Future life will be synthetic: About the emergence of engineered life, its promises, prophecies and the formal causalities needed to make sense of them

Abstract

This article proposes to reflect on the promises of synthetic biology through fieldwork carried out in 2014–15 with a group of bioartists in Helsinki, Finland. It narrates the author’s experience of three one-week gatherings leading to the production of a piece titled Your Synthetic Future, an ironic apparatus appearing as an oracular machine. This reflection leads us to understand that the true originality of synthetic biology resides in its ability to breach the once clear and impenetrable frontier that has kept apart the analogue and digital modes of existence. In turn, this renewed understanding of what is at stake with the current state of the field of synthetic biology leads us to focus on the unfolding of new forms of presence across the analogue/digital divide. It argues for a renewed perspective on causality that was first intuited by Marshall McLuhan as an original insight on the question of the medium.