SPECULATING WITH CARE IN SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

Day02. Thursday July 8, 10:30 EDT

Technoscientific ‘fixes’ promise to tackle ecological cruises by engineering plants & animals to adapt to changing climate conditions. What if, instead of this anthropocentric approach, humans use genetic modifications to adapt to their changing environment? This talk introduces a collaborative and decolonial approach to speculative design, challenging us to reimagine a new kind of human condition & provoking new notions of synthetic biology driven by more-than-human ontologies and ethics of care.

Global warming advances two times faster in the arctic areas, threatening flora and fauna as well as traditional cultural practices such as reindeer herding. Technoscientific 'fixes' in the field of genome-editing promise to tackle the ecological crisis by engineering plants and animals to adapt to the changing climate conditions. These aims usually follow an anthropocentric approach, where 'nature' is genetically engineered to adapt to the human-made ecological crisis. What if on the contrary humans make use of genetic modifications to adapt to the changing environment?

This talk will introduce a collaborative and decolonial approach to speculative design, giving insights into an ongoing project with Oula A. and Leena Valkeapää. Both live and research in the wilderness of the northernmost fell region in western Finland, close to the arctic ocean. Oula A. is following the nomadic-based Sàmi herding tradition of his ancestors. In his everyday life the reindeer – not the human is central. The human is the one adapting to the reindeer movement and following them as a nomadic practice. Living in reindeer movement means adapting to the shifting natural phenomena including wind, snow, light, and dark.

Living and thinking with reindeer invites us to re-imagine a new kind of human condition in relation to nature and the shifting environments of the arctic. As the herder adapts to his reindeer - What if human optimization would mean to adapt to nature`s rhythm with biotechnologies? The project aims to provoke a new notion of synthetic biology, driven by more-than-human ontologies and ethics of care.

Emilia Tikka is a transdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher. Her current research focuses on re-designing human-nature-technology relations in technoscientific discourses and practices, focusing on synthetic biology and genome-editing technologies. Her research on design approaches focuses on re-framing speculative design as a collaborative and situated practice. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, in the Department of Design, and a Research Associate at Tampere University, Department of New Social Research on biomedical technologies. She is also an Artist in Residence in a two-year EU project Art4med at the Finnish Bioart Society. Emilia Tikka`s former affiliations include Visiting Scholar at Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin and Artist in Residence at the laboratories of Max-Delbrück-Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Her works have been exhibited internationally at Ars Electronica in Austria, New York University Arts Centre in the United Arab Emirates, Gregg Museum for Art and Design in the USA, Imagine Science Film Festival NYC, EMMA Museum of Modern Art in Finland, and Tekniska Museet in Sweden to mention a few.