A brief moment. The way the actor moves his head. The beauty of a face. A flicker of an expression that seems to contain all the meaning in a scene. Photogénie as a cinematic concept originates with early French film theory. We often use it to try to capture the enigmatic qualities of a film star, but photogénie means so much more. Laura Ivins,Indiana University (2017)
Photogénie Project
The Photogénie Project memorializes those living entities that have traversed the ecliptic path of the Science New Wave since it originated in 2016.
By 2033, we will open up a physical site on the Galapagos Islands not too far from Darwin’s Research Station in Santa Cruz. This temperature-controlled space will be be open to visitors and researchers. On display, a myriad of living bacteria encoding the identities of the 262,144 bearers of the SNW manifesto. Consider this initiative as a cross between the Garden of Eden and Carl Sagan’s Voyager Golden Record project.
The Science New Wave identity for each manifesto recipient includes their 12-nucleotide DNA code, a donated image & a message from the future and the date of birth. This information will be encoded into the DNA of living bacteria. A brief protocol will allow scientists of the future to retrieve this genetic information and reconstruct the stored image.
Join the Photogénie Project by getting your original typewritten and signed Science New Wave Manifesto. For more information, reach out to us at sciencenewwave@labocine.com.
Your Science New Wave identity will be stored in living bacteria. Learn about this visionary procedure in the Nature paper “CRISPR–Cas encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria.”
“Here we use the CRISPR–Cas system to encode the pixel values of black and white images and a short movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria. In doing so, we push the technical limits of this information storage system and optimize strategies to minimize those limitations.”
<< Eadweard Muybridge's Galloping Horse Encoded in Bacteria and Reconstituted as a GIF.
The Photogenie Project will tentatively open its doors in the Galapagos Islands in 2033. It will co-exist next to the western Santa Cruz tortoise (Chelonoidis niger porteri) - a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise endemic to Santa Cruz.
