Biohacker meets Willy Wonka: Lucy McRae on the making of the incredible edible music video for Architecture in Helsinki

Fellows Friday

TED Fellow Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a body architect — an artist who explores how technology and the body may someday meet and merge. Her latest project is a fantastical and frothy music video for “Dream a Little Crazy” by Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Watch the mouth-watering video above, and then read all about how McRae and her collaborators wove futuristic ideas about synthetic biology, food-as-sculpture and 3D printing technology into a mad lab full of flying gloop and powder.

How do you describe to people what you do?

I do speculative story-telling. I create parallel, alternate worlds — underpinned by science fiction. The idea is to render possibilities to how technology will change, thinking about how people will embody the future in technology. But I do it in playful ways. In a way, I’m designing the connective tissue between science and imagination. I’m not a technologist, I’m not a scientist. I’m an artist inspired by scientific thinking, and I use that to steer the narratives of my films and concepts.

How did you come to collaborate on the video with Architecture in Helsinki?

A lot of my projects begin with serendipitous encounters, and this project was no different. I got an email from the band at a completely random time when I was at the LimeWharf, a cultural innovation hub in London where I’m now doing a residency. I’d been a Architecture in Helsinki fan for years, while the band’s lead singer, Cameron Bird, had seen my work, but had no idea who was making it. Then he investigated and saw that I was Australian, too, and was like, “Huh? Why haven’t we ever contacted her before?”

So he wrote to me and said I’d love for you to interpret the song. They had no brief, except that they wanted a surreal, infectious, absurd clip, and to have a strong synergy between the album artwork, made by this Finnish illustrator Santtu Mustonen, who hand-crafts analog, globby, dripping illustrations over sharp 3D geometries.

How did this lead to the concept of the biological bakery?

Our concept was to explore how synthetic biology might enter the home, but in a humorous way — using music as a superhighway to illustrate quite a complex idea. My collaborator Rachel Wingfield and I were interested in synthetic biology and the way food is industrially mass-produced, the way balloons or candies are made. We looked at how we could merge these industrial machines with the representation of the body. We started experimenting with the concept of printing the band’s faces with multicolored bacterial strands — using different-colored edible liquids composed of flour and water to symbolize this.

Everything in the film was edible. The band were scanned in Australia with a medical-grade 3D scanner, all the files were sent over to us in London, 3D printed and made into miniature versions in pop-confectionery.

There’s a scene where Cameron’s face-planting the band’s faces into corn flour. This is the way that candies are molded in factories: they create huge, big trays of corn flour, and they emboss, for example, Haribo shapes into the corn flour, and then the liquid is poured in. We piggybacked some of these confectionary techniques and made them for an installation gallery setting.

Two days after the music video, we re-created and built the whole set for a live event. We invited the audience to enter into this world, and we performed the scenes from the music video, exploding the liquid and painting this sort of fantastical tattoo skin over the body. In the end we were merging film and experiential art into the gallery setting.

Did the audience actually get to eat the props from the film? What were they made of?

Yeah, we worked with a chef at the LimeWharf and used the 3D-printed molds to make edible faces with a Prosecco, pear and thyme jelly. The audience members were eating the band. We made chocolate versions of the band as well. Everyone was asked to wear white, so it was kind of like this Willy Wonka–esque experience. Cameron was playing music, it was sort of like this chamber where this liquid was overflowing and spilling everywhere, and people were eating the props.

Now, back in Australia, the band has collaborated with a confectionery company, so the molds we made are being turned into lollipops, which they’re launching as part of their album release. It’s interesting how the evolution of this project started as a conversation, became a music video, then an experiential installation, and now a real-life biological bakery!

I’m interested in transforming materials, and food is a great material to sculpt. By representing the anatomy through food, it’s a way of experiencing sculpture in a different way. You can touch it — eat the contents of a gallery — breaking down the barrier of just being a viewer.

And you’re ingesting into your anatomy the anatomy that was represented by the food.

Exactly. And this points to the bigger picture of whether, in the future, we actually will clone ourselves, or eat ourselves in order to enhance our senses. So it’s kind of tapping into those different areas of research, but in a playful way.

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Buildings made from cardboard tubes: A gallery of Shigeru Ban architecture

architecture TEDx Shigeru Ban was commissioned to design and construct the Christchurch Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand after the deadly earthquake of 2011. Here is a view of the inside, shot in 2013.

