Speculative Life: Art,Synthetic Biology and Blueprints for the Unknown

Synthetic Biology and Engineered Life

Coined as a term by Stéphane Leduc in 1911 to propose a physio-chemical materialist basis for life, synthetic biology now modifies existing living matter and manipulates the building of life from the bottom-up. Combining genetic engineering techniques with new circuit designs in order to construct small biological modules with targeted and controllable behaviors, synthetic biology generates cells and organisms that can typically be streamlined for one task alone; these modules are projected as the model of functional predictability since they can be designed to thrive within very specific conditions (Baldwin et al., 2013). In fact, since 2006 the BioBricks Foundation has been seeking to make these standardized biological units, with DNA sequences of specific structure and function, publicly available and freely usable. With these modified and modifiable parts, we are granted more control to design, manufacture and instrumentalize living matter towards particular applications and outcomes.

For the artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (2014), the prominence of such an engineering mindset in contemporary biology is worrying: ‘The central claim of the single engineering paradigm is that it is the application of real engineering logic onto life. This is particularly true in the case of synthetic biology. Its rhetoric proclaims that it is not merely rebranding existing forms of manipulating life, but rather that it represents a far-reaching shift in the way life is perceived and used.’ Indeed such a mindset is worrying precisely because it can be shortsighted in its quest to control life as raw matter, and therefore unable to evoke the potentially unintended or unmonitored outcomes of these synthetic biological newcomers over time. To take a now infamous example: what are we to make of Craig Venter who, in 2010, inserted a synthetic bacterial genome into a living single-cell bacterium to replace its existing one? When the cell started reproducing new cells containing the synthetic and not the organic genome, Venter believed he had ushered in the dawn of fully synthetic life, designing a whole life form whose ‘parent is a computer’. Yet as Catts and Zurr (2014) make clear, ‘the context (i.e., the cell and its content) is still of biological origin. The role of the computer in synthesizing the genome was that of a glorified copier – replicating a genome without fully understanding its meaning.’ Leaving aside the question of how completely synthetic Venter's cell may be, the more compelling point is that we do not fully understand the longer ranging impacts and contextual effects of synthetically replicating a genome. What this implies is that in the short term, certain synthetic prescriptions of living matter and systems may point towards very particular and temporally limited outcomes, but ultimately we cannot begin to anticipate the wider impacts and varied evolutions of bioengineered life.

Speculative Blueprints

Without a focus on functional end results, critical arts and design practices are well situated to explore these contextual, unpredictable, unknowable conditions of time and scale through which newly synthetic living forms endure. While synthetic biology, and bioengineering more generally, tends to focus on the particularities of each micro-manipulation within a specific timeframe, art practices can speculate on the wider reverberations, positioning the vulnerable encounters and uneven exchanges across forms and scales, from molecule to human, synthetic to organic, while rendering these materials and situations visible, legible, and public. In taking up such a challenge, and in responding to Studiolab's letter, a group of artists and designers offered ‘Blueprints for the Unknown’: sketches, diagrams, plans, and scenarios that are meant to lay the groundwork for specific predetermined end goals conceived by synthetic biology, but instead afford the possibility of indeterminate, ongoing, and variable outcomes. By imagining, narrating, materializing and documenting potential scenarios and potentially soon-to-be organisms, bodies, events, and actions, yet without signaling their real-world scientific viability, these blueprints perform the untenable relationship between predictable engineered life and the unpredictable, uncertain and speculative contexts from which and into which such forms of life could prevail over time. While the Project Genesis exhibition at Ars Electronica included 18 projects from artists around the world who are exploring and utilizing synthetic biology, I want to call attention to three works developed specifically under the umbrella of ‘Blueprints for the Unknown’, based in the Design Interaction program at the Royal College of Arts, London – all three of which heighten and problematize the futurity of synthetic life.

With specimens, maps, photos, and other documents, Tobias Revell's ‘Into Your Hands Are They Delivered’ (2013) presents us with this fictional narrative:

Deep in the Texan swamps, a new species of parasitic wasp is discovered by the T-SEE expedition who are funded by the crumbling Richards-Jones Institution and buried in its extensive collection of insect specimens. Years later, Global Petroleum, the nation's largest petroleum company working in the Gulf of Mexico, suffers from blockages in its pipeline network. To their horror, Global Petroleum scientists discover that a new species of parasitic wasp is incubating its eggs in the petrochemicals the company manufactures and distributes. It becomes clear that the wasp discovered by T-SEE has evolved rapidly to develop a parasitic relationship with synthetic chemicals.

