Soft Genes 006: Life in the Toolkit - Christina Agapakis, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Shelby Newsad
How is the concept of "life" reimagined with our current and future generative tools in vitro and in silico?
Join Soft Genes, SeedAI, and BioBAT Art Space in an evening of exploration and connection, featuring a conversation with Shelby Newsad, building new visions for bio and health, and Heather Dewey-Hagborg, information artist and bio-hacker, moderated by Christina Agapakis exploring the aesthetic and material intersection these questions raise.
Doors: 6:30 pm
Panel discussion: 7:00 - 7:45 pm
Hang: 7:45 - 9:30 pm
Christina Agapakis is an extremely interdisciplinary synthetic biologist working to build more creative and human futures for biotechnology. She is the founder of Oscillator, a design agency telling new stories at the intersection of life science and technology, and a guest curator for an upcoming show at BioBAT Art Space.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a New York-based artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA.
Shelby Newsad is committed to facilitating step-change technologies in bio and health. Before investing at Compound, they’ve worked as a bioscience researcher across plant sciences (PhD, University of Cambridge), neuroscience (National Institutes of Health), and drug discovery (Helmholtz Institute). As a former researcher and technologist at heart, Shelby loves getting deep into the tech with founders and has >20 active bio and health theses.
BioBAT Art Space is a non-profit gallery and interdisciplinary research studio dedicated to fostering creative practice at the intersection of art and science. Located within BioBAT Inc., a biotech incubator at the historic Brooklyn Army Terminal, it is one of the largest spaces in the world devoted to bioart. BioBAT Art Space advances its mission through large-scale exhibitions, STEAM education programs, public engagement initiatives, international academic collaborations, and experimental residencies for artists and scientists. By bridging scientific innovation with artistic expression, BioBAT Art Space cultivates dialogue, discovery, and transformative approaches to the pressing challenges of the 21st century.
SeedAi is s a non-profit organization that works at the forefront of artificial intelligence policy and governance, collaborating with policymakers, scientists, academics, and the private sector to design policies, programs, and tools.
Soft Genes is an LA-based research community that connects overlapping worlds in art, academia, and industry to enable creative practice that centers biology via interdisciplinary collaboration. Through sharing materials and skills, we aim to enable work that eschews the boundaries of "art" and "science”.