Ukew project

UK2029

Post-Natural Artefacts from the United Kingdom

UKEW Project Future of biodesign ‘UK 2029’’ offers a speculative future timeline set within a post-Brexit United Kingdom, detailing how different communities become empowered through ubiquitous biotechnologies. The exhibition curates a series of images and artefacts that depict grassroots movements exploiting the hackable potential of different biotechnologies, as they begin to address challenging societal issues.

UKEW Project Biosecurity The government is responding to the increased uptake in DIY bioengineers developing their own microbial products for private use by increasing their microbial surveillance within public spaces and airports. Coupled with the increased presence of patent trolls looking to exploit peer-peer DIY innovations, people are beginning to experiment with radical methods of protecting and concealing their creations from being stolen or taken from them.

One such procedure involves embedding tiny implant pouches within the skin to temporarily store their microbial factories, via a needle transfer. Contained within inconspicuous pimple-like sites within the skin, the implant maintains their creations at perfect temperatures for survival whilst protecting the person from infection.

UKEW Project Wildflower Protest As you walk through the neighbourhood you live in, you may have encountered a bank of wildflowers covered in neon blue-green bruises. What you are seeing is the result of the world’s first gene-drive as protest, which utilised the agency of living things to propagate through their environment as a means of spreading a political message.

Over the past 10 years within university labs, multiple species of wildflowers have been modified to contain a genetic switch which flood their petals with mTurquoise chromoproteins when grown in soils contaminated with high levels of heavy metal contaminants. This modification was engineered to ensure its inheritance to all offspring of the flowers, allowing it to spread through existing wildflower populations.

The deliberate release of the modified flower seeds via bird-feeders was perpetrated by a renegade researcher, intending to make visible the enduring environmental legacy of the unethical dismantling of industry during the 1980s which severely impacted the welfare of working class communities in the north of England. The economic benefits of these industries for the workers was taken away, but the chemical contamination they had on the environment were left behind, and continues to impact the health of the area’s current population.

Spreading through local environments on the bodies of bees and other pollinators, and over vast geographical distances in the digestive systems of migratory birds these politicised genetic codes have swept across the island of Great Britain, over the English Channel and through parts of western Europe.

UKEW Project Biosecurity As you walk through the neighbourhood you live in, you may have encountered a bank of wildflowers covered in neon blue-green bruises. What you are seeing is the result of the world’s first gene-drive as protest, which utilised the agency of living things to propagate through their environment as a means of spreading a political message.

Over the past 10 years within university labs, multiple species of wildflowers have been modified to contain a genetic switch which flood their petals with mTurquoise chromoproteins when grown in soils contaminated with high levels of heavy metal contaminants. This modification was engineered to ensure its inheritance to all offspring of the flowers, allowing it to spread through existing wildflower populations.

The deliberate release of the modified flower seeds via bird-feeders was perpetrated by a renegade researcher, intending to make visible the enduring environmental legacy of the unethical dismantling of industry during the 1980s which severely impacted the welfare of working class communities in the north of England. The economic benefits of these industries for the workers was taken away, but the chemical contamination they had on the environment were left behind, and continues to impact the health of the area’s current population.

Spreading through local environments on the bodies of bees and other pollinators, and over vast geographical distances in the digestive systems of migratory birds these politicised genetic codes have swept across the island of Great Britain, over the English Channel and through parts of western Europe.