Science Gallery Melbourne is inviting proposals for projects to be included in our 2024 show ‘Not Natural’. Through installations, performances, events and workshops, this exhibition will explore the friction between cultural perceptions of nature and the implications of creating synthetic forms of life. Advances in synthetic biology have opened a plethora of possibility and a pandoras box of ethical dilemmas. We’ve stepped into a new era, where the tools of genetic engineering and biotechnology allow us to gene-edit, splice and de-extinct almost anything biological. We get to design new life-forms and modify existing ones. But are we redesigning evolution or is evolution re-designing us? And just because we can, should we?
