Robert Bolton

[robertbolton]

In summer 2016, I created this as an experiment exploring free, low-barrier, human-computer collaboration. The music is composed by the browser-based soundtrack generator, JukeDeck. I responded, writing the lyrics and recording the vocals on my macbook’s built-in microphone. The song was finished using the automated mastering tool, Landr.  The video was made using a video generator called MVGEN. LIRO stands for Light In - Rainbow Out.

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just add money

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Vehicle

Times Neue Roman _ Vehicle [album] _ 2013

Times Neue Roman 2013 album, Vehicle. It lives at www.TNRvehicle.com __ A million thanks for the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council + Brent Fairbairn + DAPS Records + Honest Music + EMI Music Canada + the village. 

Art by Ilona Fiddy. Photos: Jessica Hoang. Soundscaping: Andrew Zealley. Mastered by Angelo Bratsis. Thanks Kyle Harrison; Thanks Jed Harper; Thanks Rich Kidd. Thanks Eli. Thanks No Sinner. Thanks Saida. Thanks Shafey. Thanks Nimish, Kent, and Dave. Thanks Ian Riddoch. Thanks Gavin Rough. Thanks Charles Wahl. Thanks Gavin Sheppard. Thanks Ian Chai. Thanks Dan and Apes = Tonka Puma. Thanks Glenn and Vinsu = Kid. Studio.

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Do The Thing Right

A song I wrote with Zaki Ibrahim and Alister Johnson; performed by Zaki

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Lament

Contributed bars to Fish Nets (1:11) and Wave Bye (1:49) on Dopey's Reprise; sequel to Dopey's Lament. Click through to listen.

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Soul Run

"Soul Run," a song I wrote with Tanika Charles, is the title track off her forthcoming album.

"Money" is another song we wrote together on the Polaris prize-nominated album, Soul Run.

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walk (hu)man [available at Art Metropole]

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The Future of Beauty

An exercise in strategic foresight: Myself, Karl Schroeder, Jayar Lafontaine, and Kirsten Hammerberg speculate on the cosmetics industry’s future brandscape. Design by Julie Do with Jemuel Datiles. Published in MISC Magazine. Ask about a PDF.

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The RipKit [Rapid Innovation Process] is an innovation toolbox-as-a-service - I developed with a team at Idea Couture / graphics by Emery Lane.

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The Inspiration Bubble

This article, written with Martha Twidale, was originally published in MISC magazine a few years back. The inspiration bubble continues its ballooning - exasperating me as it employs my friends with cool media jobs between journeys of self-discovery.

A Lululemon reusable shopping bag tells us “friends are more important than money.” The self-help book The Secret sings of how, with the powers of positive thinking, we may harness the “natural law” of attraction to achieve our dreams. Motivational quotes in bold fonts hover over stock images of sunsets. Handwritten messages stir hearts via Post-it note, and someone on Instagram has just been to the gym (#gymlife).

Intended as fuel for sudden bursts of creativity – Oprah broadcasts it; Obama campaigned on it; TED spreads it; Deepak Chopra and Anthony Robbins codify it, package it as curricula, and sell it at a premium – it’s inspiration.

But there’s a distinction to be drawn between inspiration proper – those things that actually inspire creative bursts, things like caffeine, alcohol and deadlines – and those things that just intend to. The latter category, the genre that includes Deepak, Tony, Oprah and the musings of our obnoxious friend on Instagram, represents the fetishization, celebritizaton, commercialization and finally the crowdsourcing of user-generated inspiration.

An engine of the social web, inspiration is one of the media genres that keeps users interacting – sharing and ‘liking’ each other’s media posts. The most popular social platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest, depend on this behavior. As the inspiration flows, so does the money: Pinterest – a platform whose interface makes metaphor of real-world inspiration boards – takes advantage of the user’s inspired state, as an opportunity to display ‘paid pins,’ ads disguised as content that link back to retailers.

Instagram, which had no revenue model when it was acquired by Facebook in 2012, seems to have been valuated on inspiration alone; the screen-estate that inspires the glazed eyes of over 30 million users was worth US $1 billion dollars to the social media behemoth.

Client partner at Facebook’s Global Marketing Solutions group, Daniel Habashi, said that while the sharing of inspiring content is indeed at the core of Facebook’s user experience, it comes from an authentic place. “Services like Facebook definitely make it easier for people to connect with each other and share positive messages,” he said, “it’s an outlet of expression powered by real people.”

While not every Facebook post or Instagram photo exactly fits the genre, many do. From advertising the benefits of juice cleanses (#juicelife) to throwing some arrangement of the words ‘imagination’, ‘dream’ and ‘magic’, against a pastoral backdrop and attributing them to Shakespeare, public displays of inspiration are clearly observable and pervasive across social media.

Habashi says the inspiration economy is, “a community of resources, thoughts and perspectives that organize a group to create meaningful experiences that they can share with their friends and the organizations they care about.”

Taking a cue from the success of Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, a number of startups are appealing more directly to that community, with the aim of capitalizing on the inspiration economy.

When founder of Piccsy, Daniel Eckler noticed the proliferation of inspirational “visual quotes” on Piccsy, he responded with Recite, a web application with over 50 “beautiful and dynamic” typographic templates that enable users to “turn a quote into a masterpiece.” The product has been used by some of the internet’s great motivators including LeAnn Rimes, and Sean “Diddy” Combs who’s dropped such gems as “the question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me” and “fuck anything that doesn’t make you happy.” Responding to the question: is the abundance of online positivity effective in inspiring people to get up and do something? Eckler, perhaps unsurprisingly, responded with a quotation: “Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” – Frank Tibolt

The irony, Eckler said, was that Tibolt was an author on success and self-help. “Inspirational quotes,” said Eckler, “can be great motivators, and they’re perfectly suited to the current 140 character media message landscape,” but “browsing Pinterest for quotes and sharing them with your friends is not a substitute for getting things done.”

As the internet confuses a state of being for a genre of media, there’s a disconnect between the things we call ‘inspirational’ and the things that actually inspire us. If all this inspirational content is empty – a tone standing in for an action – and no one is actually affecting the change they’re inspired to, then we’re in an inspiration bubble. Its impending collapse may mark the rise of the action economy – if such a thing could exist online.

