The GLEI Inc. Project
Lauren Ruiz operates under the fictive medical corporation GLEI Inc. to provoke a collective reflection on the intersections of corporate authority, medical institutions, and environmental pollution. As an extension of the genetic-engineering fiction behind GLEI Inc., Lauren Ruiz’s interactive new media project GLEIInc.com serves as the digital database and informational site regarding the company’s research mission and information on past medical research as well as testimonials on GLEI Inc.’s fictional bioengineering process. The GLEI Box: At-home Saliva Toxicant Test, which is available for purchase on the site, deploys the structural mechanisms of home ancestry kits to problematize issues of identity, trust, and privacy in the medical sciences and to question the relationship between reason and compromise in proposed solutions to anthropogenic climate change. This interactive project encourages participants to share private data: saliva, medical history, and personal information that will be incorporated into the GLEI Inc. research database for microplastics and human biology. The website, GLEIInc.com, and The GLEI Box: At-Home Saliva Toxicant Test exist as a collective project commenting on the implications of aesthetics in medical corporate design and as an interrogation of public trust in scientific authority.
Lauren Ruiz
Lauren Ruiz is a research-based multimedia artist interrogating ecological contamination, institutional authority, and bioethics through speculative fiction-based installations, interactive performance, and digital projects. Her work calls attention to the direct effects of individual choices on the environment and the future of human existence amidst anthropogenic climate change. Ruiz draws upon environmental data and science journals, climate fiction novels and horror films to complicate the complex mechanisms of evolution, ecology, data, and identity relative to institutional power and personal embodiment.