Biotechnology From the Blue Flower: The Unnatural, That Too is Natural
ยท talk
Alex May joined an Art Science Node Berlin panel on biotechnology, CRISPR, and changing ideas of what counts as natural, centred on the CHIC project and Biotechnology from the Blue Flower.
Alex May took part in Biotechnology From the Blue Flower: The Unnatural, That Too is Natural on 30 June 2021, an online discussion organised through Art Science Node Berlin around the work Biotechnology from the Blue Flower and its research context within the EU Horizon 2020 CHIC project. The event brought May into conversation with Anna Dumitriu and scientists including Dirk Bosch, Paul Bundock, and Katarina Cankar, focusing on plant biotechnology, gene editing, and the cultural meanings attached to ideas of nature.
The discussion used chicory and the symbolic history of the blue flower to frame a broader question: how should art, science, and public debate respond to technologies such as CRISPR and new plant breeding techniques? For May, this offered a precise context for exploring how technical systems do not simply transform matter, but also reshape perception, language, and the assumptions through which change is understood.
That made the talk a strong extension of the wider practice. In projects such as Biotechnology from the Blue Flower, May uses digital and collaborative forms to examine how technology alters what is remembered, classified, or accepted as real. Here, those concerns were brought into direct contact with biotechnology, showing how questions of evidence, intervention, and imagination now sit at the centre of how the natural world is described.