Artist Talk: - Genome Editing & GABA Tomatoes

In this Artist Talk, Georg will talk about his practice as BCL and about the projects and technical developments leading up to the CRISPR Tomato Project.

We will discuss the definitions of Genetically Modified Organisms and how new developments like CRISPR-based Genome Editing and "New Breeding Technologies" questions and circumvent the existing legal and bio-security regulations. We will take a special view on how different countries and communities approach the issues of New Breeding Technologies and will try to find out the hidden agendas, and possible genetic self-defense mechanisms and actions.

About Georg Tremmel / BCL

Georg Tremmel is an Austrian artist living and working in Tokyo. He studied Biology, Informatics and Media Art with Peter Weibel and Karel Dudesek in Vienna and continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London with Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Since 2001he is intertwining biological, cultural, ethical and societal codes, creating objects, installations and situations for contestable discussions. He founded the BCL - an Artistic Research Framework for critically exploring Art & Biotech. BCL's body of works includes projects like Biopresence, the Common Flowers Series, and Ghost in the Cell. Georg has been working as a Project Researcher in the Laboratory for DNA Information Analysis at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Medical Science, specialising in the Information Visualisation of Cancer Genomic Data. He is also a Visiting Researcher at the metaPhorest Art & Science group at Hideo Iwasaki's Lab at Waseda University. Georg is also the co-founder and community director of BioClub Tokyo, Japan’s nicest Open Biolab & Biohackerspace.

• The talk will be in English.