 Hi everyone. My name is David Benjamin and I have known Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg for, I believe, more than 10 years. And although she is younger than me, she has been a kind of mentor to me in my work on bio design. Her brilliant framing of complex relationships between people and nature, between technologies and culture, between scientists and artists has always been inspiring for me. Her projects are equal parts, mind-blowing concept and beautiful aesthetics. Her captivating images, videos, prototypes, spaces and experiences often question our current technological and cultural directions. They represent a future with more questions than answers and they leave us with a pleasing but uneasy feeling. In other words, they are excellent examples of design. Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg is an artist exploring the human values that shape design, science, technology and nature. Through artworks, writing and curatorial projects, Daisy examines the human impulse to better the world. She leads a team of architects, artists, designers and researchers working in collaboration with other practitioners at the forefront of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, chemistry, 3D modeling, astrobiology and software engineering. Working at a frantic pace, her studio opens four exhibitions just in this month alone. The Wilding of Mars in Moving to Mars at the Design Museum in London and also at Designs for Different Futures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Substitute and Resurrecting the Sublime are currently on view at the exhibit called Nature at the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial here in New York City. And also on view now at the Vitra Design Museum is the first retrospective, Better Nature. Daisy's work has been shortlisted for the 2019 Lumen Prize and received honorary mention in the Artificial Intelligence and Life Art category at the Pricks Ars Electronica. Her PhD, Better, at London's Royal College of Art received the Rector's Award Scholarship. She received the World Technology Award for Design in 2011 and the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year 2011 and 2015 with Design for the Sixth Extinction being described as romantic, dangerous and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world. Please join me in welcoming Daisy. Thank you, David. It's very kind words and we were discussing it was nine years since I came sat in one of your student pinups and did that again today. It's really wonderful to be here and learn from all of you. So, I have an obsession and the obsession is this promise that I hear a lot from designers and synthetic biologists and entrepreneurs and architects and that is that we can deliver a better world. And that is in essence what we think design does. It makes things better. To paraphrase Herbert Simon, we use design to change an existing situation to a preferred one. But the question for me is what is better and think about it for a moment. What does it mean to you? Does it mean greener, more profitable, more user-friendly? Well, all of these things at once. Is this better? The PET plastic bottle was invented in the 1970s as a way to hold carbonated drinks. It was better than the glass bottles it replaced. It was lighter, it used less material, it was less breakable. It's better. But of course it's also much worse and increasingly we're realizing how terrible it is for the environment and for our health. But the plastic bottle is just an everyday example of how design and technology can be used to solve a brief and to solve a particular problem and make bigger, new, unexpected problems in the process. Once I noticed this paradox of better, I began to see it everywhere. It's used to sell us everything from pizzas to chemicals to rival political ideologies. It can fit any agenda. But the problem is that better isn't the same as good. Better for some will be worse for others. It depends on context and people and the exact moment and time it's used. So how can a word that has so much power in our contemporary world not actually have a shared meaning that is something that I became so curious about I decided to write my PhD about it which I can tell you is a terrible thing to write a PhD about because it is the most enormous topic in the world I very quickly discovered. And I realized though that whenever we see this promise of better we need to be asking what is better but crucially who's better is being delivered. And the third question is even more important is who gets to decide. And this evening I want you to think about these questions and how they relate to different humans but also to the non-human. So I spent four years obsessing about dreams of better and I was asking this question how do particular dreams get materialized by particular people into things? So how are politics and visions encoded into stuff? And I decided to look at, I've been looking at this field called synthetic biology a form of genetic engineering for a number of years and I'd really noticed how these visionaries are able to gather people around them and build institutions and infrastructure. And what I noticed was that there were maybe three different kinds of better that were emerging that had very different meanings to very different people but actually were becoming stuff. The first was the fundamental aim of synthetic biology. It's a kind of genetic engineering but it was a group of engineers who around the year 2000 specifically decided that they could make biology better. And for them that meant making biology programmable, predictable and designable like computer code rather than something that lives and dies and evolves and reproduces. And this is an example of that school of thought. This is a plate of engineered E. coli that were designed to go dark when they're exposed to light like photographic film and was designed by undergraduate students back in 2004. So it's a very early example of synthetic biology. Then I noticed that the second group, and for this group they want to use this better biology to make a better world. And by that I saw this idea of sustainable abundance that we could grow sugarcane and feed it to engineered yeast and create jet fuel and we could just carry them flying around and we wouldn't have to change our behaviours at all. We could tie the economy to the environment and live a life of plenty. The problem here for me is that we're making the same things and the same people are making them, just the methods are different. And the third group was the one that perhaps intrigued me the most and that was a group of scientists and engineers who want to, in my view, make nature better. And that is quite a radical idea, the idea that you could solve nature that you could improve it, that you could protect us from it and it from us. So this is an example which is an engineered mosquito that's designed so its progeny don't survive and it's made by a company called Oxitec and is currently being released in Brazil and elsewhere around the world to combat dengue fever and malaria. But when we ask what better nature is, I start to sort of unravel slightly because there's a problem with this sentence. Are we making nature better for us so that we can emancipate ourselves from it, that we can not be troubled by it or make it more functional for us? Or is it about making ourselves better? And again that's an emancipatory question saying that somehow we need to level up out of the morass of nature around us or engineer ourselves to improve us or change the very nature of humans. Or is it something perhaps more worthy which is saving a damaged nature which again is taking responsibility perhaps for the things that we've done to nature but again we come back to the separation between ourselves and the natural world. And this is kind of the problem is that better is a human value and it has human measures and these don't necessarily apply in the same way to nature. So take these finches, each have evolved to adapt to their locale and to find food and optimise the length of their beaks or the way they can interact with their environment is different. But they're better for their particular context. But better in nature just means survival and it means survival across a species and that means reproduction. It doesn't necessarily mean survival of individuals. These finches didn't imagine how they would optimise themselves in the same way a giraffe doesn't think I really need a longer neck and then I can reach those leaves at the top and then the next generation will be more efficient. But in this case with biology, adaption is a matter of context and chance. And that's very different to the way we think about design. So you often may see diagrams or pictures of the evolution of products but these are perhaps you could say adapted to different contexts and different preferences but they're all the product of pre-emptive design choices. Someone has imagined a set of needs and values and designed the thing accordingly. There's an act of imagination, an act of visioning in the process. And that's what's really crucial is that there are many betters. The big bottle may be good for the plane and the small bottle good for carrying around but the big bottle is probably better. But the values that determine each are dependent on context and many can coexist at the same time. I think what's really crucial then is to find ways to get many perspectives on this problem of better. There is no one better. There isn't one vision that I can tell you is going to solve the world and make it better. So instead I'm going to share with you some of the projects that I've been working on in the last year with my studio team and collaborators. They each try to find different vantage points on this problem of better to help us understand it, to open up new questions and perspectives about this problem. Ultimately I'd like to argue that thinking about better matters if we hope to make better things. So I'm going to start by showing a video and then I'm going to explain more about this project. Hawaii. The turn of the 20th century. The forests are being lost to colonial cattle farming. One tree will be lost forever. The Hibiscus Delphus while the Rihanna. The Hawaiians called it Maui Hau Kauaii, the mountain hibiscus. By 1912 it will be extinct. The habitat lost. The plant lost. The relationship between the two lost. Could we ever regain a glimpse of what was lost? A few years ago a small group of synthetic biologists at Ginko Bioworks, a bioengineering company in Boston, set out to resurrect the smell of extinct flowers. Christina Agapakis, Ginko's creative director, went to the Harvard University Hibarium in 2016 where over 5 million specimens are stored. Searching the collections for extinct plants with her colleague Dawn Thompson, they found 20. Two would hold enough information to unlock the scents of their flowers, each lost due to human destruction of their habitat. A third would reveal what may be an even greater loss. The first specimen was in the Malvesi cabinet. It was the Hibiscus Delphus wild Rihanna from which she cut tiny tissue samples. The second was the Orbexilum stipulatum or falls of the Ohio scurvy, last seen in Kentucky on Rock Island in the Ohio River in 1881 before a dam finally erased its habitat in the 1920s. The third was the Lucadendron grander florum, the Weinberg conebush. It was last seen in London in a collector's garden in 1806. Its habitat on Weinberg Hill and the shadowed Table Mountain Cape Town already lost to colonial vineyards. But this flower may prove to be completely lost. The project is bringing to light that a Harvard specimen and possibly specimens in other collections may all be incorrectly labeled. An old feud between two 19th century botanists exposed again. Back at Ginko Bioworks, the scientists could begin working with the DNA once it had been extracted from the plant tissue and sequenced by paleogeneticists at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Ginko team identified gene sequences that might encode fragrance-producing enzymes. These sequences of DNA were printed and then they were inserted into yeast, which were cultured to produce the smell molecules. The identity of those molecules was then verified using mass spectrometry, giving a list of the smell molecules that each flower may have produced. Those lists were sent to Berlin to the smell researcher and artist Cissel Tolla. Cissel began to reconstruct each flower's smell in her lab using the same molecules from her collection or finding comparative ones to approximate those that aren't available. We can use technology to reach back into the past, giving us a glimpse of each flower, but we will never know their exact smell. Science can tell us which molecules they made, but the amounts of each are also lost. Building on that contingency in London, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg designed a series of immersive experiences to reconnect the lost flowers to their habitat. These draw on the idea of the sublime, the sensation of the unknowable and exposure to nature's immensity that makes us consider our position in it. Using genetic engineering so we can once again experience a nature that we have destroyed is both romantic and perhaps terrifying. It is sublime. Artists tried to express this aesthetic state in 19th century landscape paintings, but like these images, even the most advanced technology can only give an incomplete representation. In a natural history museum, nature's contingency is trapped in time, the clock of creation and destruction stopped for us to look at. In the installations, nature has similarly reduced to its geology and the flower's smell. The human connects the two and by stepping into this abstract nature, they become the specimen on view. The smells are diffused in fragments and mixed in each installation, so every inhalation is slightly different. We can never fully experience the flower in the present without its past context. This is not de-extinction, it's a technological sublime allowing us a glimpse of a lost flower blooming on a hill, on a wild river bank or on a volcanic slope, the interplay of a species and a place that no longer exist. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says, the sublime is not so much what we're going back to as where we're coming from. I wanted to show you that whole video because it is the most complex project I've ever worked on. It's much easier to show you that than trying to explain how a biotechnology company, a smell researcher in Berlin and myself in London, can end up building vitrines in a town in the south of France where you can smell lost hibiscus from Hawaii and a scurvy from Ohio. But the reason we did this was for me it was a design challenge was how can you turn something so complex into a tangible experience that just gets you in the gut. You don't need to know about the science behind the project but how can you feel lost for something that you didn't even know that you missed in the beginning. So for me it was about trying to create a tangible experience through this incredibly complex science and in a way bringing it back to this moment of how would you feel to be in a landscape that you could never experience again? And there was also for me the perverse fun and this irony runs through all of my projects which was getting people inside vitrines and it's a technological challenge it turned out how do you diffuse these smells and these spaces but also how do you build something like this that can, for someone who's only done an undergraduate in architecture these are my first buildings so it's very exciting. But it was also how do you get that feeling of the museum in its simplest state. And so we also built a smaller version which you can, this is what could be here as well which we call the mini version where you are still on view, you're still the subject on view as the visitor. So you step inside and the smells are diffusing around your head there's four different smells that diffuse so there's a contingency to this experience there's no one true smell as a result. And tomorrow I'm going to Philadelphia where we're building a new version which is a diorama which will open next week. So playing through all the different natural history museum tropes and that is something that, a thread that runs through my work is this obsession with taxonomies and the natural history museum and the need of humans to collect and identify and label nature to make sense of it. And I don't have a science background I studied architecture and have learnt science about science as an outsider and that's a really interesting way I think to experience it. And this project has been such a learning curve because one of the kind of strangest things that happens I've had to learn a lot about botany. So this is the third flower, the liquid engine ground of flora and you'll notice it's in little inverted commas and the problem was that once I started googling this flower after Christina had sampled DNA and done this extraordinary scientific work on this flower I didn't know what flower we were actually looking at so when you start to google the name of this flower you end up with three different flowers. So then the question is, which is the real flower? And I had to learn about homonyms so there's different flowers with the same names it turns out and the real flower is actually the one on the right even though it's called the Urusperm grandoflorum and this flower, it turns out, was only documented in this one book written, it's published around 1805, 1806 in London and one botanist rewrote the botany or the taxonomy of another and he imported this foul smelling plant in a collector's garden in London and this is the only description of this flower so we solved the name of the flower this was lots of emails and help from Q last summer but then it got much stranger so remember this is a project about resurrecting the smell of extinct flowers so our Christmas studio party we went to Q because that's a very exciting thing to do if you like botany so we took the whole studio and we went to look at the actual flowers because I'd never seen them in the flesh and the curator botanist Harry Smith who was helping us pulled out the Orbexelum like, oh it's very beautiful, the hibiscus and then he pulled out this thing on the right and he said, and there's your Leucodendron grandoflorum and I was like, that's very different to this photograph on the left so what is this thing at Q? Remember again, Christina has taken DNA from this plant at Harvard and we have rebuilt the smell of it and are about to put it in a museum so then I actually finally looked at the label on this plant on the left and realised that it was grown in 1966 so we have now got this problem of a flower that doesn't, it's not possible that it exists because the flower was last seen in London in 1805 or 1806 and this one was actually grown in 1966 the plot thickens and then I was like, well what a sizzle we built the smell of what actually are we about to put in this installation so we found a protea expert in Cape Town and I'm telling all of this to show you what ends up looking like a very simple glass box turns out to be an international murder mystery for a missing corpse that we don't know that even exists because this flower on the right is this flower on the left that's been verified by a protea expert in Cape Town called Tony Rubello but he said well what's on the left he said it could be anything it probably could be one of these and these to me look like photographs of things that are not dead and they grow by the road in Cape Town so whatever this is it's not an extinct flower because it lived in the 1960s but where is the Luka Dungeon Grander Florum so in the unexpected way that my life goes it turns out we're now trying to track down a conservation charity in Cape Town a burning Weinberg hill they were meant to do it last year but there was a drought and then it rained too much this year and the idea is that they've persuaded the landowner to actually clear the landowner who cleared the colonial pine plantation on this bit of hill and has agreed to let them burn the hill to see if there's any seeds buried in the soil so now we're looking for seeds of a flower that last grew 200 years ago but was actually seen in London on a hill with the off chance that it might actually produce what we're looking for but then there's no way to actually check if the flower exists because whatever is at Harvard is not the flower so this is how you make mysteries and the reason I'm telling you this is because suddenly you realise build these reconstructions because if it's built in Unreal Engine it's our imagination of the hill at the time of the lost flower but suddenly we've opened up this whole mystery into the construction of science and the fact that colonial botanists went to this place collected these flowers and we can only verify their existence by a drawing in a book from 1805 and for me this starts to raise questions about whether why do humans need to identify these things to know them to actually for them to exist so you can smell this lost flower in the Vitra Design Museum Gallery but it might never have existed or maybe it did exist but it's lost or maybe it still lives and it's going to come out of the soil in a couple of years time after we've burnt the hill so that is something I'd like you to watch this space because I don't think we'll ever solve it but it's a really interesting way that artists and scientists can start working together and sort of unravel a lot of things we didn't expect to find about how science is constructed and for me the reason to do this is to start to ask these questions each of these flowers was lost by through colonial action the building of vineyards, the building of dams the building of cattle ranches and what we're left with through this project is an imperfect memory a trace of something that maybe never existed but is it enough to remind us to change our behaviour in the future to be better towards other species and other places and other peoples so this project is for me one of the ways I challenge this cone and anyone who's looked into speculative design and maybe familiar with this idea that we can sort of look at preferable and probable futures and actually use design as a way to think about what kinds of futures we might like but for me this model is wrong it situates us in a single present looking forward and we can only choose between the futures that we design or that we imagine that are on offer it doesn't give us agency to change our behaviours in the present and we can only choose between to change our behaviours in the present and I would argue that's where we need to change at the moment I think the reality looks more like this it's messy and multiple dreams of better coexist alongside each other futures and past shape our present shape our choices and actions today and you could say that very much at the moment histories are shaping our future a particular kind of history social imaginaries dreams of better futures golden ages the idea of make America great again or in Britain take back control this idea that we ever had control to begin with or that America was great according to who then to become back to this question of better these questions are subjective so for me the resurrecting the sublime project sits in the space where we're using histories to think about the present I want to show another project now where we're using in a way history but sort of extrapolating into a future but it's not a prediction or a proposal it's more of a way to explore these kinds of issues this project is called the substitute and it started for me last year when this picture came to the top of my Twitter feed and what she was offered to me is a prediction of what I would like to see and this is of course Sudan the last northern white rhino that died last March I didn't know there was any one male left and again once he was dead then I knew and it was too late and there's two females left and I was really struck by this this moment in time that this great creature was gone but we didn't have to worry because scientists were busy planning to harvest the eggs of the last two females and this is one of them last summer having her eggs harvested and then inseminate those eggs using sperm that was taken from Sudan and create new baby northern white rhinos of course they would have to be gestated in southern white rhinos because the two females are too old to reproduce so we're left with this very strange idea where we might have northern white rhinos coming back but these northern white rhinos don't have any other northern white rhinos to learn from and as I started to learn more from these videos a courtesy of a scientist in the Czech Republic who is studying their vocalizations the northern white rhino was the most social of all the rhino subspecies so they have a complex culture and ways of interacting so if you're to create a new technological northern white rhino how is it going to learn how to be a rhino is it a good copy of the species at this time there's 23 hours of those videos that we have watched so if anyone wants to watch some videos I've got some highlights on my computer here at about the same time though I came across a paper from DeepMind the artificial intelligence company and scientists there had devised an experiment where an artificial agent so a piece of AI would navigate around a box and they fed the data set and they trained this agent from a data set of rats navigating around a box and what they discovered in their experiment was that the artificial agent optimised it solved the problem of navigation of understanding where it was in a box in the same way that the mammalian brain has evolved to solve so using the learnings from rats it found the same solution and by that they meant a very particular configuration in the brain called grid cells so when we look at a room we make a hexagonal map of the room and there's actually cells in our brain that are firing in a similar way and their artificial agent did the same thing so I was really kind of overwhelmed at this point that this paradox that humans are so busy creating new life that we completely neglect what already exists and I couldn't understand how this could be the case so I was really excited about this research I'm guilty of it as well but it's really interesting though about this process of copying of the artificial agent being a copy of the rat itself and it reminded me of this image which is the famous Jura reproduction of this rhino that was drawn in 1515 this was an Indian rhino and it was sent from India to the king of Portugal he thought it was so great that he then sent it off to the pope as a gift after about six weeks and the rhino died in a shipwreck en route and its carcass I think was eventually found and taxidermied somewhere but Jura heard reports of this rhino he never saw it and he