On the advice of our legal council, we hereby would like to make the following statement:

We, Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara, operating under the artist name BCL, would like to participate in explaining misunterstanding concerning our art work ‘Common Flowers – Flower Commons’ and its exhibition at the OK Center as part of the ‘CyberArs 09′ exhibition during the Ars Electronica festival in September 2009.

The work of prolonging the life of the cut flower carnations was carried out in the BioLab of the Ars Electronica Center in August 2009 by specially trained technicians working for the AEC. The lab currently operates on a S1 bio-security level, all precautions have been taken to prevent the risk of accidentical escape of blue carnation.
During the exhibtion ‘CyberArts’ at the OK Center in Linz further security measures have been implemented. The genetically modified plants were restricted to plant containers, which were further secured in plastic boxes to which access was only possible by breaking a lock. As a further security measures, the OK Center positioned an invigilator at all opening hours during the the Ars Electronica festival in our exhibitions space. After the Ars Electronica festival the Cyberarts 09 remained open for another 3 weeks. During this time it was not feasable to station a permanent guard in the exhibition space. Instead the door leading to the space was sealed with a plexi glass sheet, making entering the exhibition space all but impossible.

Flowers Commons refers to the imagined spaces that the genetically modified blue carnation are exhibition. Our project ‘Common Flowers – Flower Commons’ proposes to create ‘Flower Commons’ as an act of critically engaging in the emerging biosciences and questioning the role of genetically modified plants in society and their relation to the general public.

We would like to state, that we did not release genetically modified blue carnation in Linz/Austria during Ars Electronica 2009.

However we would also like to re-affirm a main point of our project: Genetically plants are easily available and anyone with the interest could easily clone and release the genetically modified blue carnation or any other similar plant.

We can not be held responsible if anyone else will clone and release Blue GM Carnations plants.

We confirm that the above statement is true.

Thank you for you attention.

For BCL: Georg Tremmel, Shiho Fukuhara.
Place: Tokyo, Japan
Date: 16. September 2009. 10.34h