In another future scenario depicted by the Anglo-Indian group Superflux, ‘Dynamic Genetics vs Mann’ offers material evidence gathered from a fictional court case. An interrogation video, surveillance photos, genetic search warrants, found documents, newspaper clippings, an improvised CO₂ incubator, and tissue biopsy samples tell the story of Arnold Mann, an ordinary citizen. When a routine spit test shows elevated risks for various chronic health conditions, Mann is forced to get a gene upgrade on the black market in order to avoid huge health insurance bills. Dynamic Genetics is the gene therapy corporation that accuses Mann of illegally possessing their DNA (Superflux, 2013). Transporting synthetic biology and gene therapy to the health insurance marketplace, Superflux envisages a possible world in which health plans are determined and upheld by an individual's genetic make-up. Writing about the project, synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis (2013) suggests that such a fictionalized future could ‘show technologies at the edge of speculation and reality, inviting us to imagine, question, and debate the applications and implications of new science and technology in a cultural context’. Postulating towards as well as interrogating this kind of future, Superflux's scenario stages one possible outcome of the enduring hope that our genetic codes can predict our future health, and with it our need to genetically oversee and manage not only ourselves but also others.

With small test rigs and experiments, a flag and a manifesto, David Benqué (2013) envisions the operations of a new kind of future personae. ‘The New Weathermen’ is a fictional group of environmental activists who embrace synthetic biology ‘for a new symbiotic world order’ between the synthetic, the organic, and the increasingly blurred in-between. In their manifesto, the group sets forth a series of principles: Parasite Lost: parasitic behavior will not be tolerated; Eden Gone: there is no untouched Nature to go back to – only forward; Caution is for Preys: abort the precautionary principle; Bio Commons: abolish intellectual property; and Species Galore: conserve all species and genomes. Create as many new ones as possible. As Benqué (2013) suggests: ‘The goal of the project is to encourage discussions on the relationship between science and environmentalism, as they are so often opposed. What would happen if environmental activists started to use science and DIY biology to support “green” ideology?’ Benqué offers some answers, presenting us with the models for a few ambiguous Weathermen activities such as: #PIRATE POLLEN CLUB, a wind dispersion tunnel that activates copyrighted gene removal in proprietary golf-course grasses; #PalmOPS #BIOLULZ, a palm oil non-digester in which lipase inhibitors prevent palm oil from being digested; and finally #BIOCCUPY DIESEL, a diesel bug test rig which catalyzes the optimization of microbial contaminations in diesel fuel tanks. Recalling Situationist tactics of disturbance, such actions synthetically micro-manipulate random materials in particular sites for dubious gains, presenting potential scenarios in which surprise synthetic biological interventions are ridiculously interruptive and in which environmental activism is closely linked to our increasing ability to easily modify living matter.

Affirmative Design Speculations

These three very different scenarios imagined and materialized by Revell, Superflux, and Benqué each project a possible future already embedded in and potentially always ready to become our present. Although exhibited within the context of an art exhibition, all three works were developed in the Design Interactions program at the Royal College of Arts which, acting head Sharon Baurly notes, ‘explores new roles, contexts and approaches for interaction design in relation to the social, cultural and ethical impact of existing and emerging technologies. Projects, which are often speculative and critical, aim to inspire debate about the human consequences of different technological futures – both positive and negative.’

For Anthony Dunne and Fiony Raby (2014), founders and former directors of the program and forerunners in the field, speculative design catalyzes critical and sometimes radical propositions for the world as we might know it and life as it could be. Sidestepping the development of functional design products, speculative design instead produces alternate imaginings and possible realities in order to question how and why we introduce and modify things in the world, and for what kinds of users. As David Benqué (2014) proposes: ‘Design as an efficient problem solving process is turned into an exploratory problem finding tool, a way to pre-enact synthetic biology moving out of the sanitised bubble of the lab and into the complex systems of society’. Pre-enacting in larger contexts over time offers the potential to launch questions without promising answers, indeed to afford ambiguity in the place of surety. As Dunne and Raby (2014) remind us, ‘the idea of the proposal is at the heart of this approach to design: to propose, to suggest, to offer something … To be effective, the work needs to contain contradictions and cognitive glitches. Rather than offering an easy way forward, it highlights dilemmas and trade-offs between imperfect alternatives.’ As this mode of design becomes increasingly detached from functional use-value and projected end-results, its proposals find common ground with all manner of imaginative fiction, whether utopic or dystopic, scientifically plausible or not. Such practices of fictional speculating can at the very least propose an awareness of the variable contingencies of time and scale, of the unpredictability of encounters and exchanges between the living materials and forms continuing to emerge and evolve around us, and of the incalculable nuances of their developing interdependencies.

