Biodesign meet up in Bangalore

We have managed to come together at (Art)ScienceBLR -well, not all of us, but 3 members from Lifepatch, 1 from Switzerland arrived here in Bangalore for a meet-up and residency. We were welcomed by great posters.

In reflecting back, we have done a lot – not surprisingly, the weeks flew by.

We had interactions with the students of Yashas’ class at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology – through class work in the Sensors Probes and Detectors II– also going to the Puttenahalli Lake to take samples.

We had also visits from classes taught by others.

We had two public workshops a Lab making / 3D printing workshop and for the Open House for the weekend, including the DNA Copy Machine Workshop. Thanks, Iyok for making the biropette parts to be 3D printed in time on the (Art)ScienceBLR DIY built machine! The Open House was a great success. We had a mobile kitchen by Dholy, serving fresh drinks, amongst the other projects of (Art)ScienceBLR / Lifepatch / hackteria like the Cocomake7, Nopel’s videos of what we had done so far, but also the video of his community work with KetjilBergerak.

We went to visit NCBS and had a conversation with Dr. Aswin Sai Shesasayee, who studies how bacteria manage to regulate and organize their genes so they can replicate so rapidly. We were introduced to the work on termite emergent behaviour by Sree Krishna and Shipra Saxena in Dr. Sanjay Sane’s lab, and visiting the NICE lab of Dr. Shannon Olsson and seeing the experiment set-up by Pavan Kumar Kaushik for understanding how flies navigate to fruits – vision and smell with a full VR-set up and real-time wing tracking.

The quotes in the main entry of NCBS were inspiring. Here are some of them –

Another important visit was to the placeArts Youth Collective working with Arzu Mistry, a collaborator of (Art)ScienceBLR, and Earth Co.Lab, Tasneem Khan, who made the swamp creature documented in the Songs of the Swamp entry on this site, which started with her residency at (Art)ScienceBLR.

Nopel gave a presentation at the placeArts Youth Collective and talked about his work with art, youth and communities, which share similarities with the projects there – it was great to make the first bridge.

Aside from meeting people, we started to look into new tools and materials. Inspired by the work of Emmanuela Ascari from her Utopiana residency, we started experimenting with circular chromatography on our soil and sediment samples. We are also thinking of other reagents to look at the kombucha processing of sugars. Another process we started was preparing the silk for possibly printing and casting. We also made glycerol stocks of our bioreporters now safely in the -80C freezer at NCBS. There was also a parallel program with I.S.R.O. the Indian sonic research organization.

All of this sharing and working together was a great way for us to update and learn about each others’ work.

Iyok presented updates of the projects, which has grown into a web of projects. For example, the Lifepatch map that started based on Ushahidi, and had evolved to the Laravel Database Designer project has evolved into Democratic Databases and now they are Mighty Bits presented at Dutch Design Week.

What we learned to appreciate was that projects go through phases – and our interests are connected in this meshwork of activities and the projects are growing by meeting people and learning and sharing activities.

It was very insightful to hear from Nopel’s work that consistent presence of 2 years is necessary to establish a self-sustaining community, with external community managers present.

Consistency and long-term thinking …

We also saw that everyone really enjoys reading booklets about the activities, especially when visiting new people and places – here is Dholy and Nopel engrossed in looking at some of (Art)ScienceBLR’s beautiful documentation.

We would like to make a book for biodesign.cc.

It was nice to meet again in person – nothing replaces face-to-face working together….and sharing food and experiences together. Thanks again, (Art)ScienceBLR for hosting us!

See complementary write ups on hackteria site, and also (Art)ScienceBLR and The I.S.R.O. sites.

Thanks to Bidisha (Art)ScienceBLR and Nopel (Lifepatch, Lajur 14), also collectively from the others for the documentation photos. All of the wonderful event and welcome posters were designed by Chandni (Art)ScienceBLR.