Geneticist, science writer and BBC broadcaster Adam Rutherford will be in conversation with artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy to explore the ideas underlying their film and installation Genetic Automata.

In his acclaimed book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories of Our Genes, Rutherford explains how DNA determines far less than we have been led to believe about us as individuals, but a vast amount about us as a species. Delving into the history of genetics, the artists and Rutherford will discuss what our genes can really tell us about ourselves and examine some of the murky history of science and race.

Tickets £10/£8 concessions, booking essential.

Dr Adam Rutherford is a geneticist, writer and broadcaster. He presents the weekly programme Inside Science on BBC Radio 4, as well as The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry. He has written books on human history and evolution - A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, and The Book of Humans - and on the origin of life. Adam collaborated on a project with David Blandy and Daniel Locke in 2014 that resulted in a show and interactive art work titled Helix, which went on to become the epic graphic novel Out of Nothing. He has also worked on several films including Ex Machina (2015), Annihilation, (2018), and Björk's Biophilia Live.

Larry Achiampong (b.1984) is a British-Ghanaian artist whose solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. These investigations examine constructions of ‘the self’ by splicing the audible and visual materials of personal and interpersonal archives, offering multiple perspectives that reveal entrenched socio-political contradictions in contemporary society. Achiampong has exhibited, performed and presented projects within the UK and abroad including Tate Britain/Modern, London; The Institute For Creative Arts, Cape Town; The British Film Institute, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; Prospect New Orleans, New Orleans; Diaspora Pavilion – 57th Venice Biennale, Venice; and Somerset House, London.

David Blandy (b. 1976) is a British artist who has established his working practices through a series of investigations into the cultural forces that inform and influence him, ranging from his love of hip hop and soul, to computer games and manga. His works slip between performance and video, reality and construct, using references sampled from the wide, disparate sources that provide his (and our own) individualist sense of self. He has exhibited at institutions nationally and worldwide including Tate Modern, London, UK; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; The Exchange, Newlyn Art Gallery, UK; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. He is currently working on a New Geographies Commission for Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea.