Last day of exhibition and for the first time in days we managed eat breakfast before its opening.
We pick up a fresh batch of Banana Bacteria and move the Stress-o-stat poster to a more visible area hoping it will do the explaining for us.
A nice surprise turned up - Kagemu, a spectacular audio-visual performance artist whose show we saw the night before. He wants to see our synthetic biology work the Stress-o-stat.
Later, Professor Pramod Wangikar of our IIT Bombay lab comes by with his family to view our works. We were really happy he came and got to see the outcomes of our lab labour. Hopefully, he enjoyed it – at least his children eagerly put on goggles to see how we made the invisible process of stress come to light. And yes, they exclaimed, the bacteria – do smell like banana.
Later, the crowd outside was getting unruly, many wanting desperately to come in. A bit of commotion between organisers and audience took place with security stepping in.
At the end of the night, our neighbouring robotic’s exhibitor had arrived with his parents and we let them smell the Banana Bacteria. The father responded – “We can make them walk, climb and crawl, but it is still years before technology (robots) can make smells”. As the exhibition comes to a close we wrap up all material.
By 9pm, the hanger was coming down, all lab equipment had been returned and was being cleaned, we despaired over a flask that broke but seemed less of a headache to our researchers. We gave our thanks to the lab who assisted us through a few days of madness that allowed us to premier our first exhibition involving living synthetic biology and nanotechnology art to an Indian audience. Our sincere thanks to everyone at IIT Bombay for their willingness to push difficult works through, and to our wonderful coordinators, particularly Sai Prashanth, who helped us 24-7 and the Techfest 2012 crew. We remain indebted to the incredible kindness of Professor Pramod Wangikar, Krishna Kumar and Dr Sandeep Gaudana from IIT Bombay's Biological Systems Engineering Laboratory.