What if humans were gene edited thousand of years ago? What if the gods were versed on gene-editing tools and we thought of their science as a supernatural force; the so-called Divine Providence?
Blog
Interactive Telecommunications Program [ITP Blog]
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
Midterm Ideas
-Post under construction-
At the moment I have two ideas:
1. A programming language for biology (inspired by Scratch), a gene editing tool simulator.
2. A voyager bacteria. Insert meaningful data on a bacteria. What if we don’t longer exist but want to be remembered, where to stored our history. Poetics on bacteria
[clumpsy] VJ
Free guns!
– Nathier Fernandez, Amitabh Shrivastava, Nick Wallace-
This was a simple project with a slight political tone. The sign read “Free (water) Guns! – No Background Checks!!”. We got 25 squirt guns and lay them on the table with this sign. Seeing adults turn into kids was well worth the effort!
The project had just two parts- the sign and the squirt guns. Perhaps unsurprisingly both had issues! The sign kept falling down in the wind and the quirt guns ran out of the water. We had to make runs for duct tape and water bottles. So, it was a humbling experience in field trials and being prepared.
4 stars- Will try again.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch [Group interpretation]
-Aidan Nelson, Alexandra Lopez, Nathier Fernández & Sam Hains-
One Simple Sentence
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is about a painful quest for wholeness.
One Complex Sentence
Hedwig And The Angry Inch is about repairing the sense of self which fractures in the face of trauma.
Three to Five Sentence version of the story
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is about a genderqueer rock musician retelling the story of her life on stage. She relives the pain of trying to find completeness through the conditional love of others: an emotionally absent mother, a botched sex change operation, and the betrayal of her musician protégé. We are left with a vision of an individual overcoming of the painful divisions in her self to become whole.
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Our world
This collage represents our current visual thinking about our world. We are considering a failed ‘norse mythological’ musical such as Beowulf or ‘Revenge of the Vikings’.
Image research
Hedwig’s stage
Failed musical [Norse mythology]
On stage setup/exit door [While Hedwig is making her show]
Inspiration
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Night rules this world, light is artificial, bright, hard and kitsch. Light becomes more natural and playful as we get into the world of memories and dreams [interiors], most of the time we are outside, space is open, cold, dark and wet. It feels abandoned, scars of conflict are visible on it.
Time goes linearly although it glitches from time to time. Time is like our main character frenetic, loud and sarcastic, it delivers raw and hard truths so fast that it takes us a bit to realize there are sadness and cruelty in this world, is a defence mechanism. It feels like we are in an edited flashback always.
The mood is created by the continuous monologue Hedwig is giving. The passive-aggressive interactions we see with the band members, Yitzhak, Hedwig’s mothers or others. No one is comfortable in their own skin or their current situation, we can feel it.
Wigs, makeup and heels are part of the picture, is not a world of drag queens but is close to it. Hedwig’s pass as a woman and she knows it but she is in between [scars of conflict are visible] gender without being completely one. The glam RocknRolla fades into an angry Viviane Westwood vision throughout the play, a modern-day child of the moon.
Glam Rock and Punk rock pours through every corner of this world; silences are not permitted. Noise in our characters heads, noise on stage. There are echoes of a better life in the sacrifices they take or demand from others.
Self-dictated rules vs rules of destiny. There is a song by Cage The Elephant, Ain’t no rest for the wicked that comes to my mind a lot while thinking about this world.
Oh there ain’t no rest for the wicked
Money don’t grow on trees
We got bills to pay, we got mouths to feed
There ain’t nothing in this world for free
Oh no we can’t slow down, we can’t hold back
Though you know we wish we could
Oh no there ain’t no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good
The world becomes louder and louder around Hedwig’s character, we are a bit dizzy. She starts to cracks and the sarcasm is crueller. This gives the opportunity to other characters like Yitzhak to come forward to the spotlight, soften the mood.