[robertbolton]

Biohackers: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Synthetic Biology

Richard Thomas and I contributed a perspective on policy surrounding DIY biotech to Innovations Journal (MIT Press). The journal is jointly hosted at George Mason University's School of Public Policy, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. 

Click through to read it:

It has been said that if you ask five scientists for a definition of synthetic biology (often referred to as synbio), you’ll get six different answers.1 While it may frustrate policymakers, this semantics problem signifies synthetic biology’s position as one of the most dynamic and misunderstood sectors of the life sciences today. 

For the purposes of this paper, we define synthetic biology as the deliberate design and construction of a biological system to produce effects that would not ordinarily occur in nature. It is the process of combining raw DNA components into “synthesized” DNA strands that, when introduced into a living cell, create an organism that behaves according to the designer’s intent. That could mean reprogramming the genome of a bacterium so that it manufactures a vaccine, engineering algae to create biofuels, altering a plant’s DNA to make its flowers glow in the dark, or constructing a more powerful influenza virus from scratch (for research purposes or otherwise).

Synthetic biology has the potential to solve, and to create, social problems. It represents a tremendous economic opportunity and a considerable threat to public health and security. Now entering a decisive development phase, synbio technologies are beginning to be both commercialized and democratized. As more products created via synthetic biology are going to market, the tools and materials used to apply the technology are also becoming cheap and accessible enough for startups and hobbyists to get involved. The general public has little understanding of the technology and its implications; it therefore arouses attitudes of both enthusiasm and alarm. Given that synthetic biology involves creating new forms of life, these attitudes are neither unjustified nor surprising. It is critical that measures be taken to facilitate discussion and accelerate understanding of synthetic biology so that a code of ethics and policies for its use can be developed. The best way to understand the issues and determine policies to regulate the synbio field is to cautiously embrace a culture of open, transparent, and participatory science that promotes discussion of opportunities and consequences at every turn.

COMMERCIALIZATION (IN YOUR NEIGHBOR’S GARAGE)

While the pharmaceutical industry has used synbio to manufacture products—including synthetic human insulin—for over 30 years, materials produced through synthetic biology are beginning to appear in household products with increasing frequency. Ecover, a Belgian cleaning-product company, currentlymarkets a liquid laundry detergent that contains oil produced by genetically engineered algae. Swiss-based Evolva has constructed a synthetic vanilla that is expected to be the first synbio-produced food additive to hit the market.

The science is also entering a stage of commercialization in which companies are marketing “do-it-yourself” synbio products. A growing movement of “garage biologists” or “biohackers” (referred to as “DIY synbio” in this paper) are using digital tools to design DNA sequences, then assembling them using biological materials that can be purchased online. The increased access to these activities by entrepreneurs and citizen scientists outside of universities, big corporations, and government agencies (“big bio”) is the result of dramatically lowered barriers to entry in terms of formal education, bureaucracy, and cost. The DIY synbio movement fundamentally challenges the way scientific knowledge is structured and controlled, as it essentially enables anyone to access and contribute to biomedical research. Whether DIY synbio ultimately disrupts or complements the work of the existing big bio regimes, including academic institutions, corporations, and government agencies, will depend on whether big bio chooses to embrace it, ignore it, or fight it.

Genomikon, a startup whose tagline is “Genetic Engineering for Everyone,” markets a consumer “wetware” kit that can be purchased online for about $500. A wetware kit is a consumer product that provides all the biological materials, instructions, and troubleshooting tips to enable experimentation in the lab or in the home. Synthetic biology is frequently compared to computer programming. A wetware kit is much like a software development kit that enables users to create applications for a particular software platform—the significant difference being that, rather than programming software, the user is programming living matter and manipulating the functions of cells by altering the genetic code.

If programming cells becomes as accessible as programming software, DIY synbio could become a new medium that people use to express themselves, much like computers and the Internet. Moreover, if this synbio “democratization” continues to scale, we could see the creation of entirely new industries.

The mix of scientists, amateur tinkerers, artists, and entrepreneurs who comprise the DIY synbio community embodies an idealist countercultural ethic that is reminiscent of the early computer hackers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Homebrew Computer Club met regularly to exchange ideas about the future of personal computing. That group included the likes of Apple founder Steve Wozniak. In terms of drive and capability, the DIY synbio community looks very similar, which raises an obvious question: could DIY synbio drive the same kind of economic growth and social change as personal computing? Are we perhaps seeing the dawn of consumer biology? The growing sense of curiosity about synbio among non-scientistsspeaks volumes about the market potential of democratized life science. Bill Gatesonce envisioned putting a computer on every desk. Why not a biolab in every home?

For all the similarities between IT and synbio, there is of course one glaring difference. Computer scientists work in silicon and code. Synthetic biologists are playing with living organisms; thus the risks are far more extreme. Although information technologies can be weaponized and difficult to control, biomaterials pose a far greater threat. While potential upsides of synthetic biology are great, altering DNA can produce new species for which humanity needs to be responsible. Because of the complexity of the field and the velocity of progress, policymakers must engage immediately and continuously with the DIY synbio community.

The tools biohackers already use promote sustained openness and transparency; accountability is implied. The DIY synbio community’s current activities are self-regulating: they facilitate continuous risk assessment by virtue of the fact that they rely on the open sharing of information. Processes and results are crowd-reviewed rather than peer-reviewed. Thus, they can be tested and verified, and their ethical soundness and safety can be assessed, by a larger group of peers and at a faster rate than traditional closed-lab experiments.

Properly assessing and addressing the issues surrounding DIY synbio requires a view of what it looks like at the ground level. Seeing the movement in action promotes understanding of the economic and educational opportunity the field could provide. It also makes it clear that, although the risks involved in DIY synbio are real and cannot be ignored, they also are manageable and should be carefully addressed rather than fearfully suppressed. The most effective way for regulators to keep tabs on DIY synbio is to become involved. Go to the source and take part in the discussions and activities guiding the future of the discipline. The following section presents a firsthand account of the still unfolding #Sciencehack project and provides a ground-level view of DIY synthetic biology in action.

