If DNA is the “code of life”, what new perspectives can help us read, think, story and make worlds with biology? The latest incarnation of the Creative Residency centers around meaning; more specifically, how have language, metaphor, and fiction shaped synthetic biology, and can we find new scripts to generate other meanings?
Human-centered language is represented through sound, gesture, spoken word, written script or visual elements. These are context-specific symbols, and through their various forms constantly evolve as both passenger and shape-maker to the society and culture they exist within. For language to “work”, a sender and a receiver need to enter into active exchange or dialogue.
Synthetic biology relies on a plethora of metaphors, analogies, origin stories and science fiction narratives to describe its technical underpinning and utility, as well as its promise for planetary betterment. Depending on who is doing the talking, to whom, and to what end, the field borrows language from fields like computer engineering: “parts” can be “standardised” and “assembled” to create “self replicating machines”. Meanwhile theological references like “Noah’s Ark” are commonly used to depict the benevolence of research areas like metagenomics for the preservation of biodiversity. Reducing biological systems to components pieces while removing the parts we don’t understand, enables us to focus on what can be controlled to make biology predictable and therefore easier to engineer. In the lab and removed from the ecological context of biology, what meanings are lost, what meanings are created? What other ways exist of crafting language and therefore outcomes in synthetic biology?
For our 5th iteration of the Ginkgo Creative Residency, e are thrilled to welcome Ayana Zaire Cotton as Ginkgo’s 2021 Creative Resident! During their three month residency at Ginkgo, Ayana will converge the disciplines of art, writing, and programming to weave experimental, speculative fiction through a triptych of short stories taking root in Cykofa, a parallel universe. As Ginkgo’s creative in residence, Ayana will continue their practice of reverence, remembrance, and worldbuilding using language. Building on their experience constructing generative databases as well as themes identified in their recent body of research titled “Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation, and Abolition”, Ayana will collect layers of meaning from the Ginkgo lab and algorithmically weave them into three short stories bringing us into the mythology of CykofaNorth Carolina Black River. The stories will be narrated from the a perspective of a bald cypress tree over 2,600 years old and of a young, dark-skinned, non-binary biotechnologist living in Cykofa.
Work from our previous Creative Residents can be found both below, and on the Ginkgo Creative Residency website.
If DNA is the “code of life”, what new perspectives can help us read, think, story and make worlds with biology? The latest incarnation of the Creative Residency centers around meaning; more specifically, how have language, metaphor, and fiction shaped synthetic biology, and can we find new scripts to generate other meanings?
Human-centered language is represented through sound, gesture, spoken word, written script or visual elements. These are context-specific symbols, and through their various forms constantly evolve as both passenger and shape-maker to the society and culture they exist within. For language to “work”, a sender and a receiver need to enter into active exchange or dialogue.
Synthetic biology relies on a plethora of metaphors, analogies, origin stories and science fiction narratives to describe its technical underpinning and utility, as well as its promise for planetary betterment. Depending on who is doing the talking, to whom, and to what end, the field borrows language from fields like computer engineering: “parts” can be “standardised” and “assembled” to create “self replicating machines”. Meanwhile theological references like “Noah’s Ark” are commonly used to depict the benevolence of research areas like metagenomics for the preservation of biodiversity. Reducing biological systems to components pieces while removing the parts we don’t understand, enables us to focus on what can be controlled to make biology predictable and therefore easier to engineer. In the lab and removed from the ecological context of biology, what meanings are lost, what meanings are created? What other ways exist of crafting language and therefore outcomes in synthetic biology?
For our 5th iteration of the Ginkgo Creative Residency, e are thrilled to welcome Ayana Zaire Cotton as Ginkgo’s 2021 Creative Resident! During their three month residency at Ginkgo, Ayana will converge the disciplines of art, writing, and programming to weave experimental, speculative fiction through a triptych of short stories taking root in Cykofa, a parallel universe. As Ginkgo’s creative in residence, Ayana will continue their practice of reverence, remembrance, and worldbuilding using language. Building on their experience constructing generative databases as well as themes identified in their recent body of research titled “Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation, and Abolition”, Ayana will collect layers of meaning from the Ginkgo lab and algorithmically weave them into three short stories bringing us into the mythology of CykofaNorth Carolina Black River. The stories will be narrated from the a perspective of a bald cypress tree over 2,600 years old and of a young, dark-skinned, non-binary biotechnologist living in Cykofa.
Work from our previous Creative Residents can be found both below, and on the Ginkgo Creative Residency website.
If DNA is the “code of life”, what new perspectives can help us read, think, story and make worlds with biology? The latest incarnation of the Creative Residency centers around meaning; more specifically, how have language, metaphor, and fiction shaped synthetic biology, and can we find new scripts to generate other meanings?
Human-centered language is represented through sound, gesture, spoken word, written script or visual elements. These are context-specific symbols, and through their various forms constantly evolve as both passenger and shape-maker to the society and culture they exist within. For language to “work”, a sender and a receiver need to enter into active exchange or dialogue.
Synthetic biology relies on a plethora of metaphors, analogies, origin stories and science fiction narratives to describe its technical underpinning and utility, as well as its promise for planetary betterment. Depending on who is doing the talking, to whom, and to what end, the field borrows language from fields like computer engineering: “parts” can be “standardised” and “assembled” to create “self replicating machines”. Meanwhile theological references like “Noah’s Ark” are commonly used to depict the benevolence of research areas like metagenomics for the preservation of biodiversity. Reducing biological systems to components pieces while removing the parts we don’t understand, enables us to focus on what can be controlled to make biology predictable and therefore easier to engineer. In the lab and removed from the ecological context of biology, what meanings are lost, what meanings are created? What other ways exist of crafting language and therefore outcomes in synthetic biology?
For our 5th iteration of the Ginkgo Creative Residency, e are thrilled to welcome Ayana Zaire Cotton as Ginkgo’s 2021 Creative Resident! During their three month residency at Ginkgo, Ayana will converge the disciplines of art, writing, and programming to weave experimental, speculative fiction through a triptych of short stories taking root in Cykofa, a parallel universe. As Ginkgo’s creative in residence, Ayana will continue their practice of reverence, remembrance, and worldbuilding using language. Building on their experience constructing generative databases as well as themes identified in their recent body of research titled “Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation, and Abolition”, Ayana will collect layers of meaning from the Ginkgo lab and algorithmically weave them into three short stories bringing us into the mythology of CykofaNorth Carolina Black River. The stories will be narrated from the a perspective of a bald cypress tree over 2,600 years old and of a young, dark-skinned, non-binary biotechnologist living in Cykofa.
Work from our previous Creative Residents can be found both below, and on the Ginkgo Creative Residency website.