This kind of open-ended speculation is, however, at odds with our historically modern mode of firmative speculation. What modernity introduced, an anonymous collective of theorists writing under the name of ‘Uncertain Commons’ (2013) attest, ‘is a speculative mode that seeks to pin down, delimit, constrain, and enclose – to make things definitive, firm’. Within the framework of this mode of speculation, statistical calculations give a probable account of what might happen in our present-day world – economically, environmentally, politically, medically, biologically, the list goes on – oftentimes in order to manage the risk associated with the unknown world-to-be by producing one potential outcome, exploiting that outcome, and foreclosing all other possibilities. In tandem with the mode of fictional proposals offered as ‘Blueprints for the Unknown’, the Uncertain Commons stand behind another kind of speculation – the affirmative – that instead celebrates the indeterminate, undoes anticipatory solutions, embraces the unthinkable and the unquantifiable, takes rather than manages risks, and opens up a multitude of worlds-to-be, not just for one but for many other things and beings, human and nonhuman, now and into the future. They write (Uncertain Commons, 2013: ch. 1):

To speculate affirmatively is to produce futures while refusing the foreclosure of potentialities, to hold on to the spectrum of possibilities while remaining open to multiple futures whose context of actualization can never be fully anticipated. This is not to say speculative living is simply ephemeral; rather, it is a consistently modifying practice that seeks to act in shifting, multiscalar worlds. It mandates intuition, creativity, and play. In this sense affirmative speculation affords modes of living that creatively engage uncertainty. Its stakes are resolutely collective: often sabotaging individuated and privatized prescriptions, it builds on the tentative mutualities that arise in the face of uncertainties.

Biological Speculations

Moving from speculative design into the real world of contemporary biology, we are not only quickly coming closer towards that ledge but we are stepping into the abyss. A branch of biology called ‘gain-of-function’ (GOF) research has been doing its own kind of speculating, and in some cases now operates in tandem with developments in synthetic biology. Gain-of-function research mutates genes in order to confer an additional or enhanced activity and as such is intended to expand the range, intensity, and capacity to transmit certain viral pathogens (Briseno and England, 2013). These additive manipulations of genetic matter are attuned to predicting future potentials and materializing future scenarios, in order to better manage possible and uncertain outcomes.

A recent example of GOF research, one that could easily be aligned with those futures conceptualized as ‘Blueprints for the Unknown’, demonstrates the challenging task of moving towards any kind of productively affirmative biological speculation. In September of 2011, Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, announced that he had mutated a strain of avian flu virus (H5N1) that primarily infects birds into a virus that could spread between ferrets through the air. Around the same time, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, had also developed a similar mutation of H5N1 (Garrett, 2013). Because viruses that are transmissible between ferrets are also very likely to be transmissible between humans, and because the influenza virus itself has a high level of transmissibility, an advisory committee to the National Institutes of Health stopped Fouchier and Kawaoka from publishing their research, and a temporary moratorium on manipulating H5N1 was initiated. Since GOF research gives rise to ‘dual-use research of concern’ (DURC), in which outcomes can be both beneficial and dangerous when in the hands of parties with differing endgames, the committee was preemptively foreclosing worries about bioterrorism and security, particularly in light of the uneven global implementations of biosafety guidelines in countries, such as China or Indonesia, where human contact with these viruses is more prevalent (Garrett, 2013). Yet such speculative work offers not only multiple scenarios of transmissibility and possible modes of infection, but also new methods of surveying highly dangerous viruses. Months later, in early 2013, both papers were eventually published and the moratorium was lifted, as Fouchier attested to not having used synthetic biotechnologies. Nonetheless, researchers from China's National Avian Influenza Reference Lab have since synthetically manipulated H5N1 in tandem with their GOF research. Considering these developments, how can such speculative research unfold within an open yet monitored global framework without either foreclosing the uncertainty of these viral modulations or solely managing their impending risk? Such an example calls attention to the difficulty inherent in activating affirmative rather than firmative speculation, particularly within a biotechnological framework.

