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BioFlaneur takes on board the important and emerging topic of personal bio-privacy in the era of big data, social networking and hackers.
Recent developments in the field of microbiology and synthetic biology expose facts from the “micro world” which previously were unknown. That means, following scientists from the University of Oregon and Human Microbiome Project, that each location in the world as well as each of us, can be identified by very unique microbial environments. The above mentioned research is still in the middle of development but since we managed to discover so much about the invisible environments of ours, what would it mean, in term of social behaviour and interaction in public spaces, if those technologies and data uncovered by it, become stored and commonly accessible… ? This short film speculates on the future of invisible, biological data of humans and spaces. Will anything change in our understanding of privacy in public space, when what is invisible becomes uncovered and starts to identify each of us?
The title takes its inspiration from the 19th century Parisian flaneur, often mentioned by Walter Benjamin or Baudelaire. A Flaneur is an urban explorer, who, by wandering around streets, discoverers new stories and affairs… BioFlaneur is the 2050 equivalent of the 19th century dandy. Instead of just walking around, the BioFlaneur uncovers modern stories and characters through simple bacteria sample scans, taken from the surface.
In this slightly absurd, exaggerated and imaginative way, this film aims to provoke a question about our awareness of personal, online privacy and its future, which together with new bio-technologies shares more and more facts from our life.
