BioForge

What it is. A working biological design lab built for visiting artists, commissioned and shown at the MICROWAVE International New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong.

The brief. Most artist-encounter-with-biology programming at the time gave artists access to biological outputs (cell-culture imagery, sequencing data) rather than the materials and methods themselves. BioForge was an attempt at the inverse. Hand a visiting artist a working bench, the protocols, and enough technical support to actually do biodesign as a medium, not as a subject.

Our role. Lead Artist on the festival commission. Bench specification, materials, on-site setup, and the day-to-day support of artists who walked in without prior wet-lab experience. The festival ran the production logistics and the audience-facing programming.