Grow Your Own Cloud is an organization exploring how we might enable clean data solutions through DNA data storage in plants and other carbon absorbing organisms. As part of that exploration they are now developing a project and growing a community to bridge the worlds of web3 and synthetic biology to create web 🌳.
This IRL/URL community will empower the growth of GYOC to follow a less-centralized model of operations, governance and ownership, utilizing emerging DAO models. Meanwhile technologies like NFTs help facilitate new ways of growing technology via community. In this talk we will hear from Cyrus Clarke, one of the creators of GYOC about how they are utilising web3 technologies and tools to help enable their vision.
Grow Your Own Cloud (GYOC) seeks to create new types of data infrastructure; typologies which render data open and available to everyone, create new opportunities for green space, indoors and out, while subverting notions of the privatised digital information economy. Through initiating these sites of investigation, GYOC researches new scientific methods for working with biological data storage, a crucial emerging technology to help thwart the data industry’s exacerbation of the ongoing climate crisis.
GYOC has been the recipient of various international awards including the UN Summer of Solutions 2019, Prix BloxHUB 2019, Interaction Awards 20202, and Core77 Awards 2019. They have addressed audiences at the United Nations during the World Youth Climate Summit 2019, COP25, and various events at Davos 2020.
The core team of the project are the initiators Cyrus Clarke (UK) and Monika Seyfried (PL) designers and artists working at the intersection of science, technology and the arts. Collaborators include Jeff Nivala, Principle Investigator at the Molecular Information Systems Lab, University of Washington, Annelie Berner, Principle Investigator at CIID Research and abNormal Studios.
Cyrus Clarke is a Designer, Artist and Futurist with a background in economics and digital technologies. He is passionate about reforming human-nonhuman relationships by establishing new models of cooperation between people, ecosystems and technologies. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, he seeks to promote futures in which technologies are based on living systems through a deep partnership with nature.
His focus lies on seeking to promote alternative notions of nature and technology through the creation of artistic pieces ranging from film, mixed-media installations, fictions, live experiences and genetic software. In particular he is fascinated by data as a material, working with nature as a technology to reframe human relationships with the cloud and initiate discussion on the ethical, environmental, political and socio-economic implications of the technology filled worlds we are rushing to create.
He positions himself as a link between the techno-scientific communities and the wider public, to help bridge between potential futures and today, in order to inspire technological developments that enhance value, equity, justice, and the environment. To do so he works with emerging technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, mixed reality and biotechnology, to create immersive environments, physical installations, digital interfaces, near-future scenarios and science fiction narratives.
As an independent creative and futurist, he consults and develops work for commercial clients such as IKEA and World Expo 2020, as well as institutional initiatives for the UN and EU Horizon 2020. He is the founder and creator of the award-winning educational game What The Block, biological design initiative Grow Your Own Cloud, former co-founder of fact-checking service SIFT, and former Innovation Lead at L’Oreal Global.
His creative work has been recognised and exhibited internationally, most notably SXSW, World Economic Forum, Bio26 – 26th Biennial of Design Ljubljana, as well as solo shows in the United States and Denmark. He is grateful to be the recipient of many international awards including Interaction Awards 2018, Core77, BloxHub and the UN Summer of Solutions. Always keen to share knowledge, he leads dozens of courses and workshops each year around design futures and emerging technologies. Cyrus is a regular keynote speaker on a range of topics from value beyond money, to biological data futures.
Monika Seyfried is an Interaction Designer who works across the disciplines of science, ethics and futures. Her research focuses on how living systems and the natural world can help us to establish new perspectives on the future of technology and ecosystems. Monika’s focus lies in the role of ethics in the design process. In recent years she was involved in European Commission research projects that explored topics of Critical Heritages, Fusion Energy Futures and Ethics & Technology collaborating with institutions such as LSE, Newcastle University and IT University of Copenhagen.
Through her design work, Monika engages at the intersection of emerging technologies, digital media and the natural environment, creating sensory rich, interactive spaces. Her passion is to build immersive experiences; mixed reality worlds that blend the digital and physical, working with a speculative mindset and experimenting with design approaches. In her latest work she’s been exploring how design, art and science, in particular the field of biotechnology, can create immersive spaces for the creation of new futures.
Monika is an educator. Monika’s courses are based on her deep research and design work in the fields of futurescaping, ethics and climate, together with techniques of prototyping, data visualisation, storytelling, and exhibition design. Her approach to teaching is to create an atmosphere of open sharing and learning, whereby students and participants are invited to collectively contribute to shape and inform the course. She teaches at various institutions including Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Design Academy in Eindhoven, Hyper Island and The Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen.
Bartosz Frąckowiak, curator, director, culture researcher. Deputy Director of the Biennale Warszawa. In 2014-2017 he was the Deputy Director of the Hieronim Konieczka Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz and the curator of the International Festival of New Dramaturgies. Curator of the series of performance lectures organised in cooperation with Fundacja Bęc Zmiana (2012). Theatre director, including “Komornicka. The Ostensible Biography” (2012); “In Desert and Wilderness. After Sienkiewicz and Others” by W. Szczawińska and B. Frąckowiak (2011); performance lecture “The Art of Being a Character” (2012), Agnieszka Jakimiak’s “Africa” (2014), Julia Holewińska’s “Borders” (2016), Natalia Fiedorczuk’s “Workplace” (2017) and documentary-investigative play “Modern Slavery” (2018). He published in various theatre and socio-cultural magazines, including “Autoportret”, “Dialog”, “Didaskalia”, “Political Critique”, and “Teatr”. Lecturer at the SWPS University in Warsaw, co-curator of the 1st and 2nd editions of the Biennale Warszawa.