drew this image which became one of the most reproduced images of the Enlightenment and if anyone with a keen knowledge of rhinos you'll notice that it's got an extra horn on his back amongst strange things like the armour and this image was reproduced in books about nature of the time and it was an error in reproduction so for me these dots started to connect thinking well how would we make an archival copy of a northern white rhino that somehow kind of is the new rhino that's born through IVF actually a northern white rhino or is it somehow a copy so the solution for me to think about this was to build my own archival copy of a northern white rhino so this is at the Koopa Hewitt and the installation is a little bit smaller than this but he's life-sized and I'll share a bit more of what you see this is a little clip from the video the installation having your own northern white rhino in your server is quite a fun thing and this project is a very strange one so I'll just talk a little bit about the processes behind and what you've just seen so in the gallery you see there's three cycles to it and each one is slightly different and the rhino is actually following the path of the Deep Mind experiment so we were able to use Deep Mind's artificial agent experiment and actually generate out parts so our rhino is essentially performing this experiment and this is a strange thing to do and it's a strange thing to ask animators who are used to doing Hollywood visual effects to do something so sparse and so spartan and we really focused on his behaviors and the sounds and the sounds were actually taken from those 23 hours of rhino videos which I was sent in a cognac box from the scientist in the Czech Republic and so you realize that there's this sort of shipping of data and things around the world the rhino, who's the star of our video, was actually a southern white rhino that was from the LA Office of the Mill which is a visual effects company and he'd previously been in a energy drink commercial in Brazil so there was this very nice moment where we then had to remodel him to be a northern white rhino and so mimicking the dura miscommunications and changes in errors and reproduction we were able to synthesize this new northern white rhino and make him come to life in front of you as you watch him in the gallery but then every time he disappears so he comes to life, his sounds are an archival copy in essence using this real sound from footage, real behaviors from these videos of the last eight northern white rhinos in a zoo in the Czech Republic but then he's gone and you can't keep hold of him and it's a really strange experience watching this because in a way it's the closest I'll ever get to a northern white rhino and it's probably the most authentic experience I'll ever have of a northern white rhino but of course it's not the real thing and for me this project again comes back to this question of better do we deserve technologically resurrected northern white rhinos why would we look after them when we've already failed to look after the ones that come before, is it better to have this kind of experience where you can come face to face with something like this and be reminded of the need to protect other beings and non-human beings and our role in doing that for me this kind of starts to step into a very different way of making work and creating new kinds of perspectives and thinking about how do you prioritize the non-human perspective at the same time keeping the human perspective because without us looking at it nature doesn't really exist and so that for me kind of comes onto the last project I want to share with you which in a way does something slightly different so I've drawn it like this because it is a project that bifurcates into the future there are many different ways that the world could be and many different ways that biology could be and we are just one of them and this project is called the Wilding of Mars and it has been going on for two years so I was asked to come up with a project for a show called Moving to Mars that opens next week at the Design Museum in London and I was told I don't know if I'm allowed to say this but I was asked to make something optimistic and said it's a show about how design can help us get to Mars and colonise the planet and I'm really not a fan of colonisation and I find it really strange that we talk about colonisation in a positive way when we talk about Mars because the idea that we're being sold especially from certain corners of the Mars sort of enthusiast stack is that we can somehow turn it into another Earth that we can terraform the planet and go there and once we've trashed this planet completely and of course when you think about it, it is this it's just flipping the image Earth is going the way of Mars and this is not a new concern so in the 19th century the astronomer and businessman Percival Lowell got very excited about canals on Mars Chapparelli who was an astronomer had identified these channels on the planet and they turned out not to be channels but an artefact of his telescope and Lowell which again we see things as we can at the time that we see them at that time that was what we knew what we know about Mars now maybe in 50 years time we'll look back on and think how did we think that but we're using science to look at the world and we can only understand through the knowledge that we have but Chapparelli saw these canals or channels and Lowell translated it as canals and he talked about Earth going the way of Mars at the time there were already concerns about the effects of industrialisation and desertification on Earth and this very contemporary awareness that we have now of the impacts of our colonial exploitation of the planet were already contemporary then so for me the solution to this brief which is how to make something optimistic about colonising Mars was straightforward but first I had to think about this question is why do we think that Mars is going to be better with humans and crucially why do we think that humans are going to be better when we get to Mars I asked my 8 year old cousin last week about this question and he said well we need to go to Mars to colonise it because Earth is like going down the pan basically and we need a back up planet but we probably shouldn't go to Mars because what happens when we go there and we do the same thing and I think that's a really good point so I'm more interested in life on Earth and protecting it but the project the Wilding of Mars proposes something radically different and that is a simulation of seeding Mars with Earth biology in stages but humans never go there so this is my solution to the problem of how to fulfil a brief that is optimistic and critical about colonisation is to send plants as proxies so we've built a simulation that runs for a million years of biology seeding Mars creating wilderness but humans never go there so to do this turned out to be really difficult so it's like a good idea and then it's like how do you build a simulation of colonising another planet when you're not scientists and don't have a super computer so we chose our plants with help from scientists at NASA who worked with planetary geoscientists at Brown and had really amazing conversations that start to open up the problem of doing this is that everything is a speculation you realise especially when it comes to astrobiology because scientists are looking for water based life on Mars as the result of a political decision in the 1960s and life on Mars might look completely different so when you ask a scientist at NASA how should we seed Mars what plants do we start with and they say well actually I don't know we chose 16 extremophiles from Earth that can all tolerate harsh conditions so from the Antarctic the Arctic from desert locations we designed parameters for them like understanding their optimal living environments and we built a simulation according to these rules so this is upside down to make it easier to read the South Pole we would start with some cyanobacteria and some other kinds of bacteria that are dark to melt the snow and then we could introduce some lichens and other species that could slowly sort of acclimatise and after maybe half a million years we can add a few other things and eventually we get a gentle colonisation that's taken a million years and we just watch from Earth so I'll show you a few clips of it we just finished it on Friday so this is a bit scary so this is the year 30,000 you can see there's a clock ticking along the bottom not lots happening there's some snow at the South Pole if you can read along the bottom on the right you see evolved and extinct so that's the number of new organisms and what's actually happening in here for the eagle-eyed amongst you is this is plant cam you can just see there's like a little bit of lichen growing where the label has come up so this is going to run for an hour in the gallery and we showed a prototype at the Vitria Design Museum and in the visitors book