“I was disappointed in my profession,” says architect Shigeru Ban in today’s talk, which he gave at TEDxTokyo in May. As far as he’s concerned, architecture has lost its way. Shigeru Ban: Emergency shelters made from paper“We are working for privileged people, for rich people, for government and developers. They have money and power, and those are invisible, so they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monuments of architecture.” Ban, instead, has committed himself to creating buildings that can truly be useful — whether or not they’re permanent fixtures on a horizon.

Ban first began experimenting with constructing buildings from paper tubes in 1986, and he’s continued to test new ideas of form and material ever since. For Ban, good architecture must answer questions of utility and sustainability even as it delights with aesthetics. Somewhat surprisingly, given the apparently transient nature of so many of his chosen materials, his buildings have proven long-lasting.

Here, take a look at a gallery of images he put together exclusively for the TED Blog.

“I like to build monuments that are beloved by people,” Ban says. Here, a look at the exterior of the Christchurch Cardboard Cathedral in New Zealand.

Temporary housing. hastily erected after disaster. often allows only a sorry approximation of “real life.” Ban built these multistory buildings from shipping containers to house residents in Onagawa after the tsunami hit Japan in 2011.

After the Japanese tsunami in 2011, many people were evacuated to local community centers. The scene was often one of chaotic disarray. Ban’s solution was simple: to give evacuees at least a sense of individual space by building partitions from cardboard tubes and curtains.

When an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Ban drove six hours from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to get to the stricken country. There, he worked to build 50 shelters from local materials.

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 70,000 people in China. Ban traveled with his Japanese students to work with their Chinese counterparts on rebuilding. “In one month we completed nine classrooms,” he says. This included the Hualin Paper Elementary School, shown here.

The Paper Dome was originally built in Kobe, Japan. But after a big earthquake hit Taiwan in 2008, Ban and his team dismantled it and sent it to be reconstructed by volunteers as a permanent structure there.

Ban does not always resist working for large organizations or clients. He describes this offshoot of the Centre Pompidou, which he built in Metz, France in 2009, as “a big monument for government.”

Ban says he was couldn’t afford Parisian rent when he came to the city to work on designing the new Centre Pompidou. So in 2004, he built his own office on top of Richard Rogers’ iconic building. “We stayed six years without paying any rent,” he recalls in his talk. Only one problem: Anyone who came to see him had to pay the entrance fee for the museum.

After a big earthquake in Italy destroyed many large concert halls, Ban was commissioned to build a temporary auditorium — out of paper. Here, two images of the Paper Concert Hall L’Aquila, built in 2001.

“What is permanent? What is temporary? Even a building made of paper can be permanent as long as people love it,” says Ban. Shown here, some of his perma-temp structures: the Paper Log House built in Turkey in 2000; the Paper Log House built in India in 2001, and Kirinda House, built in Sri Lanka in 2005.

“The collapse of buildings kills people; that’s the responsibility of architects,” says Ban. But all too often, architects eschew relief or disaster work for more obviously prestigious projects or, as he puts it, “working for privileged people.” These images show one of his first projects working for the displaced, the Paper Emergency Shelter for UNHCR, Rwanda, he built in 1999.

After a huge earthquake in Kobe in 1995, Ban proposed a new design for a local church to the presiding priest … one he wanted to make from paper tubes. “Are you crazy?” the priest asked him. Ban didn’t take “no” for an answer, but instead first constructed smaller buildings, and slowly persuaded the priest his idea wasn’t at all crazy. The resulting church stayed in place for ten years.

Here are some of those smaller structures Ban built in Kobe in 1995, to show that his concept of building houses from paper really worked. Note the beer crates he used as foundations.

Where it all began: Ban’s original experiments with paper and cardboard tubes. He started to experiment with these ideas back in 1986, as shown in this Alvar Aalto Exhibition, held that year in Tokyo.

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Using nature’s genius in architecture: Michael Pawlyn on TED.com

How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty? By learning from nature. At TEDSalon in London, Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society: radical resource efficiency, closed loops, and drawing energy from the sun. (Recorded at TEDSalon, November 2010, in London, UK. Duration: 13:47)

Watch Michael Pawlyn’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.

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