[spectre] DIY Human Enhancement Clinic #1 - Your Hormones

[Lucas Evers]

Dear spectres, 

Below might be a little off topic to this list, but i know there are quite a few that have an interest.



Do-It-Yourself Human Enhancement Clinic (DIY HEC) #1

Your Hormones – extract and deploy

Sat. June 11, 13.00 - 17.30, Waag Society, Amsterdam 

With Maja Smrekar, Spela Petric, and a remote presentation of the Open Source Estrogen project by Mary Maggic and Byron Rich
 

What use are hormones, to us, to others, to other species? What if you extract them yourself instead of leaving that to the pharmaceutical industry? What can you make? Cocktails, connections, corrections?

In this first edition of DIY Human Enhancement Clinic, invited artists-researchers Maja Smrekar and Špela Petrič will teach and tell you how and what for to isolate your own hormones, by extracting them from your urine. What can we then use these hormones for? Injecting them back into our bodies, or mixing them into a fancy cocktail?

Maja and Špela will show us – with a special appearance of Mary Tsang and Byron Rich of the Open Source Estrogen project – that hormones are not only influencing our own bodies. New ways of modifying our hormones also affects our relationships with the species around us, and these effects aren’t always as straightforward as you may think. Starting from Maja’s K-9_topology project, Špela’s exciting new work with plants, and your own hormones in the test tube before you, we will open a discussion on human enhancement that us out of our human-centeredness.

(this workshop is suitable for artists, students and scientists and anyone interested).

Maja Smrekar: http://majasmrekar.org

Špela Petrič: http://www.spelapetric.org

Mary Tsang: http://maggic.ooo

Byron Rich: http://www.byronrich.com

Do-It-Yourself Human Enhancement Clinic

The DIY Human Enhancement Clinic investigates novel strategies for public engagement with new developments in biotechnology. By bringing artistic, scientific and humanities research together with the public in a hands-on space, the DIY HEC aims to create reciprocity, shared responsibility and a more humane understanding and development of technologies to enhance human kind.

Waag Society, Nieuwmarkt 4, Amsterdam

10 June, 13:00 – 18:00

Entrance fee €10,-

Participants:

Špela Petrič

Špela Petrič (1980), BSc, MA, lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was artist in residence at Waag Society and is now a fellow researcher. Her artistic practice combines natural sciences, new media and performance.

While working towards an egalitarian and critical discourse between the professional and public spheres, she tries to envision artistic experiments that produce questions relevant to anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. She extends her artistic research with art/sci workshops devoted to informing and sensitizing the interested public, particularly younger generations. She is a member of Hackteria and winner of the Bio Art & Design award.

Maja Smrekar

Maja Smrekar was born 1978 in Slovenia, 2005 graduated at the Sculpture Department of Fine Art Academy in Ljubljana, Slovenia; currently finishing MA at the New Media Department. Her main interests are based at the phenomenology of perception and the concept of life. Among others, she has been collaborating with Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana for the last eight years and with Aksioma Institute for the last five years. Under their production she has been executing projects, connecting the intersections of humanistic and natural sciences into the interdisciplinary art works.

Mary Tsang

Mary Maggic is an artist-biologist practicing in civic biosciences, open source organisms and tools, and how to deploy them. Her projects explore the biopolitical nature of new biotechnologies, their roots in society and transhumanism, and the question of who gets emancipatory access. Since 2013 she has partnered with a filmmaker to produce a documentary web-series on “bio-art” and emerging communities in DIYBio. The web-series DIYSECT hopes to initiate conversations on the rapid effect of biotechnologies on our society. Her most recent work involves gender-hacking, estrogen synthesis/mutagenesis, and promises of "significant otherness." She is currently pursuing her masters in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT Media Lab, Design Fiction research group.

Byron Rich

Having grown up on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in western Canada, where a seemingly endless wild gives way to the rapidly expanding influence of human hubris, Byron was compelled to make things that ask unanswerable questions. He pursued a degree in art at The University of Calgary before wandering the islands of the South Pacific, finally finding himself in Buffalo, New York where he obtained an MFA in Emerging Practices at The University at Buffalo. He now teaches Electronic Art, Intermedia and Painting at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

This DIY HEC is part of DITO’s and supported by the European Commission.

Our project, 'Doing-It-Together Science', DITOs, represents a step change in European public engagement with science and innovation. We propose moving from a model in which scientific research, innovation, and problem-solving is mainly driven by scientific/professional institutions to one based on active public participation and capacity building with various levels and strategies of engagement in the scientific process. At the core of our ethos is a recognition of people's existing expertise and the different ways people want to and do engage in science and technology. The project is aimed at elevating public engagement with science across Europe from passive engagement with the process of developing science to an active one. Citizen Science and Do It Yourself (DIY) scientific efforts demonstrate that this is possible, and our aim is to ensure that the European Research Area will become leader in ‘deep’ public engagement that is afforded by these advances.

As a 'Coordination and Support Action', this project will support and build upon DIY, grassroots, and frugal innovation initiatives so that in the short and medium term we sustain localised capacity building and in the long term the effects of these grassroots efforts channel to policy makers at different levels, from external advice to societal inputs, regarding appropriate research and innovation policies.

The proposal includes the participation of policy bodies (European Citizen Science Association, DE), SMEs (Tekiu, UK; Eutema, AT), Universities (University College London, UK; Universite Paris Descartes, FR; University of Genève, CH), Science galleries and public spaces (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, BE; Medialab-Prado, E; Kersnikova Institution, SL) and NGOs (Meritum Association, PL; Waag Society, NL).

http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/203160_en.html

 
Best,

Lucas Evers
— 
waag society || www.waag.org || nieuwmarkt 4 || 1012 cr amsterdam || netherlands 

future emerging art & technology || www.featart.eu 
hack the brain || www.hackthebrain.nl 
diy antibiotics || http://waag.org/en/project/diy-antibiotics 
open wetlab || http://waag.org/en/lab/open-wetlab 
biohack academy || http://biohackacademy.github.io 
fablab amsterdam || http://fablab.waag.org 
bio art & design award || http://www.badaward.nl 
trust me I am an artist || http://trustmeimanartist.eu 
open design now - why design cannot remain exclusive || http://www.opendesignnow.org










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