02- INNER CARBON01 - MAMMOTH TECHNOLOGY00- PRIMORDIUM
InformationExhibitions
WritingsSpeaking
Interviews
Biotopy
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
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
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
ARCHIVE
Speculating An Affective Gaze in Scientific Practice
Essay, chapter in Interplay
2024.11
To ongoing debates about emerging technologies, namely artificial intelligence and biotechnology, this book contributes the novel hypothesis that interaction sites between human and non-human intelligences, be they human, collective, biotic, synthetic or environmental, are already proliferating according to developments in game design. In short, new genera and species of interactions and of intelligences are already present in playful experiments.
This book tracks the evolution of five such intelligence experiments, not unlike a set of petridishes with variant initial conditions. In doing so, what the book offers is not a unified theory of ‘play in the age of AI’, but rather a multifaceted account of how intelligences form and emerge through and across playful interaction surfaces, spaces and dynamics.
Featuring Games and Essays from:
Will Freudenheim
William Morgan
Wendi Yan
Sylvan Rackham
Doug Stark
Flora Weil
Christina Lu
Dalena Tran
“Is it possible to invent ways of making knowledge without shying away from the self? The interactive gameplay and the fictional scaffolding of Biotopy are intended to assist with the knowledge-making process. Affectively seeing an epistemic object, we believe, does not have to compromise the rigor of the knowledge production. We developed Biotopy to better intuit microorganisms' liveliness and their involvement in planetary processes. It is a new perceptual instrument which assists us with feeling our inherent entanglement with scale-agnostic evolutions. Through the process of raising a bio-digital planetary pet, Biotopy takes the player on an imaginative journey based on both biological and digital renderings. It helps the player zoom out, and see the tiny vial of microbial samples as capable of terraforming a planet.”
“What comes out of playing Biotopy, hopefully, is a somewhat shifted self, looser in its boundary from the biotope that enabled the player’s existence. One learns to see the microbial world and the planetary world differently. As a result, the scientific self meets the gaze of the epistemic object.”
Micronaut Odyssey
Animation video
4 minute 48 seconds
Support by Summer of Protocols (Ethererum Foundation)
As completely biological robots made from living cells, Xenobots can perform specific tasks without being genetically edited. In the future, they could help repair human tissues, remove pollutants, generate human organs, and capture carbon dioxide. Xenobots being deployed for space missions might be an ultimate form of feral protocols. They roam in the vast, largely unknown cosmos, sensing, decoding, transmitting information.
Science fiction art usually uses hard surface models to kitbash large industriral infrastructures or space fleets. Micronaut Odyssey imagines a different kind of sci-fi aesthetic that centers the soft, the living, the microscale high-tech futures.
In this non-narrative animation, speculative xenobots with different shapes and movements wander in space, against the backdrop of Martian terrains under a microscopic lens. With Schubert’s Ave Maria playing in the background, the camera slowly follows these robots on their odyssey.
Archive