someone has given feedback that they thought it could be faster so I cannot tell you how difficult this has been to do so it's really nice to share with you this is in the year 452,000 we've got this is watermelon snow which is a real thing that happens with a kind of cyanobacteria that stains the snow pink so we've got climate change happening the South Pole is melting meanwhile this is what's happening close up so our plant species are all able to mutate we've built a system we're not trying to terraform the planet instead we just need things to acclimatize and then they start to find their own balance and sort of start to mutate into new subspecies another landscape this is the year 152,000 nothing is really growing there we've got this evidence of population zero happening right now and if we jump forward this is 819,000 we have a meadow 189 new species 177 are extinct so crucially in this project it feels quite mad showing you this because this is the most useless thing I've ever made and it's purposefully so it has taken so much work from an amazing team of people to do this and one of the really important things for me that came out of my PhD research was how could you show multiple worlds at the same time so in the exhibition you'll see two worlds evolving at the same time two different ways that life could go and for me this project is really based on the book has short story about the garden of forking paths where he described a garden that existed in time not in space that you could get to different points at the same time and it's a story about contingency and in biology when you have a planet you may actually end up because the conditions are ultimately the same you may find life goes in the same direction or it could go radically different way why is earth different to Mars why do we think Mars is better than earth it could be better now one of the mad again I use the word mad because this feels like a madness this project one of the crazy things about what we did was once we've chosen our subspecies we then were able to design this system where new species mutate and then you start to realise that in a project this scale every single decision opens up a new problem so what do you call things that have evolved on Mars when there's no humans to look at them through the surveillance system so I then had I wrote some philosophers of biology asking them what would you call stuff on Mars and my favourite responses was well you could call them whatever you want because they don't exist and so then I decided that we really had to solve this I'd been procrastinating for about a year with this problem so I decided to go for a trinomial naming system acknowledging the colonial nature of this project yes we are colonising Mars we just are not there to exploit it but we're watching we're gardening from afar through these surveillance cameras so the saxophragia positifolia ends up with an extra Marsha after it so we have a new system to catalogue a new planet of biology and then this is the subspecies and acknowledging that these are the products of a simulation because they're entirely fictional as the philosopher pointed out each one has a barcode of its simulation generation number you'll notice that they're all getting darker and stranger as they as it goes on and this is part of the system is that things start to optimise to Mars conditions we're not recreating Earth on Mars so there are thousands of these many thousands of them and again it's the obsession with taxonomy and there's very clear distinction of well how do you create another world to reflect back on our own how do you ask well is this better or is that one better for me is at the heart of this project and it's part of this interest I have in the idea of the heterotopia the term coined by Foucault about worlds that aren't better or worse but they're different and these strange other places that he described he included cemeteries and brothels and cruise ships as heterotopias for me this project is a heterotopia that's sort of adjacent to us but it's a space to reflect back on our world and a space to ask these questions of well is Mars going to be better and I would say it won't be and so in the feature we have showing is 12 screens in two simulations and the design museum is going to be four big screens and I'm very curious how an audience who are expecting to see spaceships are going to react to very slow growing plants and so I'm very excited so I would like to just sort of finish by talking about this the ideas that underpin what I'm doing which is this idea of better and dreams of better really drive what we do as humans we are hopeful animals but there isn't one better each of our worlds coexist futures and past and form processes in the present and direct what we do in the worlds that we make and for me one of the most important questions that we need to be asking right now and perhaps the most important question is what better nature do we imagine for humans and for the non-humans and how do we get there and these questions then circle back to this need to interrogate every time you hear these promises that something is going to make something better with this product or this technology we get to choose these things we choose who they're better for or we disenfranchise and don't get to choose and that's also crucial as we start to analyse the politics and power structures that actually determine the world that we make and why it really matters for me it always comes back to this it's very simple as someone trained in design is how do we do better than this and so I would like to finish there thank you and if there's questions I think we're going to talk about them because I think there might be questions about how you actually colonise Mars thank you I'm going to ask a couple of questions but then we'll quickly open it up to the audience so get your questions ready I mean first I want to say that it's impeccable work the concepts the clarity of presentation the images and it's great for me to see some of the newer work and your engagement of for one all of the human senses you know the sounds were amazing the idea of working with smell in addition to visuals which have always been there and your mastery of like almost any technology the ability to engage but the work you're directing and it all has your direction, your sensibility you know much like architecture and studios it's of the direction of a person but it's not just done by a single person and so I'm wondering if you know as you've been involved in a lot of different educational institutions and you know you're teaching now at the AA the architectural association how do you teach that kind of thing well I mean I think thank you because that's really nice to hear because these projects are all I mean this one is fresh out of the studio and they are all the product of a lot of people so I have an amazing team in the studio and lots of sound designers and other artists and experts that we work with so it's very much not a solo venture I would really like to stress that so the way to teach I mean I'm learning so these projects in a way are the outcome of my PhD so I didn't get to do things at the scale in my PhD and it's what I would I was doing PhD by practice it's what I would like to have done but there was no way I could complete doing it they're so complex and the world-building aspect so I was trained in design interactions with Tony Dunn and Fiona Rabie at the RCA and did my PhD there which is very much a course about world building in effect and in a way these kinds of strategies can exist in a single instance you can design a world you know what would you drink out of is a way to build to start to imagine a whole world the Mars project is taking it from the other angle and that's my interest in directed evolution is well if you have the world already what comes out the other end what do designs look like if you can control the system but not actually determine the things themselves so I think world-building can be done at a very small scale and what has been really exciting with these is testing different ways to actually cut through all the words you don't need to know anything about this Mars project is that there's a fascination that humans have with watching plants grow sped up is enough I think but each one you can start to uncover more and more layers the rhino you can just watch it and have this physical sensation that you don't need to know what's going on and all these layers underneath yeah that's that's really interesting it's a good point that all of the work that you presented is has this visceral impact I think it's really powerful I mean along those lines because world-building is I think a really helpful term and I was thinking about you know our mutual friend Paul Antonelli lectured kind of at the school sponsored by the school but over at the school of arts a couple days ago and she there was talking about and she's always been doing this kind of blurring the line between architecture