01 Biotopy — Wendi Yan

Installation at SeedAI House SXSW. March 9, 2025.

Biotopy

2024 - present
Pioreactors, Unreal game engine running on custom PC, monitors, microbial and environmental samples, custom 3D-printed PLA bases

Scientific Concept by Darren Zhu
Interaction System by Will Freudenheim
Sound Design by Jessica Shand
Visual Design, Research Writing by Wendi Yan

Support by Cosmos Ventures, NEW INC, Digital Architecture Lab

Biotopy is a philosophical experimentation, a biotic game demo and an art installation that explores bio-digital Symbiocine. It is a Pioreactor-based game engine that seeks to combine concepts from scientific discovery games with biotic games to allow citizen scientists around the world to collect, grow, and interact with different microbial populations. By growing microbial cultures in the bioreactors, players terraform a virtual planet.

As a team with backgrounds in synthetic biology, interactive systems, game design, history of science and procedural music, we have been developing this project to provoke questions of how biotic agents will live with virtual universes, and how scientific discoveries might be facilitated through collective play.

EVENTS

Bioclub presentation, Tokyo, Japan. April 22, 2025.
Talk and Exhibition at SeedAI House at SXSW, Austin, March 9, 2025.
MESH Studio Residency, Japan, Virtual. Fall 2024-Spring 2025.
Game debut at NEW INC Creative Science Dinner #4: Rewilding. October 26, 2024.
Cosmos Ventures grant. Summer 2024.
Talk at Santa Fe Institute. April 18, 2024.
Demo presentation at the Unfiguring Conference, Harvard University. March 22, 2024.

GAME DEBUT

SPEAKING AT SEEDAI HOUSE

RESEARCH PHASE