
01010010 rCACT 01000111 gCATT
01001111 oCCAT 01010011 sCCCC 01010101
uCATC 01001101 m
Move 36 concerns a plant whose genome
incorporates a new gene that Kac created. The
gene uses ASCII (the universal computer code for
representing binary numbers as Roman characters,
on- and off-line) to translate Descartes's
statement "Cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I
am) into the four bases of genetics. Move 36
was inspired the Kasparov/IBM Deep Blue computer
chess match in 1997. In Move 36 The plant
grows from an earth-and-sand chessboard where
chess computer Deep Blue made its subtle,
conceptual yet crucial move.The plants leaves
leaves curl due to the introduced genetic
modification.
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BIOART
"davidkremers"
We are the first generation of artists to face
the problem not of mortality, but of immortality.
The work, while stable, is neither dead nor
finished. It exists in a state of suspended
animation, and at any time the resin might be
removed, the plate scraped, fed, and placed in an
incubation room to grow to a new stage of
development.
Paraxial Mesoderm7 1999-2000 Microbes
genetically modified to produce enzymes.
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CONCEPTUAL / THEORY
Natasha Vita-More
Posthuman
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
But not all media art and design are used as
reliable sources and credible information to
influence people. Some are used to scare society
by exaggerating information for effect, creating
a heightened emotional response.
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critical art ensemble
Media art and design being used to discredit life
extension technologies.
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Identified Problems
Changing misconceptionsconcerning social
attitudes
Changing emotionalresistance to anti-aging
Changing negative prejudiceagainst anti-aging
advocates
Changing missing critical pedagogy
Changing the divide between knowledge and
nescience
Changing myths about aging
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Investigated
Creative innovators, especially trans-biological
artists and designers, might encourage people to
think about what to do when their life spans are
increased and eventually immortal.
Hans Moravec
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Media arts and design are crucial for building
social understanding and open-mindedness toward
anti-aging and extreme superlongevity.
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
Their relationship with society is built on
articulated human experiences, struggles, and
aspirations. This relationship acts as a guide
in establishing a languagenarrative and
symbolicfor how people look at and react to
innovative ideas and to their ways of own life
and their environment.
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BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
SENSStrategies for Engineered Negligible
Senescence
Thank you.
Third SENS Conference Cambridge 2007
Natasha Vita-More, DC The Planetary
Collegium,CAiiAUniversity of Plymouth, UK