Joshua Wodak

We attempt to justify the use of synthetic biology in response to the climate crisis, based on the premise that it is impossible to avert runaway climate change without sequestering sufficient greenhouse gases (GHG), which could only become possible through Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). Then, moving from a consequentialist standpoint, we acquiesce to how the consequences of using NETs through synthetic biology are preferable to the catastrophic consequences of runaway climate change. In conclusion, we show how our analysis of synthetic biology resonates with a zoecentric view of climate science and ethics.

This article examines the practice of synthetic biology, and its relevance in terms of technoscientific responses to the Anthropocene. The article offers a brief history of the practice, and contextualises synthetic biology within the wider field of controversial ‘technofixes’ that are proposed for ameliorating the existential challenge that is the Anthropocene. In particular, it explores the emerging relationship between conservation biology and synthetic biology, whereby the latter is put forward as an integral means for intervening in ecosystems and evolution itself.

Due to its high sensitivity to ocean warming and ocean acidification, coral presents paleoclimatological records that situate the impact of homo sapiens as a geomorphic force against the long duration of geology. This article examines coral and its highly particular relevance to the Anthropocene. It offers an overview of coral in terms of its evolutionary biology, the extent of the current existential challenges facing the lifeform, and the emerging field of controversial technoscientific conservation that is proposed for ameliorating these existential challenges. Coral is presented as a discrete means to understand how inadvertent human engineering of the biosphere marks the Anthropocene, such that the future of myriad lifeforms is becoming inextricably entwined with polemical human-engineered evolution that is intended to augment ecosystems eroded by the Anthropocene.

Over his 40-plus years of professional practice, artist David Rokeby’s work in interactive art has explored diverse mechanics and dynamics of the human self-and-other dichotomy. This article reconstructs Rokeby’s trajectory of practice, to articulate a framework of the relationship between response-ability and responsibility, and between self and other, both in terms of an individual self within the ‘other’ of an interactive installation, and further, using that experience as a portal into relations between a self and numerous ‘others’, namely social environments of fellow persons, as well as the physical environment of the world itself. As such, Rokeby’s creative process has reflected the complex mechanics of creating interactive art that evokes relationships between self and other, seeking balance between responsibility and responsivity in order to afford audiences, or ‘interactors’, new insights into their own engagement within the microcosm of his artworks and to carry that heightened sensibility of their own potential impact and responsibility to the ‘other’ into their daily lives. Such questions of selfhood and other-ness, especially as they relate to responsibility, are highly pertinent to current society, where individual response and responsibility seem invisible, and our sense of engagement to that which is ‘outside’ of our personal ‘inside’ seems heavily lapsed.