DIY SYNBIO IN ACTION

One Friday in 2014, a yellow school bus full of biohackers headed from Toronto to Haliburton, Ontario. Armed with DNA segments, pipettors, petri dishes, disposable gloves, and a $199 incubator, the group checked into the Pinestone Resort for the weekend. There, and in a lunchroom at Fleming College’s Haliburton School of the Arts, they would design and construct new life forms.

The group of biohackers, which included some “real scientists” as well as designers, artists, writers, and computer programmers, was specifically trying to create synthetic violacein, a compound that has shown promise as an antibiotic to fight parasites, as well as anti-tumorigenic properties that warrant further research into its potential as a cancer treatment. In nature, violacein is produced by soil-dwelling tropical bacteria as a defense against amoebic predators. A gram of violacein costs around $300,000.7 The loose consortium of doctors and dabblers in the Haliburton group hoped to reduce the cost dramatically by designing newmetabolic pathways that would boost the amount of violacein production in E.coli.

The weekend-long hackathon in Haliburton, called #Sciencehack, was organized by Synbiota, a Toronto-based startup that took home the top prize in the Innovative World Technologies category at the SXSW Interactive Accelerator held earlier this year. Synbiota’s web-based open-science platform is effectively a lab on a browser that does for scientific research what tools like Google Docs have done for collaborative writing or what mass open online courses, or MOOCs, are doing for education. All experiment results are shared and open for public view. In fact, #Sciencehack was also live-streamed in the name of transparency, thus opening a window to those interested in peering into the DIY synbio realm.

While Synbiota provides the software for virtual science, Edmonton-based Genomikon provides the wetware for material science. Genomikon’s “Violacein Factory” kit is equipped with all the necessary biological materials and instructions to create the plasmid violacein. The collaboration between Synbiota and Genomikon opens and democratizes genetic engineering in a way that fundamentally upends how scientific research has been done. They believe that Mass Open Online Science (MOOS, as it was coined at SXSW) or, as Synbiota prefers to call it, Open Distributed Genetic Engineering could greatly increase the rate at which new scientific breakthroughs are made.

The #Sciencehack event in Haliburton was the first of its kind and it marked the beginning of a research sprint led by Synbiota and Genomikon to discover new biodesigns for creating violacein. Since then, researchers around the world have worked with the Factory kit and shared their findings in an attempt to engineer a safe strain of E. coli that produces violacein on demand. To date, 79 researchers have designed 54 DNA sequences over the course of six #Sciencehack events, and isolated hundreds of violacein colonies. The most recent #Sciencehack event took place in the home kitchen of MIT media lab director Joi Ito in Cambridge, Ma. Ito was so excited by his first biohacking experience that he subsequently invested in Synbiota and donated to iGEM (a synthetic biology competition for students).

One #Sciencehack participant, Alejandro Saettone, produced approximately $20,000 worth of violacein with his genetic design. He has since applied for a grant to develop protocols for extracting and purifying the enzyme in order to test its toxicity in cancer cells. Saettone thinks that “any organized company could produce and sell violacein on a ‘for research use only’ basis9.” Violacein, of course, could not be legally sold for treatment purposes because the product has not yet been through clinical trials. When you think about what Saettone accomplished, it’s only a small leap to imagine a garage scientist creating a more efficient pathway to a blockbuster biopharmaceutical. An enterprising biohacker might even take the next step and organize a company and sell his version of the biologic—or he might simply bootleg it.

Synbiota’s CEO Connor Dickie is a 36-year-old entrepreneur who studied at Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis’s Singularity University. Dickie considers #Sciencehack a way of building “a huge corpus of information, an online repository of data that is available to anyone.” Dickie knows it goes against convention,to which he says, “This is different from a traditional lab [that] would do the same type of work that we did, but not necessarily share that work with other labs in parallel.” For Dickie, however, the most exciting part of #Sciencehack has been“finding out that a bunch of people, non-scientists, who are just generally interested,have the balls to travel to the middle of nowhere on a school bus to do science.”10 What binds the participants in #Sciencehack is not necessarily any shared discipline or vocation, nor even a particular interest in biology: what the participants  have in common is a genuine curiosity and the fervor that comes from being a part of something new, uncharted, and not yet legislated.

Pantea Razzaghi, Synbiota’s chief cultural officer, says, “We all have different backgrounds. I am very much focused on bringing these tools and resources to communities outside of the expected biowalls, pushing the future of biology into new areas.”11 The fact that a biotech startup has a chief cultural officer is telling in terms of the company’s larger mission. Synbiota is not just democratizing synthetic biology by making it more accessible, it is socializing it and making it more acceptable to many, including regulators, whose fears could hamper the discipline.

ACCELERATING UNDERSTANDING BEFORE POLICY

The roads being laid by synbio entrepreneurs like Genomikon and Synbiota certainly signal the growing importance of garage biology as a source of innovation across sectors. Put simply, the more people participating in synbio, the faster it may produce breakthroughs that generate wealth, benefit human health, and reduce strain on the environment. But DIY synbio also makes more accessible the tools, materials, and knowledge needed to create and manipulate WMDs, such as avian influenza or Bacillus anthracis spores—commonly known as anthrax. More troubling is the spectrum of possible activities that are not so black and white, to say nothing of applications that we cannot at all yet imagine. Gioietta Kuo, a senior fellow at the American Center for International Policy Studies, points to the present moment as a key juncture for bioethics: “Our technical ability has reached a point where we can alter the world for the better or worse. But which is which?” One can easily imagine utopian and dystopian scenarios for a future highly influenced by biotech; the conditions of that world will depend greatly on decisions made today.

A progressive policy determination model is required. The participatory activities already being practiced by the DIY synbio community provide an optimal venue for dialogue. By its very nature, the DIY synbio community invites stakeholders from various sectors—education, industry, policy, and security, for example—to take part. It is up to these and other communities to participate and communicate directly with those active in the DIY synbio movement, where the discussions are already taking place and bioethics decisions are being made in real time as the technology advances.

A code of ethics has been drafted by the global community, DIYBIO, and posted at DIYbio.org. It emphasizes transparency, knowledge sharing, modesty, accountability, peaceful purposes, and safe practices.14 Within this framework, further regulations can be established that will promote safety and security without stifling research and innovation.

