Falling Walls Falling Walls Science Summit 2023

Data Storing: Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation with Monika Seyfried & Cyrus Clarke

Monika Seyfried, Cyrus Clarke, Alina Schadwinkel

2022 Art & Science Breakthrough Conversations Science Breakthrough of the Year

In this Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversation, digital participants had the chance to engage in a live conversation with Monika Seyfried & Cyrus Clarke, winners of the Falling Walls Breakthrough of the Year 2022 in the category of Art and Science. They talked about their interactive art installation Data Garden which utilizes DNA technology for digital data storing and retrieving from the DNA of plants, which in return create energy and absorb Carbondioxide.

The interview series provided an intimate personal atmosphere, in which high-level guests, speakers and panelists of the Falling Walls Science Summit 2022 talked about their individual research, career paths and experiences.

The Falling Walls Breakthrough Conversations are supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and Springer Nature.

Monika Seyfried

Grow Your Own Cloud

Monika is an Interaction Designer who works across the disciplines of science, ethics and futures.

Through her design work, Monika engages at the intersection of emerging technologies, digital media and the natural environment, creating sensory rich, interactive spaces. Her passion is to build immersive experiences; mixed reality worlds that blend the digital and physical, working with a speculative mindset and experimenting with design approaches. In her latest work she’s been exploring how design, art and science, in particular the field of biotechnology, can create immersive spaces for the creation of new futures.

Her research focuses on how living systems and the natural world can help us to establish new perspectives on the future of technology and ecosystems. Monika’s focus lies in the role of ethics in the design process.

In recent years she was involved in European Commission research projects that explored topics of Critical Heritages, Fusion Energy Futures and Ethics & Technology collaborating with the institutions such as LSE, Newcastle University and IT University of Copenhagen.

Cyrus Clarke

Grow Your Own Cloud

Cyrus is a designer, artist and futurist with a background in economics and digital technologies. He is passionate about reforming human–nonhuman relationships by establishing new models of cooperation between human beings, living systems and inanimate technologies. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, he seeks to promote futures rooted in biological wisdom, through a deep partnership with nature, towards the strange and uncanny.

His focus lies on shifting notions of nature and technology through the creation of artistic pieces ranging from film, mixed-media installations, fictions, live experiences and genetic software. In particular he is fascinated by data as a material, working with nature as a technology to re-frame human relationships with organic and constructed systems, and initiate discussion on the ethical, environmental, political and socioeconomic implications of the technology filled worlds we are rushing to create.

Simon Koy

Alina Schadwinkel

Springer Nature

Alina was born in 1987 and  studied science journalism with a focus on life sciences/medicine at TU Dortmund University. From 2009 to 2010, she was a trainee at »ZEIT Online« andthen freelance for various media and ZEIT editor from 2011 to 2012. Until 2013, Alina was deputy head of the life sciences department of the »New Scientist«. Subsequently six weeks with the IJP in South Africa. From October 2013 to December 2019, she was editor in the science department of »ZEIT Online« in Berlin. From then on, Managing Editor Online of »Spektrum der Wissenschaft«. Alina is the winner of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize for Science Journalism 2014 in the category of young talent and was awarded Top 30 under 30 of the year 2015. She was also nominated for the Grimme Online Award in the same year for the dossier on Down’s syndrome »Wer darf Leben?« and in 2021, awarded the »Prize for Science Journalism» of the DGK.

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