Synthetic Life: A future 'Natural History'?

Talking Culture

The Synthetic Sacred is a new action-research initiative curated by Lucy Rose Sollitt that explores pathways for ecological restoration amidst hybridity. The notion of the Synthetic Sacred is both a provocation and an attempt to forge sustainable narratives and practices. Weaving together posthuman and Indigenous knowledge systems, it explores the sacred as a means to transform fractured relations with nature and resist capitalist-colonialist extraction and alienation. It proposes the sacred as a framework to guide and detoxify our synthetic creations, ensuring all ecologies flourish.

For this episode, we explore what becomes of nature when life is synthetic and ask what role biotech can play in ecological restoration. What becomes of nature when life is synthetic? Who or what controls life when nature is bionic? And can biotech ever be part of ecological restoration?