Week1

What is Life? How would you define it, can you actually define it?

 We might be able to define the term “Life” in professional, scientific way, like “it has cell, it can reproduce itself…”, and as you might know, people have been tried to do this. But I think this is just one of many ways to define Life.
 I prefer the way to express Life from information theory. Life is things that bring diversities into this universe defying the law of entropy. If you let warm and cold water together, it will eventually become homogeneous. And just like this, the universe are moving toward death of information. Bergson said only living things are defying the law. We animals are seem to be hostile to each other because we eat each other, but we do this to defy the law. In this view of Life, We could say that we living things are together fight against the law of this universe.

What is BioHacking? What does it mean for you?

 BioHacking is about doing something with the living organisms’ ability to produce substances, or working on and changing the production ability itself. Based on this definition, I could say that all the fermentation technologies such as brewing, are a type of BioHacking. Genome editing is of course BioHacking, but implanting NFC chips into human body does not seem to be. Most of surgeries are not biohacking, but trying to change environment inside our gut for the sake of bacteria could be called BioHacking.

Why are you interested in Bio?

 As one of living things, I think this is only natural having an interest in ourselves, so there is not much to say, but I’ve always wanted to make living things except human more involved in human life. And I could say that is one of the theme of my artwork.

Written on March 6, 2022