BioInformaticsHack - RandoGeneCode Workshop

Join us in Hackteria's BBB: https://www.digitale-gesellschaft.ch/pub/hackteria

VASTAL - The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd. presents: a poetics based Tutorial for BLAST, a cornerstone bioinformatics tool at NCBI. BLAST is the Basic Local Alignment Search tool using poetry, drawing and homologies to interpret genetic code. Full description: https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/BioInformaticsHack

This is a lab about Rolling Dice, Understanding Bioinformatics Databases, Poetry, DNA Code, Drawing, Anatomical Research, Chance and Genetic Mutation. Using a foldable or randoAccees 'DNA Icosahedron' we will make a Random DNA sequence and translate it into: a poem, a drawing of the poem, a documentation chance DNA sequence in a bioinformatics database, a drawing of the actual living being that has our DNA poem in it's genome, and a drawing of the parts of that being that contain our poem. You will understand Online DNA Databases like no one else after you take this lab. No previous biology knowledge is required. Just bring your ability to draw, play in platforms and write poetry!

But what if we are not all cloistered into Gaussian distributed hyperMicro ‘individuated’ target groups with Click Bait sexual partnerz, Click Bait Politicz and Click Bait Cradle to Grave Economies? What if the cistopia, dystopia of systopia already came with the brains and sinews of poetic misinterpretation? Then the libidinal economy of complete, Non-anonymous, privacy-less Kafkaesque pornography as the spread eagle interface of big data, is not eclipsing free will through Cancel Culture and platform-government-corporate surveillance. No, it is the return of the repressed software engineer’s psyches that has colluded around the dank memic fire of privatization.

Understand the difference between synthetic biology, standard code subroutines and embedding programs in gene drives as having a rather different relation to data processing: involving meat bodies as metabolizing, somewhat cognizant and irritated by being the factory.

Bioinformatics is the world map of the world of biodiversity.

The search engines, online data dumps and editing software is intended for data mining and industrial uses of life. But, with the advent of genetic engineering, the text file tailoring of life leads to an interface between the keyboard console and Print to Flesh tech. This lab is meant to help hackers know how to encode text to DNA and to realize that any text they write has some homology already sequenced and online in some living organism's genome. Hacking is queer automatically. I know that is only a sort of relief. But hacking genomes, hiding cyphers in chromosomes, phreaking genes into producing obscure secondary metabolites is flech hacking and your code reproduces independently. Lets see what poetry can teach about bioinformatics & Lets see if we can drop a trojan horse into the code/language of life.

Adam Zaretsky is a WetLab art practitioner mixing ecology, biotechnology, non-human relations, body performance and gastronomy. His art practice focuses on an array of legal, ethical, social and libidinal implications of biotechnological materials and methods with a focus on transgenic humans. Zaretsky is a former researcher at the MIT department of biology and he also runs a public life arts school: VASTAL (The Vivoarts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.)