POLICYMAKERS FEAR WHAT THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND

As with most technologies from cars to computers, there will always be risks of misuse and dual use, or simply unintended mistakes and unforeseeable outcomes. Synthetic biology is no different in this respect. No matter how many oaths, declarations, safety inspections, tripwires, laws, and policies are developed and enforced, none will dissolve the inherent risk in interactions between nature, technology, and humans. Even in an environment where there is common agreement of intent, there are and will be many uncertainties associated with developing synthetic life. It is indeed possible that an individual or group could take advantage of the DIY synbio community’s accessible tools and open-source information and use them for malicious purposes in secret. But this is also why it is so important to maintain open and inclusive dialogue, so that the DIY synbio community, which has thus far proven to be of a high moral and ethical standard, can continue to report openly, serving as watchdogs over their own unconventional labs.

Hindering such conditions are instances where the security community has acted unjustly and hostilely to the synbio community. In 2004, the FBI detained bioartist Steve Kurtz under suspicion of bioterrorism, even though his projects were legal. Such acts by authorities have resulted in fear-based secrecy by some “garage biologists” in a community that otherwise champions transparency. Rob Carlson, a leading expert on synthetic biology, says “a direct result of the DOJ/FBI attitude is that people with labs at home have stopped talking about those labs, which has had the effect of making more DIY scientists want to practice secretly rather than talk about it and engage openly.”15 It is only via constant communication and close collaboration among stakeholders that safe policy and security solutions will be determined and upheld. Fear-based suppression by authorities will only result in fear-based secrecy by the DIY synbio community; such a cycle has the effect of increasing uncertainty and potential threats.

HACKING BIO AND POLICY

The culture of biohackers—their tools, spaces, and techniques—is becoming policy itself. The makeup of the community and its technological and ethical limits are inseparable from a system of rules. Embedded within the tools of open science is the importance of monitoring processes and results. Just as author-activist Jane Jacobs proposed a theory of “eyes on the street” to create the conditions for safe urban living, saying that “a well-used city street is apt to be a safe street,” we see the bio community building affordances—that is, properties of a thing that determine how it could be used—and support for “eyes on the strand,” where DIY synbio culture, its social protocols, and its tools become a viable methodology for risk assessment. One might say that a trait for self-regulation is encoded into the community’s figurative DNA.

The whole idea of citizen science is centered around crowdsourced data and on building on the breakthroughs of others as they happen: transparency and accountability are inherent. An effective regulatory framework for DIY synbio should be able to absorb any new elements that enter the field in real time.

However, sustaining such a responsive model will require constant conversation, collaboration, and cross-pollination among stakeholders in all sectors, which will enable the roadmap to adapt as new elements are introduced onto the landscape.

[robertbolton]

The Carnery

Isha Datar and I contributed a design fiction and essay to The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, an exploration of the new "food cultures" that might surround lab-grown meat.

The In Vitro Meat Cookbook speculates on the possibilities of lab-grown meat, considering implications for design, engineering, ethics, and society.

Our design fiction, a restaurant review with accompanying illustration by Silvia Celiberti, imagines cultured meat from an aesthetic lens I’m calling, “Artisanal Science, that I think we’ll be seeing a lot of in the coming years. 

Here it is:

Counter Culture, London's latest in vitro micro-carnery proves it's the real thing. The restored 1970s-era English brewpub boasts an expansive bar of reclaimed mahogany and booths upholstered with magnificent in vitro leather. Steaks are grown to precision inside giant steel vats, decorated (functionally) with illuminated green algae tanks. A disorienting mingling of global spices flavor varieties of exotic and heritage meats like boar and Berkshire, all of which are cultured on site. The large charcuterie board, consisting of mushroom-media duck foie gras, coriander mortadella and crispy lobes of sweetbread pairs perfectly with a shortlist of probiotic cocktails (try the rum and kombucha)...

Click through to read the full essay

In vitro meat has the capacity to transform meat production as we know it, not only offering new and diverse types of product but also introducing an entirely new way of thinking about and interacting with food. One day, growing meat may seem as natural as making cheese or beer.

Carcass Meat: From the Farm to the Factory to a Theater Near You

The farm was long the cultural ground connecting humans to our food and to our labor. Through over 10,000 years of agricultural practice, farming – food and work – was a foundation on which we developed our sense of humanity. From values like integrity, quality, respect and stewardship, to experiences of shared knowledge and enjoyment, to developing our relationship with land and species and gaining a concept of the cyclical passage of time that connects us to the seasons – the farm has been our cultural rooting. Keeping farm animals played an integral role in maintaining the farm. Animal husbandry and crop cultivation were concerted activities. Animals were fed on crop residues after a crop was harvested, or on pastures that were unfit for farming. Manure was used to replenish soils. Animals were slaughtered and shared. Meat was honored and savored.

The farm has also been a locus of human innovation.

To meet and exceed consumer demands for food, the farm has been a site of cutting edge breakthroughs in mechanical engineering, genetics, and chemistry. The craft of tending the herd evolved into processes of automation and directives. Meat production scaled to a point where it can no longer fit into a cyclical and sustainable farming system. Today the majority of meat is produced on industrial farms, where animals are bred, raised and slaughtered for the principal purpose of producing food for human beings. Crops that could feed humans are instead fed to meat animals. Fertilizer is produced in such quantities that it spoils soils rather than nourishing them. In many ways animals are treated as living meat-producing bioreactors with human food as an input, polluting waste as an output, and various drugs, hormones, and genetic manipulations added to make the process more ‘efficient’. Price is the defining product characteristic and minimizing this incurs vast external costs to the environment, animal welfare, and public health.

Further, meat is defined as a small handful of species, presented by a smaller handful of corporations. Few players, little product diversity, and a very narrow, inexpensive price range characterize the meat production industry status quo.

In light of population increase, food insecurity, volatile food prices, environmental concerns and changing value systems around food – it is clear that current modes of production cannot persist. For meat production to take place responsibly, we will have to significantly diversify our eating habits, and with them, our production habits. In vitro meat is one promising alternative. We don’t know enough about it yet. But we know we can make it. And we are responsible for exploring what it will mean not only for our health and environment, but also for our culture, and our sense of humanity. How should we feel about interacting with lab-grown meat?

