I find that the overall concept and theory of BioMedia can be encompassed in the ways that life can be recorded as information. It always comes back to what a body can do.
In the reading, Eugene Thacker tells us about the two ways that we can use on DNA by two separate fields. The first is done by computer scientists and involves jumping between computers and databases to predict protein combinations in a DNA sequence. The second is much more complicated for me to understand as it is a biological approach, but it is done in a test tube and can also present the different DNA combination possibilities.
These two separate approaches show that although we are not all specialists in the same field, collaboration is vital in order to better innovate. The goal of these collaborative innovations is to technically articulate a novel device or something for the body which will keep it fully biological, not hybrid.
The first thing that I think of when someone says BioMedia is exactly what Bolter and Grusin begin to suggest. Using the body both as a medium (a means for communicating) and as mediated (the object of communication), we can decorate them with modern fashion trends such as: Piercings, Tattoos, Cosmetic Surgery, Transgenderism, Bodybuilding, etc.
“The body remediates various cultural and social meanings, while it is also subject to remediation.” Bolter & Grusin, Thacker, What is BioMedia?
In biotech, we are ultimately interested in the ways that the bodies’ biological organization and material components can be rematerialized, renormalized, and redesigned. To do this, we start with a body which we consider both a biological body and a body of compiled information and data.
An example of BioMedia is custom drug tailoring. This would allow scientists to develop a medication for you which will best treat your conditions based on your genetic code. This obviously can go two ways, as we learned in the 1997 film, GATTACA, with Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. While we can hope that drug tailoring will solve problems with diagnosis, medication efficacy, and even allergic reactions, will this tailoring give too much information to our scientists, and then to our government, causing discrimination based on preexisting conditions? The ethics of this new style of collaboration are something that will need to be laid out when large advancements are made in the field.
The biology of the body is a technology far more impressive than those we have created, so by learning how the body innovates, it can be mimicked in other areas of innovation.
