Before the late 19th century, if you were an artist, you had to mix pigments to make your own paint. This limited the creation of art to studios, portraits, and objects. “As soon as you have ready-made paints, you could go out into the world and paint quickly,” says Drew Endy, co-founder of iGEM and Martin Family University Fellow at Stanford University. “What got represented and who could be represented through the medium of art changed because the science and technology of paint changed.” Drew will also be speaking at this year's SynBioBeta: The Global Synthetic Biology Conference.

Now, about a century later, artists have a new medium to work with, one that is alive and intertwined with biological innovation.

Synthetic biology, which aims to design and create biological systems that don’t exist in nature, has inherent similarities with art. They both synthesize different components to achieve cohesive, meaningful outcomes. They’re both creative—synthetic biologists design and create new life forms while artists express new ideas and concepts through tangible mediums. And when put together as bioart, they raise questions about how we coexist with nature, future innovations, and much more.

Pushing the Boundaries of Science

With the growing sustainability problems of digital data storage, using DNA as a storage medium has become the focus of DNA synthesis companies lately. These recent efforts are now coming at a time when DNA synthesis has become more readily available—faster, cheaper, and more scalable.

But before this work caught the eye of biotechs, one of the first times someone encoded non-biological information in DNA was an artist named Joe Davis in the 1980s. Then, Davis collaborated with geneticist Dana Boyd to store an image of an ancient Germanic rune in the sequence of E. coli. This work, Microvenus, transformed the rune into a binary image that was then encoded as a synthetic DNA molecule.

Reflecting on this, synthetic biologist and artist Christina Agapakis says, “Art actually is often on the very far edge of what we can do with science and with living things.” She adds, “Artists have something to offer us in terms of how to see the world and to look at these tools in new ways, to ask questions in different ways to get at something beyond the instrumental value of the bacteria.” 

She shared with me another example: cultured meat. 

Some of the first attempts at making and consuming cultured meat were artists. Artists Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr began the Tissue, Culture & Art Project in 1996 to examine how tissue engineering can be used as a medium for art. Four years later, their work Semi-living Steak used skeletal muscle cells from an unborn sheep to produce “steaks” 1 cm in diameter from 3D tissue culture bioreactors. Then, in 2003, their project Disembodied Cuisine, where they grew and ate meat from frog cells, was showcased at an exhibition, L’Art Biotech in France. This all preceded the boom in cultivated meat in the 2010s. Other works, such as Victimless Leather, which represents a leather jacket grown from cell lines, served as inspiration points for new textiles.

Applications in Medicine

This interplay between art and science also has the potential to create practical solutions in medicine. In 2009, an iGEM team from the University of Cambridge reprogrammed pigment biosynthesis in E. coli. By giving E. coli the ability to produce various colors in response to the concentration of stimuli, the bacterium could become an easy-to-use reporter to detect biologically relevant molecules or environmental pollutants.

“What was even more amazing, or as amazing, was that project caught the attention of designers from the Royal College of Art,” said Endy. Over the course of the project, artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and designer James King worked alongside the iGEM team to explore the technology and where it could go in the future. Endy recalls, “They showed up at the iGEM Jamboree with an aluminum suitcase, and inside the aluminum suitcase were these mock-ups of different colored poos.” The idea was that consumers could, in the future, drink a probiotic yogurt containing these bacteria and when they come across a specific signal (ex: molecule), they could help diagnose disease by changing the color of poop.

Connecting Nature, Humans, and Technology

While the projects above are at the forefront of biology, they also have another thing in common: they depict the intersection of nature, humans, and technology and comment on the possibilities of how synbio can be used in the future and what that means.

Some examples of this can be seen in the Synthetic Aesthetics interdisciplinary project in which Endy and Agapakis were both involved. It was run by Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh and paired artists and scientists together aimed at “designing, understanding, and building the living world.” Agapakis’ project, Selfmade, used bacteria collected from the human body to produce cheese. Agapakis and the scent artist she worked with, Sissel Tolaas, called these  “cheese portraits” because they depicted a person’s unique microbiome. Another collaboration from this project depicted how a living zero-waste cup could contain probiotic bacteria that lie dormant until water is poured into it to create the probiotic drink. After many uses, the cup begins to disintegrate and can then be composted. Another example is the Biocomputation project that explores using bacteria to design building materials with lower environmental impacts.

Others have explored our relationship between technology and nature—probing at the nuances and the risks of integrating synthetic biology and nature. Speculative Future from Stéphanie Morissette comments on this. While the piece doesn’t start with biological materials, she depicts a bird/drone hybrid creature that’s part biological and part mechanical to bring into question what could eventually come to be with engineering nature. A piece from Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Pigeon d’Or, designed bacteria with a lipase gene that, when hypothetically fed to pigeons, turn feces into soap. While they couldn’t test the bacteria on pigeons, they created a structure that could be attached to windows to house pigeons for this purpose. They call into question our relationship with pigeons and the release of these products into the environment.

The Limit is Our Imaginations

Bioart pushes the boundaries of synthetic biology and our engagement with biotechnology. As Agapakis notes, “It's not drawing pictures, and it's not communicating science. It’s challenging us to think about science differently.” Endy adds, “When you think about art and critical design in biology… it's about exploration of what matters and what might be.” 

And the limit of this exploration is our creativity. Agapakis shared with me a quote from David Drubin, Jeffrey Way, and Pamela Silver in “Designing Biological Systems: “The rate-limiting factor for the future development of synthetic biology may actually be human creativity.”