The light is still unnatural but more organic, it doesn’t feel abandoned but very much habited. Still loud but alive, instead than anger we have hope. Most importantly we fell comfortable and as Hedwig says at the beginning “ you legitimize me, ladies and gentleman, you really do” only that she didn’t need it others.
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This story is about self-love
This story is about a man who became a woman in order to find a better life, full of love.
This story is about a gay man that since childhood feels can only be complete until he finds his other half [love]. He falls for an American soldier that offers luxury goods, marriage and a ticket away from the Eastern block. The only way to fool the authorities is to be husband and wife, which ends in a traumatic sex reassignment surgery, a trailer home miles away, divorce, poverty, and music as a coping mechanism. He takes his mother’s name, dress and behaves like a woman obsessed with finding his other half falls for a younger man, thanks to her he becomes a famous rock star but denies their relationship publicly, especially denies being aware of her being transgender. Now Hedwig wants to tell her side of the story, who she is, prove all his song are hers. She is the talent but while she gets deep into her story, she cracks and her angry starts to fade, realizing there is no other half, she is her other half.
Lasso of truth Cornell Box
An emotional response to The lasso of truth play – Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s boxes
Gene editing [links and videos]
Gene editing:
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-crispr/
Videos:
http://video.wired.com/watch/crispr-gene-editing-explained
CRISPR to store information:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23017
Gene editing as programming language:
https://www.wired.com/story/biology-will-be-the-next-great-computing-platform/
Microscopes
Recently, I discovered an old project by Manu Prakash who has become a personal idol, mostly because of the social awareness aspect, plus democratization of the science in his work that makes him so inspiring. This project that I found is a chemistry set that works on a music box. I really appreciate how he’s constantly taking the physics behind long lasting and simple toys to create his project but also takes into consideration the material. An example will be his blood centrifuge and his foldscope. Can we get the classroom kit? Less than 3 dollars each one of us. How great would that be!! We could have our own paper microscope as a tool in the meantime for this class.
Gene drives [Topic: Gene Editing]
Topic: Gene editing
When I was little I was obsessed with the prospect of becoming a doctor, to be more specific a neurologist. I don’t remember how it happened but at some point in my life, I was allowed to see a brain surgery from the gallery of the operation room. I have to say that that day the obsession shifted; I discovered that more than being amazed by the technology and the skilful surgeon. For me, at that moment, that brain became a beautiful, powerful, delicate computer that was being butchered by a knife, and nevertheless, it worked and recovered from such a brutal experience!
Something similar happened after I had the opportunity of my own CRISPR experiment at Genspace. After our readings, I have to admit I was a little apprehensive and dizzy about the topic, sometimes the theory is overwhelming and the biology could be a hard friend to communicate with. At the moment I have too many thoughts about the genome editing, not only because is my topic but because for fortune, it was our first topic. The reading explained how it worked, how it was being discussed or approached around the world, the possibilities, the miscommunication behind it also. You get the idea of what gene editing is, what CRISPR represents in today’s labs and the future. But I don’t think you fully understand the scale of it until you are in front of a centrifuge with your own yeast transformation protocol.
More than amazed by the science (which is by no means smaller or less breathtaking) I was amazed by the possibilities of our bodies as humans, as mammals, eukaryotes, bacterias and viruses. No state is definitive for sure. I mean, we are going atomic and cutting DNA. Yes, is difficult and from trillions of cells a dozen will be actually cut, but the beauty is that it survives, it recovers and function as expected. Thanks to science we are able to transfer vital organs from one body to another, keep hearts alive in boxes for hours and know have atomic biological scissor. Not only that, recently I remembered the story of how CRISPR was used to store information inside bacteria, taking the uses of gene editing beyond the needs of health
There are some aspects that worry most people, for me, more than anything they make me angry. If the way pharmaceutical industries behave is any indicator, we won’t be seeing gene drives tackling diseases or on wild populations just for the sake of eradication. Money more than morals is gonna be the main protocol system of gene drives, any genetical diseases that only affect 1% of the population or any wild population affecting a population that lives in a state of poverty are not gonna be part of this rush we are hearing, maybe I’m just being pessimistic.