If we’re comfortable treating meat animals like bioreactors, and engineering them strictly for the purpose of maximal protein production – then perhaps we can go a step further. Meat is simply a collection of muscle, fat and connective tissues. Rather than raise an entire complex organism only to harvest these tissues, why not start at the basic unit of life, the cell, to produce meat? In vitro meat is meat, created in a bioreactor, rather than in an animal.

A few things are required for making meat in vitro: a cell line, a media to feed the cells, a bioreactor where cell growth can take place, and a structure upon which the cells can attach and grow. Each of these elements allows for limitless variations of technique and process. The room for deviation bridges science with craft, enabling in vitro meat makers to create unique products with unique characteristics and features. At the fictional in vitro meat restaurant Counter Culture that begins this essay, the boar meat could be made with adult stem cells collected from wild boar, cultured in an algae media. Grown in a rotating wall bioreactor on a tubular scaffold, the cell stretches to produce a lean, grained meat. The mushroom media duck foie gras could be made from a co-culture of duck fat and liver cells in a mushroom-based media, 3D printed into a bioabsorbable scaffold to produce a fatty, smooth, and cruelty-free foie gras. The flexibility of in vitro meat production can change and diversify the ways people consume and interact with their food.

As it stands today, a thick interface separates the experience of eating from the process of food production. Industrial farms are located far from the eyes of consumers and knowledge of what occurs in these farms is limited in the wider public. While consumers are mostly disconnected from the realities of where their food comes from, marketers continue to romanticize the ideal farm of yore, substituting images of agriculture in place of ones of industry, dropping visual cues to the rural farm on packaging, advertising and in retail displays. These signifiers remind us of the core human values and sense of community that we’ve historically associated with the farm. Indeed, when done well, you can taste the crafted freshness. In the eyes of diners and marketers alike, the distinction between fantasy and reality is apparently trivial, if not entirely non-existent. We buy into rustic theaters of “artisanal”, “smallbatch” and “handcrafted” cuisine though the associations we have with these words may bear no resemblance to the actual back-end production processes. The theater of branding is effective enough that we’re relieved of our responsibility to confront the truths of our food. In vitro meat may play into this theater – fitting among the existing symbols, textures and cues that make us comfortable with artifice – while breaking down its fourth wall, chipping away the layers, so that like the farmer, the baker, the butcher, and the brewer, we can interface directly with the realities of food production, or making.

From the Lab to the Brewery: In vitro Meat as Carniculture

The science and art of culturing cells to produce meat has been called “carniculture”. Like a bakery where bread is made, a winery where wine is made and a brewery where beer is made, the “carnery” is where in vitro meat is made. Carniculture might be dressed with similar connotations and aesthetics to the craft brew and farm-to-table movements.

We have to ask not only how in vitro meat products nourish our bodies, but how the process of making them nourishes human culture and fits in with our sense of a modern humanity. How, going forward, can the manufacturer of in vitro meat achieve the symbolic status of the farmer, the baker, and the small batch brewer? How can the carnery, like the bakery, the winery, or the brewery, become an impetus for human culture? Though it uses mammalian cell cultures rather than yeast cultures, a carnery has the potential to look very similar to these facilities – beer breweries in particular.

At the carnery of the future, large stainless steel tanks house the biological processes that are transforming organic ingredients into food products. Conditions like temperature and pressure are controlled and manipulated. Inputs and outputs are carefully measured. The work environment is clean and safe. But it doesn’t feel like sterile science. It feels crafted, artisanal – because it is.

As with beer, the basic production scheme for producing in vitro meat can be modified and adapted in endless ways to make products that vary in appearance, aroma, taste, and mouthfeel. This makes for an industry comprised of many diverse products and players, and production on many different scales. A brewery can be massive with several stories-tall bioreactors, located near city limits, or it can be smaller and situated in urban areas. A brewpub restaurant may choose to brew seasonal offerings in-house, while a DIY enthusiast may wish to try his or her hand at making the ultimate personalized brew with a home brewing operation.

Imagine that within the stainless steel tanks at a brewery, microbrewery, brewpub or basement, meat rather than beer, is being brewed.

Low cost, mass produced meat is cultured in massive carneries in rural areas. Because the risk of bacterial contamination and viral epidemics is far decreased without the use of animals, the meat production business is no longer at risk of recalls, workers are no longer at risk of health issues, and the local rural environment is no longer at risk of water and air pollution.

Mid-range in vitro meat is made in local carneries in urban areas. These carneries host school and travel tours, educating the public on the art and science of carniculture. Because growing meat in vitro does not require the large tracts of land that factory farms require, this carnery is located in a skyscraper that once contained office space. Algae tanks surround the outer surface of the tower, reaping the unshaded sun available several stories up from ground level.

High priced meats are “micro-cultured” in trendy neighborhoods at boutique carnery pubs like the fictional Counter Culture described at the beginning of this essay. These small batch facilities create various seasonal offerings, depending on which media ingredients are available and which cell cultures and nutrient profiles are in vogue. Forward thinking restaurants offer signature meats cultured in house, paired with a house wine. Some chefs focus on nutrition profiles, some focus on traditional “heritage breed” lines and others focus on biomolecular gastronomy. They test the limits of carniculture by culturing rare or extinct species, co-culturing multiple cell types or developing unique never-before-seen cell lines.

Communities of home carniculturists, who began as foodies and DIYbio enthusiasts, swap techniques and recipes at cultured meat cook-offs, fairs, and night markets. Carniculture bloggers post photography, data, and other media documenting their materials, methods and meals online. The home carnery movement spawns carniculture specialty shops, cell culture babysitting services, protocol-swapping websites, cell banks and special interest magazines. Hobbyists seeking to turn their passion into a profession have a variety of certification and apprenticeship programs to choose from to help them join a major carnery or start one of their own.

In contrast to industrial farming, meat production methods go from secretive to celebrated. Meat production facilities go from vast to vertical. The meat production industry moves from the hands of few to the hands of many. And people grow more authentically connected to the origins and creation stories of what they eat.

Creating the Conditions

For this new industry to exist, some conditions have to be met in the early days of discovery and development.