and design and also many other fields and I think your own history has been a kind of blurring of the lines between architecture and design do you do you see the distinction as helpful do you see us moving in a direction of those kind of terms being less relevant do you think there's some things that are specifically design and others that are specifically architectural or satinata what I've been fighting to call myself an artist at the moment because that for me feels transgressive somehow and fun because I've been a critical designer and an architect in training all these different things and in a way that feels truest to what I'm trying to do I'm very interested in design and why we design stuff as humans what is this urge to make things is the interest of driving behind at all but the labels are not so important I mean my practice my studio I have three escaped architects working in the studio so they all want to practice but not necessarily make buildings and see a problem with the future of architecture and it's the same problem that I identified when I was training in architecture that somehow my interest in the ethics of design didn't match up with the reality that I knew lay and wait for me as a practicing architect and while I love buildings I don't think I'd be a very good architect so you have to really like details drain details and I prefer naming plants so this was a much better fit for me and I think that's important because I think what we're doing in the practice is probably also still architecture which is finding a very different way of doing it we're building things we're making things happen the time scales are much shorter and the impact on the built environment is different but I think it's still relevant to practice across design and architecture and art practice yeah I mean in many ways it is as you said architecture and it's compatible with the kind of again world building that we might do in the school I want to pick up a little bit I have maybe one or two more quick questions but so yeah the ethics of design I mean there was this layer of of those questions that you're asking and the critiques that you're making in your work that have this clear clear aspect of ethics and I really like that you were talking about the agency to change behavior in the present and I wonder if in that context if you for one watched Greta Thunberg's UN Summit I just have tips about I'm very supportive so I'm saying that just as a kind of so that's one kind of urgent call to change the present to change our actions in the present so I'm wondering in architectural work or in artists work in design work and also in your own work but I'm asking you to also think about just those fields in general what role do you think there is or what space do you think there is to kind of carve out for this kind of more specific activism or a very clear and tangible call to action where a lot of our work you know in this school it's so compatible with your work is questioning things and that's what we think is you know a good way to pursue a project it's to open up more questions than provide answers but at the same time I think there is this nagging aspect in many of us individually and in the current work at the school and in your own work about needing to find the right connection to a specific call to action and just problematizing the you know the way we're doing things now but having a specific call to action and I wonder if you have thoughts about that for these fields in general or about your own work I can talk specifically to my own work but it's deeply problematic I'm not solving any environmental problems climate breakdown I'm shipping rocks around the world building steel and glass patreons and I'm here talking about it and these are all really problematic parts of contemporary practice on the other hand you know I would be better off joining Extinction Rebellion if I really wanted to make an impact but what Extinction Rebellion are doing is a storytelling and I met a wonderful conservationist called Kent Redford who's part of the Wildlife Conservation Society and we were sitting having breakfast in university halls at a conference before and I was eating this horrendous process sausage that was just terrifying these weird scrambled eggs and just thinking how synthetic this whole breakfast was sitting on my plate terrifying me and he said the thing is that we've run out of time it's too late it's too late to do anything but what all we can do now is tell stories and he's like please can you tell more stories because that's the only thing that's left and that stuck with me that was three years ago and so these new projects are all really trying to think about how do you tell the skills that I have and the kind of work that I have the privilege to do what are the stories that I can tell and what are different ways we can experiment with getting people to react so this is what I can do I could go and sit outside my studio at Somerset House on Waterloo Bridge and actually be part of the blockade would probably be more useful but this is also I think it does have use and if it gets people talking about extinction in new ways then that's valuable. Yeah well it makes me think too about the need for a diversity of approaches and you talked about a kind of diversity in your talk and even going back to Al Gore's original inconvenient truth that still sticks with me that craft of like you know there's no single technology or solution that's going to need to work on these wedges and like we need to have a lot of wedges and I think it's a good point I think one of the reasons Greta is so powerful is her own version of storytelling it's not that her as one person is skipping school it's the story she's been able to tell and captivate people by I have one more question and then we'll open it up to the audience I don't know for some reason this feels almost too like tried to ask but I'm genuinely curious to hear your thoughts and your answer about it what would be like an ideal like a dream next commission for you whether it's curating or making a specific work of art or entering a new field you already said you probably wouldn't want to do a building because of the drainage details so maybe you don't want to do a building but maybe a different kind of building or do you think about like I know what I want to do next I can't say because it's secret but more of the I'm really enjoying so this is all of this work has been made in the last year and a half which is crazy and I had to practice before I went back to do a PhD and that's how I first met working on a project called synthetic aesthetics where I was embedded in synthetic biology which left me questioning what do I do now like where does this leave me I was weirdly integrated inside a field that I was trying to be political about and critical of and that's I'm still working with synthetic biologists but I needed to reframe what I was doing so these projects have all happened and now I want to carry on making projects like this because it's so fun but it's also crazy and I'm learning about the practice of being an artist and building installations and you know this much better than I do having built towers of mushrooms it's really difficult but the challenges are amazing and if you can find ways to do it then it's you know for me there's a huge pleasure that I'm doing making work about something I really care about whether it's sustainable as a practice whether it can be sustained and there's avenues for this kind of work is you know that's the mystery it feels like it's worth trying at the moment because I get to tell stories about nature that's really nice powerful stories I'm kind of interested in aesthetic theory and I've got a question regarding your practice as an artist which you said yourself maybe you've identified that or not so there's a body of literature and aesthetics that kind of defines it as something that's got the ability to produce the unthinkable right into open doors and so it sparks ideas new knowledge by offering us a vision of something that we didn't know and so um that's kind of how you come to produce a new notion of what's better in a way and that's kind of different than producing a notion of better that is like a game theory model of morals and such things and so for you is is art supposed to investigate the world and tell us some truth about the world so with your work in science or is it more are we gonna like produce new ideological tools with those stories so are we telling are we doing are we educating just producing a new a new story just like we produce ideologies I can only talk about my personal view on this which is that I think that I mean I see this practice of art that I'm engaged in as a means to create reflection and new perspectives so in making these projects for example the substitute it's a slightly messy project because there's multiple different strands coming together you end up with this huge rhino but he's walking the path of an