Emergence Catalog: Pillars of Creation
Emergence Catalog: Pillars of Creation
Pillars of Creation
Henry Tan and Masato Takemura
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: 48
Dimensions: 8 x 10 in.
Cover: Paperback
Binding: Perfect bound
Process: Risograph and digital
Introduction | 1
Natasha Boyd
About Henry Tan and Masato Takemura | 6
On Dreams, Hybrid Entities, and the Ethics of Manipulating Life | 9
Henry Tan in Conversation with Yewande Pearse
Miniature Brains the Size of a Pea Are Sending Out Brain Waves for the First Time | 25
Thiago Arzua
A Toast to the Genetic Code | 29
Henry Tan
Searching for the Meaning of Life | 31
Henry Tan in Conversation with Komkrit Uitekkeng
The Pursuit of Immortality: Poems of Personal Elixir | 35
Henry Tan and Collaborators
The Age of Agelessness: The Race to Bottle the Fountain of Youth | 39
Frank Swain
From “Night V. The Relapse” | 45
Edward Young
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.