The science has to remain fairly open, transparent, and publicly accessible. With a population of scientists scattered about the planet interested in making in vitro meat a reality, an “open source” approach to in vitro meat will accelerate development of the technology. Intellectual property protection has a place in the industry at some point, but heavy, prohibitive patent protection early on could stunt this new industry before it has a chance to flourish. Culturing in vitro meat involves a level of “art” and technique that only comes with experience and familiarity with processes and materials. As such, patent protection will be complemented by trade secrets, secret recipes and the carniculturist’s distinct artistry and prowess.

Development needs to coincide with public conversation about meat, meat production, carniculture, and food science. Consumers need and want to know about the origins of their food. The new science of carniculture must be developed responsibly, driven by discourse from the beginning. This is much more likely to happen if research is funded and conducted publicly, openly engaging researchers, DIYbio enthusiasts and students to address scientific hurdles. Creating a food politic that tackles resource use, the environment, public health and animal welfare should be a cooperative movement.

In vitro meat is simply meat created outside of the animal. Cultured meat and carcass meat are the same product, though created through different processes. The potential for carniculture to introduce a more humane and sustainable meat industry is undeniably compelling. With the right set of conditions in place during the development of cultured meat science, carniculture can reduce the need for, or entirely displace factory farming. By embracing transparency and creating a culinary attitude, the in vitro meat industry can become more diverse, responsible, and viable than the current meat industry. A new set of food values emerge, unique from, yet akin to those we associate with the family farm. A future with in vitro meat is indeed a cultured future.

This essay was originally published in The In Vitro Meat Cookbook. Get your copy here.

[robertbolton]

Conversation with Helen Sword

Writing With Style

Helen Sword is a scholar, award-winning teacher, and poet who has published books and articles on modernist literature, higher education pedagogy, digital poetics, and academic writing. Born and raised in Southern California, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and now teaches in the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland.  Her latest book is Stylish Academic Writing.

Can I start by asking you for your definition of style?

Yeah that’s an interesting one. In academic writing, style is quite a neutral word. That’s why I tend to use the word “stylishness” when I’m talking about what, probably in a more design and creativity context, you would just call style, but there are all these academic style guides that are really about rules, and not about style. So when people talk about academic style, often they just mean how do you cite sources? Where do you put commas to be correct according to this style or that style. That’s not necessarily my definition of style, but that’s the definition in the context I’m working within. Calling my book Stylish Academic Writing was an intentional oxymoron because people so often don’t associate anything academic with being stylish. The point I was trying to make is that everybody has a style.

When I was working on the book, I was thinking quite intentionally about comparisons with style in architecture, style in furniture, style in clothing, where we can probably all agree that there are a lot of different styles and we might have different opinions about what styles we like, or even what we would call stylish, but we generally agree on what is and isn’t an attempt to be stylish. To just kind of push the metaphor a bit further, a lot of academic writing, to me is kind of like the person who rolls out of bed in the morning, pulls on a pair of track pants and goes to work dressed like that, or worse yet, goes to a black tie reception or something. Whereas if somebody came decked out and a Mohawk or a bunch of piercings, you would at least say, well they’re being self-conscious about how they’re dressing. They’ve got a sense of style, even if I don’t necessarily like that sense of style myself. There’s a broad range of possibilities of what could be stylish writing, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re all self-conscious. There’s a self-consciousness on the part of the writer. They’re making an effort. They’re making conscious choices.  They’re not doing the writing equivalent of rolling out of bed and putting on the dirty clothes from the night before that just happened to be lying there.

So, stylishness, by its nature, is deliberate?

Yeah, it’s a deliberate effort to dress for the occasion. If you look at academics lecturing, some people really dress up. Some deliberately dress down. They don’t want to invoke that sense of authority. And then some will not think at all about what they’re wearing. And they’re the ones we’d probably associate with the absence of style. Same thing with writing—there are so many people who write the way they do because they’ve kind of unconsciously absorbed the style of the discipline. And not because they’re making conscious choices about how to communicate effectively.

Why, in academia, is convention so often taken almost as if it is physical law?

 I think there’s a certain amount of resistance to stylishness in academia, not by everyone. But the idea that somehow, if you’re dressing things up, you’re therefore dumbing things down or you’re somehow not doing full justice to the ideas. One thing I found really interesting, researching the book, was the idea of ‘elegance.’  I could’ve called the book ‘Elegant Academic Writing’ and it would have sort of meant the same thing. In elegance, when we think about it in terms of again, clothing or furniture or something, we tend to equate it with a sense of style. Some indefinable sense of style. But in science and mathematics, it has quite a precise definition. Which is that it’s the shortest solution to a complex problem. That’s an elegant solution. So if you think about elegant writing in that way, it’s not necessarily shorter sentences, but it’s the best possible way of expressing what you need to express. And if you put that definition in front of academics, they’re very receptive to it. But if they think that what you mean by stylish is dressing things up, then they’re very resistant to that.

Is stylish academic writing always synonymous with clarity or might it also be more decorative?

Yeah, for me, it’s the gamut. And I come out of literary studies myself, and people who work in English departments will often value complexity. They’ll actually say I write these long, difficult sentences because there’s a kind of mental discipline that’s needed then, to be able to work through that complexity. I have some resistance to that—to the idea that you’re intentionally making things more complex to your reader, but I can understand the argument and I would like a definition of style or stylishness that allows for that choice. 

I love this example in your book of the Formula-1 pit stop crew that helps reinvent the organizational design and workflow of a hospital, making procedures more synchronized and efficient.  Can you speak to the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration? Does style has everything to do with thinking across disciplinary lines?

I think it does. It allows you more choices and it makes you more self-conscious about what you’re doing, so it fits perfectly within that overarching definition of what it means to be stylish. What I really noticed, when I went out to read books and articles by people who have been identified to me by their own peers as stylish writers, or exemplary writers, was how again and again that they were making references to ideas from beyond their own disciplines. That just seemed to be such a component to their way of thinking. And that goes way beyond writing in style on the level of how you construct a sentence. It’s really a mode of thinking that shows intellectual curiosity and voraciousness. Does that mean that interdisciplinarity is a component of stylishness? Not necessarily, but I would say that you have a much wider range of styles or ways of thinking at your disposal if you have an interdisciplinary bent. 