experiment he's coming together there's all sorts of different layers in there but that's also me trying to work out stuff along the way it's not a perfect answer to the question but it's in doing that I learn new things and I hope that people are looking at notice other things or feel other things or find out other questions they have to me the questioning they're tools to ask questions but they're not just questions in your head they're questions with your body so there's a physical experience and also trying to scale up my practice I'm really interested in how you access the bits that the brain isn't necessarily you know like the gut feeling the sense of loss the emotional connection if someone's crying in a vitrine with the smell of a lost flower I'm happy because I've done my job of creating an emotional experience without having to use any words it's not necessary they may not be crying about the flower they may be crying about something else just they happen to sit down on a rock and have a moment but that's a really to me that's what art can do and what I'd like art to do is create a new perspective on the world for me and let me see something differently but that is not a I have not studied aesthetic theory so please forgive me I just really wanted to say thank you it's been a while to since I've kind of sat at a lecture and you know had it you know David Benjamin's kind of last question or next to last question really put things into perspective for me in terms of the fact that you're asking kind of the world's most pressing questions and who kind of gets to say what those questions are you kind of like authored and took the personal liberty to be able to ask those questions and I think that's super exciting and I love the fact that you kind of said in a way like all of these projects are you know in some way I don't want to say worthless but I said useless useless I'm so sorry but what I'm saying is that I definitely don't think that they're worthless by any means it's exciting because for me I've been a part of this institution for three years now and I've borrowed $200,000 to be able to be where I am today and like sit here and ask you questions and speak to people like you and it's refreshing to know that the questions that you can ask as for me the real questions that I want to ask like what is our role in post-colonial Africa as an architect and you know the lack of architects that exist there and the pressing need for urbanization and kind of like what's your role as an architect it's a very difficult question to ask and every day I think about how one should kind of participate in that world or whether we should be participating in that world at all it's like my obsession for the last three years and like why I've spent the money that I have to go here etc and it's just really really refreshing to see that somebody out there is asking questions that really don't necessarily have answers but in one way or another you've come to a very fine-tuned presentation and resolution to questions that have never been asked before it really gives me like energy to forward and you know attempt to answer these questions whether it's right or wrong it's exciting Thank you that really means a lot the three questions the better questions I mean that took me four years to identify those really simple questions so I mean it's a design project in itself was how to find out what the question that what is the simplest possible question that can be most easily communicated so although the work is super complex and goes into these rabbit holes of dead plants and other things it always comes back to like for me it's how to talk to different audiences how to be able to go and speak to synthetic biologists or artificial intelligence experts when I don't know the stuff and also seeing value in the naive outsider questions for me that was really important scary but very helpful process so ten years ago starting out being like well why would you do that and it turns out no one actually asked that question in that way in a lab so being that person actually is a very powerful thing and being willing to ask and to learn so the scale of ambition is like I've done a whole planet now thank you I just want to ask I saw the experimentation on the Mars about the plants and I thought it was very interesting because you show that there are I remember like some numbers like there are 300 some species that are existing and there are like 150 species extinct I'm wondering what's the general reason for the extension of those species so on Thursday last week it said died and on Friday I thought I forgot that word it was extinct that was the word we were looking for for the last six months so we built a system in the game systems it's built in Unity there are harsh seasons so life's not perfect on Mars even if you're a lichen so harsh seasons come and kill everything off and we had to have a mechanism you don't want to be a plant even there it's not going to be fun so the whole thing is not necessarily going to work if you actually want to wild Mars I've spoken to someone whose job it is to not contaminate Mars and showed him the project and he's like yeah I don't think it's going maybe you get like a little patch by a rock of contamination but you're not going to have meadows so the extinction was also to point out that the system plants is itself out it's an ecosystem so each of our plants is contributing to three parameters of temperature, water and nutrients which are kind of global and local parameters so each one is helping raise the temperature and make it better for plants but then you've got to kill them it wouldn't be life otherwise if it worked perfectly so it's kind of like I feel like it's kind of like longer plants will survive yet in one of the first slides you showed that one of the extinct plants in Ohio I believe and you said they weren't extinct because a dam was built so actually that plant went extinct it was last seen in 1881 it was first identified in 1835 last seen in 1881 and the dam was built in the 1920s so they never found another specimen of that plant apart from on this one island so when they failed to cultivate any specimens that they'd collected from the island and it died out on the island and then the island was flooded 40 years later there was like no hope for it to ever come back because it was such a localised specific plant and our Mars plants are also localised in specifics we have maps on every terrain so according to the geology of the terrain where things are like like to be in the shade or in the light it's wild out there I'm just curious about how do you determine that a species extinct because what we do if we do something bad a species will go extinct or is it just a choose of nature extinction is good it makes room for more stuff so the Mars project is based on Corkhead's short story but it's also based on an experiment by an amazing scientist called Richard Lenski who's been running an experiment since the 1980s called the long-term evolution experiment and he took a plate of E. coli and split the population into 12 flasks and his lab ever since the 1980s have been monitoring these 12 parallel worlds every day and tracking the genetic diversity in how each world develops when you start to look at the graphs that come out of this and they're very pretty some of them because they show explosions of diversity but the world is always contained the media is the same the flask that each population is in is the same so there's genetic diversity explosions things die out and that's just the mechanism of biology so in the wilding of Mars Mars becomes a repository for the mechanism and that includes losing things so it doesn't matter that the northern white rhino is extinct it doesn't matter at all we care, I care because it's quite cute but it doesn't really matter to the history of biology or the future of biology it will just go in another direction so extinction doesn't matter it's that if we want the world to be as it is now and to continue then it matters so that's about what we think is better Hi I have a question regarding the Mars experiment that you did I think like since you deployed a lot of elements in Mars I was wondering while like when you were doing it since you were the director of it what do you think and anytime like they come across your mind like what kind of culture it's going to create since it's a controlled experiment that you are trying to simulate what do you think what kind of culture would you create what kind of culture are you creating or something similar to that you mean for the plants for humans based on your experiments you are like you're doing a bunch of experiments like from macro to micro scales and I was particularly excited about your experiment on Mars and since you are deploying a lot of these elements to grow and make it look like Earth I was fascinated what kind of culture are you trying to create or what kind of unpredictable culture it's going to create I'm not sure I fully understand