Within synthetic biology in particular, wider speculation has been held at bay since the manipulation of both living matter and systems has typically pointed towards very specific and temporally-framed outcomes. Nonetheless, synthetic biology has also been exploring how specifically engineered modules can be re-used, by integrating them into larger, more complicated and variable biological systems in which standardization and coordination are more difficult, so as to consider the variable conditions and complex interactions that occur in ever-changing contexts over time. According to Dr Vivek Mutalik, a research team leader at Biofab – the first biological design-build facility producing freely available and engineered biological parts:

Until now, virtually every project has been a one-off – we haven't figured out how to standardize the genetic parts that are the building blocks of this new field. Researchers produce amazing new parts all the time, but much like trying to use someone else's house key in your own door, it's been difficult to directly reuse parts across projects. (Biofab, 2013)

Indeed, re-use is the foundational and purposeful basis of synthetic biology, I was told by Drew Endy (2013). Endy is the co-director of Biofab, president of BioBricks, and a pioneer in synthetic biology. As Endy and his colleague Alistair Elfick, co-director of the SynthSys Centre at the University of Edinburgh, put it: ‘how do we achieve reliable performance in a device when there is the likelihood of it spontaneously mutating away from its designated function?’ (Endy and Elfick, 2014). In fact, in order to determine the functional patterns of genetic parts in variable circumstances, researchers had to understand how they misbehaved when reused again and again in different ways. So the challenge, then, is to develop keys that will fit into and open many doors in different contexts. Making headway towards that end, Biofab researchers have begun to determine a precise grammar or the rules by which certain standardized parts of DNA fit together. Although the DNA parts are specific for E.coli, the most widely-used model bacterium, the grammatical rules could apply to other microbes as well. Endy asks ‘that others expand upon the genetic grammar initiated here, to incorporate additional genetic functions and to translate the common rule set beyond E.coli’ (Biofab, 2013). Indeed, this is just the first step of many that Endy speculates will soon come.

Unknowable Lives

And so the reading and writing genetics paradigm continues, as invoked and then questioned by Studiolab's letter as curatorial call: we have the words, and we have certain grammatical rules for how some of these words will fit together. Expanding this grammatical paradigm, we can say that performativity is central to synthetic biology's circuitry; each word, or discrete unit or sequence, is meant to enact a particular function in a particular situation, its work being iterative. But we still cannot prescribe the reusable intentions of these parts and systems in the long run, or the implications in wider, macro-contexts. Give these parts to multiple forms, scale them up in a multitude of settings, and performative iteration can be foiled and displaced.

In contradistinction to performativity and beyond performativity's initial association with speech act theory, performance acknowledges the variability of contexts in which various unexpected outcomes across time and scale can be enacted, thus acknowledging the discrepancies within performativity's promise to catalyze exactly this/now, again and again. For performance theorist Peggy Phelan (1993), contextualized and situated performance resists, deflects, and displaces performative reproducibility and iterability, unsettling any clear determination of replicable expectations in the temporal unfolding of specific, varied and embodied action. To follow such thinking, any kind of performative repetition has the potential to be rerouted by the sites, engagements and entanglements of performance, where performance indicates the unfurling of multiple actions in particular and various situations over time. If, for a moment, we could gesture towards Phelan's conceptualization of performance in relation to performativity outside of its application to living bodies and instead within the framework of synthetically engineered living matter, we could remain attentive to the contextual variabilities and relational dependencies afforded through the grammar of these potentially reusable parts and sequences, and inflect synthetic biology's micro-modulations with the speculative conditions of life's unknowability over time. In doing so, we might begin to acknowledge the ongoing and intertwined generation of things and beings over time and across a variety of contexts and scales, organic to synthetic, micro to macro, positing new possibilities and intertwinements that reside as contingent latencies in these uncertainly unfolding performances.

So what would it mean to take longer and wider views of life, or to have a long-term or even multiple plans, as ‘yours synthetically, Life on Earth’ asks of us in the opening letter? The ‘Blueprints for the Unknown’ projects give us three different looks at our potential futures. Realistically-on-the-horizon, cautionary or parodic, Revell's, Superflux's, and Benqué's materialized projections of the already-happened signal the problem of knowable futurity that is embedded in both the instrumentality of life itself in its micro-perspective and the indeterminacy of life in its wider temporal, situational, and relational conditions. We come to realize that if we only focus on what we can do now to life, on a micro-scale, we will have no idea what is going to happen in the future on a macro-scale. But if we know we are going to have parasitic wasps living in pipelines with biochemistry similar to crude oil, or a healthcare marketplace of individual gene markers and therapies, or indeed an H5N1 virus transmissible between humans, would we initiate random and disruptive yet ultimately futile interventions in line with the New Weathermen? Would we identify and then take preventative measures, and how, and how many? This line of questioning quickly begins to spin out of control. By fictionalizing the future as already here, these projects are each speculating upon an unknown, predicting an unpredictable, and determining an indeterminate, but one out of many. We can take them as warnings to be preemptively foreclosed. Or we can recognize that as we synthetically introduce and modify a variety of living matter, forms, and bodies within a multitude of situations and scales, we, it, and they never act discretely and never only in one way at one time. We cannot lay claims to this unknown; what we need are more blueprints.