[robertbolton]

Musicologist Rob Bowman on Style

The Elements of Musical Style

In Conversation with Grammy-Winning Musicologist, Rob Bowman

 Bowman: It strikes me that style is a gestalt of practices, or a conglomeration of practices that marks a given entity - an individual, a genre, or a tradition - as being unique. Aretha Franklin has a particular style in approach to vocals. Al Green has a really unique style. I might argue that Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston certainly have style but they tend to be, how should I put it, closer mainstream notions of virtuosity. Style is a collection of practices, micro or macro, by a given entity, that gives an aesthetic identity to that entity.

Bolton: Why do you think style has proven to be such a useful way to classify music?

Bowman: We all need to typologize or categorize to make sense of all phenomena. Otherwise we can’t make sense of this word. Style is just one way of categorizing. In music we often use the word genres. We talk about the genre of Soul Music. Then we talk about sub-genres such as southern soul, Motown, Chicago soul, uptown soul and so on. For each one of those genres - we describe them with stylistic elements. When you say that Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters have similar style, you’re really saying that they’re both making a form of post-world war 2 bar band Chicago blues with certain things such electricity, distortion, aggression, 12-bar structures and so on. You’re saying there’s commonality. They’re different but there’s a commonality and these stylistic elements make up that commonality. I could go further and get into micro-details about vocalization - what separates one from another, even though to a more casual listener, it’s the same.

Bolton: Let’s break down some of the stylistic elements within singing. 

Bowman: Timbre is a key element. Distortion is one aspect of potential timbre manipulation. Howlin’ Wolf’s got a very distorted voice, a very raspy and rough voice.  That said, if I do a micro-analysis of a Howlin’ Wolf performance, I could show you how in one lyric utterance, one line of text, he actually changes the level of rasp three different times, and he uses that as a way of structuring that lyric line and giving it meaning in sometimes subtle and sometimes more dramatic ways, giving shape to the music line helping to ascribe meaning to the musical moment. It’s a simple concept but it can get quite complex if you unpack it further. Another huge thing would be use of breath. Use of sibilance, words with S, is another huge thing. Some singers try to minimize the S sound, like Bing Crosby. I’ve heard Aretha Franklin deliberately draw out sibilance and use it the same that one might draw out rhyme or assonance within their vocal style. Timbre, use of breath, how much you hide it, how much you reveal it, it would be the use of sibilance. Phrasing is a really important aspect of style. Do you phrase in front of, behind, or directly on the beat? Is your phrasing primarily starting on offbeats or on-beats? Do you start phrases on beat one, or do you avoid beat one? And where do you place your accents on the down beats or the up beats? Does your framing tend to involve staccato or legato beats? Are you trying to slowly connect your notes or are you deliberately separating them? And of course different singers will do more or less of one or the other. Most will do both different times and its the characteristic ways that they use those two different concepts, moving at various points of a continuum that would be considered part of their style. Timbre, breath, sibilance, phrasing, accent, annunciation, dynamics or volume, intonation or tuning - are you in tune or out of town. At what point in a given scale and structure might you play with tuning. Manipulation of all these possibilities is style. Song choice has a whole lot to do with style too. Are you mostly singing ballads, or up-tempo dance tunes? Are the melodies conjunct, where they’re moving from C to D to E - notes that are adjacent to each other? Or do they involve leaps? Are the melodies humble ones that anyone can pick up and sing? Or are they much more difficult with big interval gaps? What kinds of repertoire are being sung? As we unpack this ides of style, you can see it’s unbelievably complex.

Rob Bowman is a musician, producer and professor of musicology at York University.  He is the author of Soulsville, U.S.A. - The Story of Stax Records. In 1996, he won the Grammy for Best Album Notes for his 47,000 word monograph accompanying The Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 3: 1972-1975.

[robertbolton]

In Conversation with Carol Stephenson, Dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University

*This conversation was originally printed in MISC Magazine’s Style Issue; December 2012

Leadership Styles

What do you think is meant when we talk about style in the business sphere? 

I think style is the leadership attributes that you bring when you are fulfilling your job.

What are those attributes? What are the elements of leadership style? 

There are a lot of them, and sometimes a dichotomy depending on your leadership style. You can be a very collaborative leader or you can be a very directed leader, in that you are making decisions based on your own judgment and not involving a lot of others. You can have a great listening style or you can like to tout your own ideas through speaking forcefully about them. You could be empathetic, or you could be not necessarily interested in other people’s point of view. So I think character comes in a lot with leadership. Your own sense of values, your own sense of integrity, how you build trust, to me, those are pretty important to style.

Tell me more about those dichotomies. How can one’s internal style tensions work to make that person a better or worse leader?

Most people have a predominant style, which they generally use but I also think you need to know how to adjust your style in different times, which will require different styles. So the typical one would be, if you’re in crisis, and you have to take action quickly you’re probably going to have to cut down on your consultation and collaborative approach to the extent that you might naturally use. It doesn’t mean that you don’t use it at all, but use it just as much as the situation requires. To me, a really good leader can be authentic about their own management style, but can also understand the environment enough to know when they might need to alter based on circumstances.

Were there ever any failings you identified in your own leadership style, which you had to adjust over the course of your career—some things that weren’t working about your leadership style?

Yeah, I think sometimes I would be a little bit too empathetic, where, at the end of the day you can’t please everyone. So I have recognized that it’s impossible to solve everyone’s problems in coming up with a decision. So I probably tailored that a little bit so that I put my own input to think about the situation and make a decision with more confidence.

 What are some of the early jobs that influenced your leadership style?

As a female leader, early on in my career, I had some pretty nontraditional jobs that women hadn’t done. So it was good and it was bad. The good end was that everybody was watching because you’re the first woman to do it—I was doing a plant job in Canada. I had sixty men reporting to me, I worked for a boss who didn’t believe I should be there. So some of those earlier nontraditional jobs shaped my leadership style and I would say because I didn’t know a lot about functions, it probably did encourage me to listen and learn from people actually doing the job but then holding them accountable to high standards and making sure they had resources and made decisions quickly. Some of those early nontrade jobs were actually very good for me. And I had a choice there. You can sort of go in as “I know it all, I’m the boss,” which would’ve been a disaster. Or you could go in with “I have a lot of knowledge around leadership and management. But I need to learn to understand this job and you can help me do that.”

