Genomic Media is a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant project (2021-2026), led by Dr. Mél Hogan (PI) and Deb Verhoeven (co-PI), in collaboration with artists, scientists, industry specialists, archivists, and scholars. We aim to explore, explain, and expose DNA-based data storage by tracking and documenting the legacies of genetics/genomics sciences and their various applications, in parallel with the advent of computation, internet infrastructure, binary code and their discourses.


  • Mél Hogan (Project Lead)

    PI: Mél Hogan

    Dr. Hogan (white settler scholar) is the lead researcher of Genomic Media, a project funded in part by a SSHRC Insight Grant (2021-2016). Dr. Hogan is also the Director of the EML and Associate Professor (CMF) at the University of Calgary, AB, Canada.

  • Co-PI: Deb Verhoeven

    Dr. Verhoeven is a Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the University of Alberta. Prior to her post at the University of Alberta, Verhoeven was the inaugural Director of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure project , a virtual laboratory interoperating data from Australia’s major cultural collections. Verhoeven has been appointed to the Digital Research Alliance and CANARIE. Verhoeven has a longstanding history as a radio broadcaster appearing weekly on public radio for almost fifteen years, as an expert commentator on various platforms and for ten years she held a regular slot on ABC radio in Melbourne.

  • Project Co-Manager: Tessa Brown

    Tessa Brown is a PhD student at the University of Calgary. She completed a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Dalhousie University in 2009 and worked as a writer, editor and performer in Montreal until 2019, when she returned to academia. She finished a second MA in Communications, Media and Film in 2021. She is co-editor of Heliotrope, a journal/creative space connected to Dr. Mél Hogan's Environmental Media Lab. She has cats and a lot of plants.

  • Archivist: Madeleine Mendell

    Archivist: Madeleine Mendell

    Madeleine Mendell is a research and archives practitioner currently interested in chemistry, biology, and material in audiovisual preservation, from alternatively hand-processed film to the storage of digital media on DNA. They received their MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University in 2021, where their thesis focused on the technology, ethics, and logistics of storing audiovisual media onto DNA in an archival setting. Currently, Madeleine is continuing to write and research in this area; previously they have been a film programmer, a bookseller, a line cook, a collaborator on open-source archival software, and a graduate scholar in residence at the Environmental Media Lab.

  • Artists: Kyriaki Goni

    Artists: Kyriaki Goni

    Kyriaki Goni works across media and focuses on the relations and interactions between technology and society, bringing in dialogue the local and the global perspective. Her latest solo show (2020) Data Garden was awarded with the Greek state prize INSPIRE2020. Her research and artistic practice includes workshops, talks and papers/essays, conferences and publications (Leonardo Journal MIT, Melbourne Triennial). Goni holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Digital Arts from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2015), where she also obtained her teacher education degree. Goni also holds graduate (Athens, Greece) and postgraduate degrees in Social Anthropology (Leiden, Netherlands).

    Kyriaki Goni is an official collaborator on this grant.

  • Ella Klik

    Ella Klik is a lecturer in the Hermeneutics & Cultural Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University. Her research interests range from histories of recording technologies to media theory, futurity, and digital aesthetics. Her research appeared in venues such as Memory Studies, Television & New Media, and New Media & Society. She is completing work on her first book manuscript. In Undoings: Erasure and Negative Media Theory, she considers the material and economic conditions that introduce erasure into the design of recording media. Her second research project critically explores emerging and speculative forms of data storage.

  • Grad. Researcher: Steven Gonzalez

    Steven Gonzalez is a PhD Candidate in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an ethnographer of data centers and his dissertation narrates the diverse ecological impacts of computing and digital data storage in Boriken (Puerto Rico) and Gila River Indian lands (Arizona) from an anthropological perspective. Steven holds an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University and a BA in Feminist Anthropology from Keene State College. He is also a speculative fiction writer, filmmaker, and gaming enthusiast.

  • Archivist: Linda Tadic

    Archivist: Linda Tadic

    Linda Tadic is Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service that helps libraries, archives, museums, producers, studios, artists, and individuals preserve their digital content. She is also an adjunct professor in UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program teaching two courses: Digital Asset Management, and Media Description and Access.

  • Artist: Cyrus Clarke

    Cyrus Clarke is one half of an artist duo working with Monika Seyfried. They are passionate about reforming human–nonhuman relationships by establishing new models of cooperation between human beings, living systems and inanimate technologies. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, they seek to promote futures rooted in biological wisdom, through a deep partnership with nature, towards the strange and uncanny. Their focus lies on shifting notions of nature and technology through the creation of artistic pieces ranging from film, mixed-media installations, fictions, live experiences and genetic software.

    Cyrus Clarke is an official collaborator on this grant.

  • Artist: Monika Seyfried

    Artist: Monika Seyfried

    Monika Seyfried is one half of an artist duo working with Cyrus Clarke. They are passionate about reforming human–nonhuman relationships by establishing new models of cooperation between human beings, living systems and inanimate technologies. Looking to the natural world for inspiration, they seek to promote futures rooted in biological wisdom, through a deep partnership with nature, towards the strange and uncanny. Their focus lies on shifting notions of nature and technology through the creation of artistic pieces ranging from film, mixed-media installations ,fictions, live experiences and genetic software.

    Monika Seyfried is an official collaborator on this grant.

  • Scientist: Jeff Nivala

    Scientist: Jeff Nivala

    Jeff Nivala is a Research Scientist at the University of Washington. Nivala works closely with faculty and students as part of the Molecular Information Systems Lab in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. His scientific interests are broadly focused on the intersection of molecular and synthetic biology/biochemistry with technology development. His research has been published in widely read journals such as Nature, Science, and Nature Biotechnology. In 2017, he was recognized by Forbes Magazine as a “30 Under 30” in science. His postdoctoral work was performed in George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School.

    Jeff Nivala is an official collaborator on this grant.