14 DAY TRIAL // On the list of sacrifices made for art, we can now add Olafur Eliasson's tears turned into a piece of cheese, as part of an exhibit on synthetic biology for Grow Your Own – Life After Nature Project at the Dublin Science Gallery.
American scientist Christina Agapakis and Norwegian scent expert Sissel Tolaas decided to work together on creating the most unusual cheese known to man, the human bacteria spiked cheese.
Besides the originality of the concept, the cheese is not spiked with your usual human bacteria, it has only bacteria taken from renown personalities.
The first piece of cheese exposed is made with famous artist Olafur Eliasson's tears, followed by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's nose bacteria, cheesemaker Seana Doughty's mouth and microbiologist Ben Wolfe's toes. If that wasn't enough, the scientists also used Chef's Michael Pollan's belly button bacteria for another piece of artisanal cheese.
The project is called “Selfmade” and it exhibits eleven pieces of cheese, each flavored with human bacteria. The bacterial cultures were taken using sterile cotton swabs sent to the donors.
“We are presenting a set of cheeses made using bacteria from the human body. Everybody has a unique and diverse set of bacteria living on their skin that can be amplified using techniques from microbiology and grown directly in milk to form and flavor each cheese,” Agapakis told Dezeen Magazine.
Each piece of cheese smells and tastes like the body odor of the donor and the project aims to show how “living organisms that exist in the body also exist in the food and vice versa.” The artist wanted to draw attention on the importance of micro-organisms and effects of bacteria and how these can be manipulated to create synthetic microbes.