the experiment itself so the simulation when we run it we get new things emerging each time but they're all because of the nature of the project and it's not a one to one mapping of Mars or a full scientific experiment so we had to work with the constraints that we had in an artist studio so you start to see similar things it's not as much variation as you would like but for me the real cultural outcomes that are interesting are people's responses when people say it's really slow and boring it's like a million years just went past in an hour that's a really interesting response of humans to reflect on that or people say well but we would go there in the end when I went to MIT to the Beyond the Cradle conference with all these astronauts and people from NASA but we'll go there no and that's for me is the cultural reflection of the project as it reveals that humans cannot help themselves but want to exploit things and that's part of our nature so I'm not sure I fully understand the plant thing but the culture within it I was more trying to get like once it develops since like all elements on earth developed natural like like all the elements has its own culture like birds and animals and us trees and so when we create this artificial simulation I was more interested in Mars how would people or plants or animals that's going to be there what kind of what sort of culture would you think that's going to be there I don't know that's part of where imagination has to come watching it the whole thing is a fiction you watch it and it's everything that you get from it is your own imagination apart from what I've directed you to think because I've art directed it in specific ways everything else is you are superimposing onto that world which reflects you I don't know what the plants are thinking or their culture in the same way that what we know about trees and how they communicate we now know more because the research is being done and we know that they're communicating but five years ago we just thought they were trees I'm being facetious but the growing knowledge that the trees are interconnected and stands and communicating with each other and that's the point I was making before that we can see the world through the lens of what we know so we can see canals on Mars we can see communities of plants but the wilding of Mars the purpose of documenting it through these botanical tropes and using the Linnaean taxonomy is all about reflecting on the way that we see the world it's just holding a mirror up to our own our own perception and our own culture I think we have time for one more question I hope the hands have been changing okay, go ahead Hi, I just wanted to ask you because you were talking about taxonomy and diorama are there other scientific tools that you think are interesting to look at as architects or designers, artists I love museums so anything but I just like cataloging things so for me anything with a label is exciting anything it draws is exciting in boxes people in boxes, animals in boxes there's like a lot of scientific diagrams corrupting scientific diagrams so one of my graduation projects ten years ago was I added an extra kingdom to the tree of life and then took it to show scientists and to talk about how synthetic biology might need its own domain and then I had an amazing conversation with a Nobel Prize winning scientist who wanted to use it on the cover of a journal and he was like could you correct this inaccuracy because you've added this bit that says root because I just copied a picture of a diagram of the tree of life and I didn't really know what the labels meant he was like if you remove that it would be more accurate and I was like it's got a big extra kingdom that I've just put on the front it's going on the front of a scientific journal but what is important is to know why you're using it and then you don't need to know everything about it but it becomes a really useful tool to then go to experts to say why is this wrong, why is this right so I ended up taking my tree of life to a workshop of tree of life scientists who are really really they like fighting about clades and how things are organised so I got them to redraw it and it was a really good way to get people who professionally design taxonomies to argue over taxonomies to talk about the impact of synthetic biology on the natural kingdom so anything is fair game Thank you, thank you for sharing I have a question wondering like you did all three projects like I wondering like is this three projects found you or you created this like a three project original like what kind of passion you will find these kind of extinct flowers, rhinos these kind of things because you know but botanical nature is huge and all the questions about better there can be everything from a little micro stuff and a lot of things but why these three projects like specifically come to you or like what kind of this kind of things like oh what's your original passion to create these three projects, thank you So the Mars project I was asked to you know it was asked to pitch a project for an exhibition I really want to do anything about Mars but then the brief was so delicious it had to be optimistic that this was too good to not find a way to not do it and then the Rhino was commissioned by the Coupier but I proposed the project because the whole thing started when I read about Sudan, read this paper that someone forwarded me from DeepMind and then was on a panel about artificial life with someone from DeepMind out of body experience thinking this is so weird because we were talking about artificial life could we, should we, would we and meanwhile this Rhino had just died and I found it very strange that we were talking about whether we could have a simulate consciousness and the project sort of emerged out of that and I wrote a proposal on these ideas of what it could be and the flower project so Christina Agapakas at Ginkgo they'd been working on it for a few years and I was aware of it and they were going to they'd finally finished the science behind it so two years in and then I'd been talking to Sissel because I've known Christina and Sissel also for a decade and I said to her, I really want to make the smell of the sublime with you like what's the most extreme smell that we can make and then she was like okay but Christina's finished the flower project so maybe we could do that but it was a really nice way because and that's where the reference of the sublime came through because when Christina said to me actually we've found this the molecules we've actually it worked, our idea that we could do this worked then it became well actually for me that is the most extreme and terrifying and awesome experience when I heard that on the phone so the project came from there so they just tend to come from ideas weird ideas there's no rhyme or reason you were just talking about the smell in the course of your work have you ever had to think about or even compromise on the science for the sake of effect because you are an artist and your medium is effect creating an impact on an audience and if the science doesn't support an impact say the smell of one of the flowers was almost utterly unrecognizable have you had to think about changing aspects of the way you project your art to an audience versus the science that forms its background that's very interesting I'm not communicating the science so I'm not trying to do that I'm telling stories and reflecting on the science and asking questions about it so that doesn't come up in that way maybe an example is a new project that we're working on that involves machine learning and we're working with a string theory physicist to do the machine learning and he said well what happens if it doesn't work I said well it will work it's really difficult what you want to do what happens if it doesn't work well it will work because our measures of what works are different so in this project where we're actually using science and did training for months we're not making science it turns out that the research that he did to make the project is probably useful scientific research and some groundbreaking stuff but the outcome is different so the smell project I showed you the inner workings when the flowers may not even exist they may not be extinct or may be extinct we don't even know but it's not we're not just communicating science there's more room for I think that's a really interesting question and that's an interesting way to kind of wrap up because I think the idea of a project that can be both art and storytelling as well as scientific research seems like a perfect kind of sweet spot for the kind of collaborations that you pulled together and reflecting a little bit on my own question, my own last question to you I can't wait to see one of your next works which I'm not sure if it would be your dream commission or not which would be either a kind of multiplayer interactive video game or a feature film I'll take both okay, so thank you very much, Daisy