Emergence Catalog: Connective Tissue
Emergence Catalog: Connective Tissue
Connective Tissue
Dr. Yewande Pearse, Stacy Switzer, et al.
This volume is part of Emergence, an initiative exploring how artists and scientists engage with synthetic biology to imagine new forms of life, agency, and authorship.
The Emergence catalog is a self-published, ten-volume collection based on Emergence: Art from Life, an exhibition held in 2024 at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide presented by Getty.
ABOUT THIS VOLUME
Pages: 74
Dimensions: 8 x 10 in.
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect bound
Process: Risograph and digital
Projects in the Exhibition | 3
Together at the Edge: Reflections on Emergence | 7
Stacy Switzer
Envisioning Just Futures: Reflections on Emergence | 13
Yewande Pearse
A Brief Dictionary of Poetic Biological Phenomena | 23
Eduardo Padilha
Long in the Tooth and the Shadow | 29
Dan Samorodnitsky
1,000 Days | 35
Drew Endy and Jennifer Willet in Conversation with Yewande Pearse
Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity: Remarks on the Opening of Emergence | 43
Eduardo Padilha, Corinne Okada Takara, Marie Bannier Hélaouët, Michael Jones McKean, Ionat Zurr, Albert Wu, Callie R. Chappell, Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong and Henry Tan in Conversation with David Kim
A Feeling for the Organism: What It Means to Actually Work with Biology | 55
Claire L. Evans
Staging a Cell Memorial Service for Emergence | 61
Annie Zeng
From “ aPrayer: Memorial Service for Microorganisms and Artificial Cells and Lives” | 65
Hideo Iwasaki
Selected Bibliography and Suggested Readings | 73
About Emergence
Emergence assembled artists, scientists, and artist-scientists working at the forefront of synthetic biology and contemporary art. Documentation of their projects as well as relevant writings and interviews, planning sketches, and other contextualizing materials are assembled in this catalog. Some contributors draw from their work in medical and transdisciplinary research laboratories, where they confront new categories of life that destabilize our understandings of sentience, hybridity, and artificiality. Others engage the tools of synthetic biology as materials for creative experimentation and studio-based inquiry. Many contributors argue for decolonizing science and expanding access to biotechnologies through DIY and community science initiatives. Across Emergence, audiences and participants are invited to contemplate our human capacities for creation, destruction, recklessness, renewal, and hope. The exhibition prompts us to ask: Who has agency in this moment of making, learning, and living with? What forms of life are we choosing to cultivate? What will we nurture, and what might we leave behind?
Projects in the Exhbition
MultiPlanetary Garden
AfroRithm Futures Group
Crying Organoids
Marie Bannier Hélaouët and Albert Wu
IndiGROW
Callie R. Chappell and Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong
of kin and bone
Michael Jones McKean
Apoptotic Bodies
Eduardo Padilha
CyberBiome and MicroPET Prototype
Pat Pataranutaporn
Floating Future Gardens
Corinne Okada Takara
Pillars of Creation
Henry Tan and Masato Takemura
The Use of Life (in Relation to the Industry of Men)
Tissue Culture & Art Project
Fathomers is a creative research institute dedicated to producing sites and encounters that challenge us to live and act differently in the world. Fathomers cultivates the ideas of diehard dreamers, commissions projects that seem far-fetched, and collaborates with thinkers across disciplines to expand the limits of scale, scope, and support for artist-led projects.
Emergence is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty.