Allow us to serve you a cocktail made of DNA.
Attend Good Genes, a genetically modified cocktail party with live music that explores the history of genetics. Using DNA from a hat worn – and never washed – by the actors in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Sister Sylvestor presents a bio-art cabaret where the work takes place in the audience’s small intestine. A thorough celebration of thieves biohackers and cannibals, Good Genes sheds worn out scientific narrative and turns them into a science for the people.
Artist Profile
Sister Sylvester is a new-media artist based in New York and Istanbul. She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and the CPH:DOX lab. Her most recent film, “Our Ark,” co-directed with Deniz Tortum, explores the relationship between computational thinking and the climate crisis. It premiered at IDFA ’21 and has screened at festivals internationally, winning Best Short Film at the Istanbul International Film Festival. In live performance she works with hand-made books that use spatial narratives and spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences, most recently with Constantinopoliad at National Sawdust, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation. She is a self-taught microbiologist, and has made both video and live-performance works with microorganisms. She teaches a class on microbiology and performance at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University and others.