Emergence Catalog: Floating Future Gardens
Emergence Catalog: Floating Future Gardens
Floating Future Gardens
Corinne Okada Takara
This project is part of Emergence, an initiative exploring how artists and scientists engage with synthetic biology to imagine new forms of life, agency, and authorship. First an exhibition and now in print, Emergence gathers thinkers from a variety of backgrounds to explore how synthetic biology and art-making can energize and inform each another.
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: 32
Dimensions: 8 x 10 in.
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect bound
Process: Risograph and digital
Introduction | 1
Natasha Boyd
About Corinne Okada Takara | 6
Floating Future Gardens Workshops | 9
Corinne Okada Takara
Kokedama: Molding Microbial Worlds | 11
Corinne Okada Takara
From “Effects of Types of Horticultural Activity on the Physical and Mental State of Elderly Individuals” | 15
Pei-Chun Tu, Wen-Chen Cheng, Ping-Cheng Hou, and Yu-Sen Chang
From “Soil and Human Health: Current Status and Future Needs” | 16
Eric C. Brevik, Lindsey Slaughter, Bal Ram Singh, Joshua J. Steffan, David Collier, Paul Barnhart, and Paulo Pereira
Of Carved Radishes, Recipes, and Rituals/Gratitude as Co-Voyagers | 19
Corinne Okada Takara
Towards Polyculture: What the Plant Kingdom Can Teach Us About Creating a More Equitable Science World | 27
Beronda L. Montgomery
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.