Verina Gfader interviewed us for her essay on our work Common Flowers / White Out in the upcoming book CODED CULTURES – Creative Practices out of Diversity (Ed. Georg Russegger, Springer Verlag – Wien / New York – Edition Angewandte.

Here’s an excerpt of some of her questions and our answers. Can’t wait to get my hand on the book.

Sissu Tarka: Q1. What is the ‘common’?
BCL: General, free, open, public. Belonging to all, the opposite of special. Shared by all or many. There are two connotations to it, the first one is exemplified in the reversal of the project name from ‘Common Flowers’ to ‘Flower Commons’, specified that shared places and spaces where the flowers might grow. Translated to German, ‘Common’ becomes ‘gemein’, which again has two distinct meanings. One the one hand the obvious one such as ‘Gemeinde’ (Community, Village) or “ever-present, ordinary”, especially in often-occurring plants and animals. (The original latin would be ‘vulgaris’). The other nuance is that ‘gemein’ also means ‘mean’. Whether genetically-modified flowers really are mean, is not for us to decide.

ST: Q2. Why flowers? Roses?
BCL: Flowers – and especially Suntory Flowers’ ranges of genetically modified blue carnations and roses – because they represent the first genetically modified consumer products, which are neither human food or animal feed, but serve a purely aesthetic purpose. That’s why they are special, that’s why they have to become common.

ST: Q7 What does (bio-)hacking mean, imply? In particular to YOUR practice?
BCL: Hacking has to be effortlessly elegant. A small gesture with a big outcome. With Bio-hacking in particular we mean the attempt to regain the power about our shared biological destiny. We need to get involved, we need to understand, we need to learn. Not only we as artists, but we as a society.

ST: Q7.1 Can one hack everything? Any system?
BCL: In principle it should be possible to hack any system that can be sufficiently well described. The ‘hacking’ in this project is evident on two of levels. On the bio-technical, tissue-culture level: we are trying to understand the system ‘blue flower’ and change it’s appearance. On the media-communication level: we are trying our DIY flowers as a counter-model to the commercially available ones, with the explicit plan of provoking responses.

ST: Q9 How do you work as a team, dialogical processes in your practice?
BCL: Yes, exactly. Dialogical processes, polylogical textures.

ST: Q11 Did you look into colour theory?
BCL: Have to admit, not very much. We are aware that blue stands for something unobtainable, and the blue rose especially seems to have a romantic connotation of unreachable love. What other meanings from colour theory would apply to flowers which were white, then became blue, and then became white again? Schizophrenic?

ST: Q20 Do you think the ‘hacked’ flower is already embedded in the ‘former’ or ‘first’ flower?
BCL: Basically Suntory ‘hacked’ the flower, we are only showing ways of re-taking ownership of it.

ST: Q25 What is your preferred day/night time of working?
BCL: After 24.30h, but before 27.30h. Yes, one should really be in bed by 27.30h.

ST: Q47 Your preferred code/coding?
BCL: It’s fun to decipher code, may they be technological, cultural or technical. Coding is active participation.

Good news everyone. We are being invited to the Cellsbutton#04 Media Art Festival in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Even better news – thanks to the Austrian Government and the BMUKK – the flight is paid for by Austrian Tax Euros. Thank you.

Nice to see many friends amongst the participants, including the omnipresent Hans Bernhard from Ubermorgen, Marc Dusseiller, Michiko Tsuda and Andreas Schlegel. Looking very much forward to meet the other participants too.

We will be doing a Common Flowers Workshop on Friday, July 30th. It’s called cellsKIT + intelligent bacteria and will be held in the Microbiology Lab & Tissue Culture Lab at the Bulaksumur Kampus of the Gadjah Mada University [UGM] :

30 July 2010 | Friday
cellsKIT + intelligent bacteria
Venue: Gadjah Mada University [UGM] Microbiology Lab & Tissue Culture Lab
Kampus UGM Bulaksumur
Time: 10.00 – 14.00 WIB
+ “biohack – biopiracy in developing countries” discussion led by Prof. Irfan D. Pridjambada [ID], Nur Akbar Arofatullah [ID], Agus Tri Budiarto [ID]
+ “cellsKIT – hackteria” workshop by Marc Dusseiller [CH] – dusjagr labs – hackteria
“DIY webcam for digital microscope and haemacytometer bacteria counter”: – extensive collaborative works, research & development
+ intelligent bacteria: “common flowers” by Georg Tremmel – BCL [AT | JP] DIY plant tissue culture workshop & “common flowers” presentation

So, the Marmite and the flowers are packed, next stop Singapore, next update Yogyakarta.

‘Common Flowers – Flower Commons’ will be shown at the Interferenze Seed Tokyo 2010 Festival at VACANT in Harajuku, Tokyo on June 25th & 26th. Yes, it’s a small festival, but a very nice one.

We are very happy to be amongst other artists and friends like Hajime Narukawa, Akihiro Kubota, Takahiro Yamaguchi, Kazuhiro Jo, Tomotaro Kaneko and Natalija Robovic+Toru Fujita.

Opening times are 12h – 21h, both Saturday and Sunday from 18h onwards are live music performance. Should be good.

We should be there most of the time presenting our tissue-cultured carnations and roses. (Let’s see what the heat does to the tissue-cultures).

Full report to follow.

The complete set at Flickr.

Unlike the blue carnation, the blue rose smells – well – like a rose. And – good news for Common Flowers – axillary buds are clearly present.

The Woody Plant Medium is in the post, anyone got any experience with home made medium for tissue-culturing roses?

*clap* *clap* *clap*

(the applause is deafening)

(the audience is listening)

Suntory finally presents: The blue rose.

Yes, we’ve known this for quite a while.

(Georg Tremmel, Illustration of Blue Rose, real Blue Carnation. Complete set at Flickr.)

Nice co-incident, that the flowers start to sell in Japan on Tuesday, November 3rd, this is a national holiday called ‘Culture Day’. Like any other good Culture Day, its purpose is to promote Culture and Art.
We will do our best to turn the “Culture Day” into a “Plant Tissue Culture Day”. I’ll keep you updates on my endevours getting the blue rose and I am seriously considering queueing the night before.

The rose is exactly the reason, why the Common Flowers Project ist called Common Flowers Project and not Common Carnations.
We were aware of the blue rose when we started ComFlow and wanted it to be so inclusive, that we can absorb new flower developments into the ComFlow fold. The nice things about roses are, that they are woody plants and therefore able to survive for years and decades, unlike the carnations, which last for 2 years at most.
Only thing left to do is find a protocol for propagating woody plants, and then it’s off to the queue. I really don’t want to miss this historic event.

Links:

Introducing “SUNTORY blue rose APPLAUSE” World’s First* Blue Roses Available at Last*With petals containing nearly 100% blue pigment

And of course, the “SUNTORY blue rose APPLAUSE” Webpage.

(from the Yomiuri Shinbun on 21. October 2009)

(English-speaking printed press with is usual and predictable 1 day gap: Daily Yomiuri on the 22nd October.)