Shifting Perspectives: A cinematic dialogue about Synthetic Biology in a more-than-human world

The short experimental film Shifting Perspectives stems from a collaborative research project initiated in 2019 in Sydney, Australia, during the ‘Choreographic Hack Lab—a week-long laboratory co-presented by Critical Path and Sydney Festival in partnership with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), which asked artists and academics to reflect and respond and rethink to the idea of the Anthropocene (Pini & George, 2019). The film was later developed in 2020 during a Responsive Residency at Critical Path, Sydney, awarded to anthropologist and choreographer Sarah Pini in collaboration with Jestin George, biotechnologist and visual artist, and Melissa Ramos, visual artist and filmmaker.This work aims to open a multivocal interdisciplinary dialogue across screendance, performance and synthetic biology. Inspired by a recent conversation between two leaders in the field of synthetic biology (Sarah Richardson and Tom Knight) and their divergent approaches to working with microbial life (Agapakis, 2019), the film invites to consider how collaborating with microorganisms can reshape our future in a more-than-human world. 

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The Study Team for Early Life Asthma Research (STELAR) consortium ‘Asthma e-lab’: team science bringing data, methods and investigators together

Thorax ◽

10.1136/thoraxjnl-2015-206781 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 70 (8) ◽

pp. 799-801 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Adnan Custovic ◽

John Ainsworth ◽

Hasan Arshad ◽

Christopher Bishop ◽

Iain Buchan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Early Life ◽

Collaborative Research ◽

Data Repository ◽

Team Science ◽

Birth Cohorts ◽

Web Based ◽

Interdisciplinary Dialogue ◽

Computer Scientists ◽

Study Team ◽

Computational Resources

We created Asthma e-Lab, a secure web-based research environment to support consistent recording, description and sharing of data, computational/statistical methods and emerging findings across the five UK birth cohorts. The e-Lab serves as a data repository for our unified dataset and provides the computational resources and a scientific social network to support collaborative research. All activities are transparent, and emerging findings are shared via the e-Lab, linked to explanations of analytical methods, thus enabling knowledge transfer. eLab facilitates the iterative interdisciplinary dialogue between clinicians, statisticians, computer scientists, mathematicians, geneticists and basic scientists, capturing collective thought behind the interpretations of findings.

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The end of high culture and the Anthropocene

Thesis Eleven ◽

10.1177/0725513620963506 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 160 (1) ◽

pp. 84-94

Author(s):

Harriet Johnson

Keyword(s):

Cultural Activity ◽

High Culture ◽

Arts And Sciences ◽

Social Interventions ◽

Earth Systems ◽

The Arts ◽

Original Works ◽

Cultural Infrastructure ◽

Human World ◽

New Phase

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth’s surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus’s extensive studies of the topography of ‘high’ culture. I reconstruct Márkus’s conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of ‘high’ cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of ‘high’ culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus’s claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus’s account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems.

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Abundance, Excess, Waste

PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies ◽

10.5130/portal.v13i1.4793 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Rox De Luca

Keyword(s):

Recent Work ◽

Plastic Waste ◽

Visual Artist ◽

Sorting Process ◽

Stark Contrast ◽

Sydney Australia

Rox De Luca is a visual artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her recent work focuses on the concepts of abundance, excess and waste. These concerns translate directly into vibrant and colourful garlands that she constructs from discarded plastics collected on Bondi Beach where she lives.The process of collecting is fastidious, as is the process of sorting and grading the plastics by colour and size. This initial gathering and sorting process is followed by threading the components onto strings of wire. When completed, these assemblages stand in stark contrast to the ease of disposability associated with the materials that arrive on the shoreline as evidence of our collective human neglect and destruction of the environment around us.The contrast is heightened by the fact that the constructed garlands embody the paradoxical beauty of our plastic waste byproducts, while also evoking the ways by which those byproducts similarly accumulate in randomly assorted patterns across the oceans and beaches of the planet.

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Economic geography, to what ends? From privilege to progressive performances of expertise

Environment and Planning A Economy and Space ◽

10.1177/0308518x19829084 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 805-813 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Chris Gibson

Keyword(s):

Real Estate ◽

Empirical Research ◽

Economic Geography ◽

Collaborative Research ◽

Empirical Studies ◽

Crucial Point ◽

Global Finance ◽

Research Experiences ◽

Expert Status ◽

Sydney Australia

Recent Exchanges have focused on economic geography’s purported ‘decline’ and its patriarchal and generational privilege, asking ‘who speaks’ for the subdiscipline. This Exchanges piece asks another kind of existential question: what ends does economic geography serve? And how is economic geographical expertise marshalled and performed towards such ends – especially beyond the British context, where much of the debate has focused? Drawing briefly upon collaborative research experiences in Sydney, Australia, I offer thoughts on progressive contributions arising from grounded empirical research within cities subject to profound transformation from speculative real estate, and hypercharged by global finance. Amid unsolicited plans for massive rezoning of industrial spaces and accompanying displacement of manufacturing, repair and cultural industries, credible economic geographical data assisted activists and sympathetic local decisionmakers by bringing to light the significance of existing spaces of work (especially in industrially zoned land) subject to rezoning plans. Contestation over massive real estate proposals continues in Sydney, but empirical research targeted at public debate has nevertheless already shifted the narrative. While academic privilege and expert status warrants intra-disciplinary critique, what also matters is whether, how and where economic geographers deploy expertise productively towards progressive ends. Hence, critically engaged economic geography flourishes in different forms beyond the discipline's imagined ‘core’ places, even via quite ‘dry’ empirical studies that on the surface do not declare radical intents. Economic geographers are key intermediaries circulating knowledges, active agents in making concrete manifestations of the economy known. And that is a crucial point of intervention.

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Integrative Epistemology and the Search for Meaning

Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies ◽

10.5840/jis199351/29 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 125-140

Author(s):

F. LeRon Shults ◽

Keyword(s):

Natural Science ◽

Relational Model ◽

Search For Meaning ◽

Arts And Sciences ◽

Interdisciplinary Dialogue ◽

The Arts ◽

Open Structures ◽

The Universe ◽

Practical Implications

The dis-integration of the arts and sciences is evidence of a cultural and psychological split in the contemporary frame of mind. The roots of this separation may be traced to the dualist epistemology of the modem period in philosophy. The emergence of an integrative epistemology through interdisciplinary dialogue may assist in healing this dualism, illustrated in the convergence of kinetic thinking in theology, natural science, and other disciplines. This essay emphasizes the creaturely nature of the search for meaning and the need for humility and integrity toward open structures of the universe. This relational model serves as a heuristic framework which discloses interdisciplinary invariances in the knowing event. The practical implications of this paradigm for theological inquiry are explored in the context of its personal, ecclesial, and ecumenical dimensions.

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