its our fault.
Dream it.
Ant Nevin: Part mad scientist, part designer, arm-waver and optimist. Ant has been making things since ages ago. As a child he was sold for scientific experiments which are now only discussed in hushed tones. He’s been a school teacher, illustrator, human cannonball, bike courier, sold fruit and worked on designing New Zealand’s 2010 World Expo Pavilion. He has exhibited his creative work in Ireland, Norway, The USA, Prague, Australia, Spain and New Zealand. Ant has worked with NZ’s own NIWA, the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and in 2019 was Barcelona’s Institute of Research in Biomedicine Artist in Residence. Alongside being a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, Wellington School of Design, Nga Pae Mahutonga, Ant is the overall lead of the BIOLUMEN lab project, creative director, chief organiser and the rubber gloves behind the emails.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0082-8927
hear it.
Kaysha Bowler puts up with Ant’s arm waving. She is a light and sound artist, audiovisual interaction designer, music hardware developer, and lighting designer from Wellington, New Zealand. An inaugural graduate of Music Technology from Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, Kaysha recently received her Master of Creative Enterprise with Distinction, where she developed kinetic light systems for experimental musical and audiovisual applications. Her works explore the relationship between light and sound, with a focus towards the physicality of these mediums.
In 2018, Kaysha was the lighting designer for Neil and Liam Finn’s “Where’s My Room?” Tour of New Zealand. This inspired her to design plex, a custom-built MIDI controller combining light and sound control, equipping artists with a new piece of performance hardware. Kaysha aims to challenge perceptions of the physical world through her explorations of light and sound, often developing her own hardware and software utilising current and emergent technologies.
Science it.
Dr Michelle Thunders brings way more than her expertise in genetics to the BIOLUMEN LAB project. She is curious, rigorous, super encouraging and just bonkers enough to believe in BIOLUMEN LAB. Michelle is a strong believer in inclusive genetics education and making knowledge accessible, actionable and meaningful to all. She is a Senior Lecturer in Pathology and Molecular Medicine currently working at the University of Otago, Wellington in the Department of Pathology. She obtained both a BSc (Hons) and PhD in Human Genetics from University College London and has worked in a variety of academic institutions in the UK and in NZ. . Her research interests are in the analysis of sequencing data, both RNA and DNA, to understand health, risk and disease pathogenesis at a molecular level. She is interested in epigenomic biomarkers relative to assessing human health and disease, specifically DNA methylation and whether stressors we are exposed to, both physical and psychological, can have a legacy effect on subsequent generations. This potentially has profound implications in terms of how we assess heritability of disease, health equity and disease risk.