How can clashing leadership styles be managed in an organization?

You have to allow for different leadership styles. I encourage people to say their point of view you need to tell people that point of view. You don’t want everybody exactly the same. But there are some standards that you want to uphold, like respect for each other, you don’t want bullying behavior, you want people to act in a certain way that encourages the culture you have, but doesn’t preclude people from having different styles of management and I see that every day. I think understanding different styles, what works and what doesn’t work, you actually have a better integration of people across styles under the umbrella of whatever culture and value have been established for the organization.

When recruiting and hiring, how do you know when you’ve found a right fit for an organizational culture and operational style?

Usually when I’m hiring somebody, I will have them meet and be interviewed by the other senior members of the team. To test the fit the style because you don’t want to hire someone you think is just like you, so I try and have a broad-based look at a person. I also think there’s an intuitive sense that I get about a person about fit and style. You certainly go through the interview process and how other people look at them, but I usually have an intuitive sense that I know influences my decision. If it’s the smartest person in the whole world, but I think, my god there’s no way this person can be on our team, I don’t think this is going to work for them or for us. But it comes through the conversation and through the intuitiveness. I know there’s testing and all these other things that people should do but in my philosophy, in the end it comes down to intuition.

How important are those factors—an organization’s culture and style—to mergers and acquisitions, or who a company partners with?

 I think it’s important. Not to say you can’t have different cultures who merge, but I think its important that you figure out a way to get the people who have the different culture aligned with you and your company. If you don’t, they will consider themselves not fitting. At Ivey, we talk about mergers and acquisitions quite a bit, and we introduced something called Cross-Enterprise Leadership. Mergers and acquisitions are the best example of that. Traditionally in business school, they think evaluating the company’s financial transaction, how you set it up, is the most important thing, so it’d be a finance class. What we all know is that it’s way more than that. How do you get the cultures to work together? How do you get two strong brands to work together? What do you do when the IT systems don’t work with each other? How do you get marketing working together? So to me, that’s truly cross-enterprise leadership. If you can’t do that well, I don’t think in the long run you’ll have a successful company. It doesn’t mean you can’t acquire someone who has a different culture but if you don’t have the tools to integrate culture into your company, then you probably won’t get the value out of the merger or acquisition that you hoped for.

Carol Stephenson is the Dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University. She currently serves on several boards for top Canadian companies and government committees.

[robertbolton]

Conversation with Nadine Chahine

*This conversation was originally printed in MISC Magazine’s Style Issue; December 2012

Designing Dialogue

What are some key words in the type designer’s style lexicon? 

In Latin type design the word style is often used to distinguish between structurally different models of reference. The roman and italic are two different styles that can be related as part of the same typeface family. Style can also be used to refer to other references such as serifs, sans-serifs, slab-serifs and so on. Some key concepts relating to style are the style of the serifs, the axis direction—changing it gives you variations from a Garamond to a Bodoni, the contrast—how much variation you have in the thickness of the stroke, and rhythm—a condensed style will have a tighter rhythm.

 Besides readability, what are the ‘ingredients’ of a great font?

It is very important to have well-drawn outlines and a visual impact that can fulfill the function that the typeface is meant for. A great typeface needs to work in its intended setting whether that is book, newspaper, and mobile. It is not about how good the individual letters look, but rather how good the words and texts are, and how the letterforms work together. 

What would you call that element - how the letterforms work together? Flow?

Yes that would be the flow of reading movement. Imagine driving on a highway, the less bumpy then the more enjoyable the ride. Each letterform creates a black and white element. Together, letterforms combine to create the text pattern. If these black and white elements flow smoothly together then the pattern is enjoyable and smooth.  

How do you describe your own style? What boundaries are you playing across?

Very function driven, and realistically experimental. I like to play within the boundaries of different styles and to create hybrids that feel authentic and are readily acceptable to those who are meant to read them. 

Tell me about some of those different styles and the challenges of creating hybrids from them.

We have many different calligraphic styles and the main two are the Naskh and Kufi styles. The first is round and organic, and the second more squarish. A hybrid blends the pen-based movement of the first with the rhythmic simplicity of the second. Frutiger Arabic is a good example of that. 

How do you set the limits of how far you'll take your experimental work?

You design and test it out and see how people react to it. It's a lot of trial and error, as well as the deep study of how letterforms are shaped and the logic behind the aesthetics.

How do stylistic variations of Arabic scripts affect the written text? 

The effects are as dramatic as the differences between an italic and a Fraktur. There is a wide range of visual expressions and the purely calligraphic references in Arabic are a good starting point to study. However, we have a lot of things to say that cannot be told in the traditional calligraphic nomenclature. So we need to mix styles and to push the envelop within the limits of public acceptance in order to be able to express concepts that were simply not present during the times of Arabic calligraphic innovations.

How have you successfully transferred elements of style from other disciplines to your own work?

I am very interested in international politics and cultural exchange and this has shaped my approach to design in general. I do not see a separation between typefaces and the environment they live in. Everything we do is shaped by how we live and that has been the strongest driver for me. I grew up in the middle of an ugly civil war, and the ability to engage in dialogue between opposing parties (political, typographic or otherwise) has been the guiding principle in all my designs. 

The Lebanese Civil War - Can you talk more about the different ways that dialogue shows in your work? Is it about making opposing ideas or styles appear complementary, or can it also work as more of a tension or clash?

The first typeface family that I designed is Koufiya, which is the first typeface family with Arabic and Latin companions meant for each other and designed simultaneously for the express purpose of harmonizing two scripts that are so different. Koufiya is the embodiment of my political beliefs, that we need to accept our differences, and that dialogue is possible even when those engaged in it are very different. We do not need to morph one to another in order to create harmony. Real equal dialogue comes through the understanding and acceptance of what makes us different. This is true for both typographic and political landscapes. Koufiya is also a statement of the relationship between the Arabic world and the western world. I prefer that we engage in equal-footed dialogue rather than hide behind stereotypes. It is the only way forward.

Nadine Chahine is an award winning Lebanese type designer with a special interest in Arabic typography. She won the distinguished Award for Excellence in Type Design from the Type Directors Club in New York in 2008 and 2011.