The Japan Times ran a story on Common Flowers on Saturday, July 31st 2010. Here are some excerpts.

Shiho Fukuhara of BCL explains, Suntory Flowers and the Moondust carnation represent the first commercially available genetically engineered consumer product that is intended purely for aesthetic consumption: ‘‘The media outcry wasn’t that huge since it was neither food nor developed from animals.’’
Fukuhara found it strange how relaxed the Japanese are about genetic engineering, the business behind it and the lack of a public dialogue about the topic.
‘‘Creating genetically manipulated plants for merely aesthetic purposes is a nice marketing strategy from somebody who wants to introduce the genetic engineering industry without being regarded as irresponsible,’’ Fukuhara says. ‘‘A product like flowers can slowly change our perception of genetically altered products. If it’s nice and beautiful with ‘Dream come true’ as a tag line, who cares how it’s made?’’
…
BCL’s process of cloning Suntory’s blue flower doesn’t sound that difficult. They buy the modified flowers and then bring them back to life using plant tissue culture techniques, a way of propagating plants in sterile conditions.
‘‘Basically, once a flower is cut, it is slowly dying. With plant tissue culture, plants are grown on a growth medium with the necessary nutrition. If the flower is reasonably fresh it will start growing again. This is what we mean by ‘reverse-engineering’ the plant,’’ says Fukuhara.

Online version of the full article, it’s also available as PDF

Sissu Tarka 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.