David Benqué: blog 

The factories are coming to town! They are moving away from the unseen fringes, and into our cities. Advances in micro-scale engineering point to a global scale revolution where local, disposable factories produce hi tech goods at our very doorstep. What shapes might this new way of “making things” take within our urban landscape ? From garage-workshops to circus-like temporary structures, from street vendor stalls to vagabond encampments, this project explores the factories of the future and what our relationship to them might be, with the exciting prospect of taking back ownership over our production tools.

I am currently working on this project as part of the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Impact! exhibition, open 16th to 20th of march at the Royal College of Art, London, where staff, graduates and students from the Design Interactions department are each working with a specific research group, to create work that explores the social implications of their research.

I am working with the 3D-MINTEGRATION research team, who are looking at new ways to use micro-scale properties to create ‘mintegrated products’

“Current micro engineering techniques are based upon those used for semiconductors, and so tend to permit only the manufacture of products based on single materials, typically in flat configurations. The project aims to address the restrictive issues flat geometries, exotic materials and very high costs to invest in machinery by developing entirely new design and manufacturing techniques underpinned by modelling, simulation and risk mitigation procedures to ensure that the new methods can be exploited by industry with confidence.”

with: PJ Steiner, PhD candidate at Jim Haseloff’s lab in Cambridge’s Plant Sciences department.

PJ has an interest in computer music as well as synthetic biology, so his input was particularly interesting. We mentioned several areas/approaches the project could explore, here are some of them:

Engineered growth of musical instruments, or how how would a grand piano tree look like ? As the instruments we know today, these harmonic fruit and veg would share a common genetic blueprint, but each one would look and sound slightly different.

Another idea was to use the daily working processes of micro-biologists as a source of music or choreography. Pipetting, one of the most basic lab-actions, is quite often repetitive and can get very rhythmic when practiced by expert hands. What if the pipette became a simple musical instrument? maybe everyone in the lab could synchronise their work and start jamming?

PJ arrived in Cambridge a couple of months ago, after working at MIT with Tom Knight.  The “wet” side of synthetic biology is very different from the computer science aspect which he was used to, this has good and bad sides:

I’m talking to scientists about my Bio-Band project and getting as many points of view as possible. To document the discussion, I will create an instrument and a badge after each meeting, as a spontaneous reaction to the big ideas and/or small details that catch my attention.

James Brown mentioned the idea of building a bacterial visual equaliser. Different bacteria would respond to different frequencies and that could affect their colour/brightness. Pushing this a touch further, I sketched this slide projector :

The slides are populated by bacteria colonies which are fed and kept warm in little slide-like containers inside of the incubator unit. Once placed in the projector, the input from the 360º microphone is amplified near the slide and the bacteria’s colour ballet is projected on the wall. This made me think of lava-lamps and overhead projector VJs with trippy fluids, only here the spectacle would be way more fascinating: it’s alive!

For the badge, this casual remark caught my attention:

I had a quick introductory meeting with James Brown today, in the lobby of the Royal Society, where he was getting ready for a big meeting. James is a PhD. student in Cambridge, working on synthetic biology at Jim Haseloff’s lab, and he is also the instructor for the Cambridge Igem team who just won the 2009 competition with their amazing project: E-Chromi.

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In the past, underground culture has associated music, aesthetics and ideology to create movements which questioned social norms, and called for change in extreme ways. Examples of this are Punks and Anarchy, Kraftwerk and the digital era, the Straight-Edge movement, Hippie Communes, and so on …
This year I propose to create a fictional music movement around biology and the celebration of bacteria. As we realise that bacteria play an essential role in keeping us alive, they also trigger the deepest fears of pandemics and dirty bombs. How would citizen-scientists react to the growing number of anti-bacterial policies? what could the symbols and slogans of their movement be? What would their music sound and look like? What drugs would they take backstage?

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