Team:Weimar-Heidelberg Arts/Collaboration

• Supercell
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Collaboration

The collaboration between Heidelberg and Weimar came into beeing through an initiative from the Media Art Department of the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Already working in the context of art & science - the interest of Weimar was to get in contact with an already experienced and succesful iGEM Team within our reach. So we were glad to get an invitation from the Team of Roland Eils to Heidelberg for an very friendly and open informal meeting in Heidelberg in february 2010. For the Heidelberg Team it was obvious that with synthetic biology many innovative products will emerge with a big cultural impact on our every day life. From the Weimar part there was a couriousity to know how new lifeforms can be engineered and imagined.
At this point the University Heidelberg started the call for the iGEM Team 2010 and the University Weimar planned on a seminar during the semester introducing students to the fields of Synthetic Biology.

After showing each other examples of former works and projects and discussing the possible relations between art and science a soft approach in the direction of a possible collaborating iGEM team was made. In Heidelberg the team started on a wet lab project soon, in Weimar the semester´s topic was Synthetic Biology. After a meeting in Weimar for a conference involving a talk on Synthetic Biology the first meeting with the whole group happened in Heidelberg followed by an intense retreat on the countryside. In Heidelberg the art students were introduced to lab work and shown the various interesting places in Heidelberg - the lab, the campus, the great restaurants and nice bars. Also included was a meeting of the wet lab team Heidelberg, explaining/discussing their wet lab project.

The art students got to know about the highly organized workflow of lab-work, the relation between simulation and formal abstraction and security matters of Synthetic Biology. For the biology students of Heidelberg the ways to create representations of ideas and product in an artistic way was discloded. These events created the basis for our collective iGEM project, defining that this would be a project were scientists and artists work together closely and feed each other with ideas and details. This included the process of finding the topic and playground to evolve and present our ideas in form of a supermarket. From there on the team met continuously on workshops were progresses on single products, on overall design, big things and details of the project were discussed. The second big parts were the collective brainstormings on products to fill the online shop, as well as producing video-comments, texts and images. This vivid exchange allowed the team to profit from each other not only in the preproduction and theory of the projects but also in the selection of images and videos.
SuperCell - the Synthetic Biology supermarket grew from a collaboration between art and science into a project concerning society as a whole matter and from a student contribution to the iGEM competition into an ongoing platform for Synthetic Biology, with combined efforts by scientists, artists and designers.