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Creative Residency

Creative Residency

A 3 month residency at the intersection of creativity and synthetic biology

Creative Residency

A 3 month residency at the intersection of creativity and synthetic biology

Creative Residency

A 3 month residency at the intersection of creativity and synthetic biology

Creative Residency

A 3 month residency at the intersection of creativity and synthetic biology

The Ginkgo Creative Residency was born out of Ginkgo's constant search for innovative ways to design with biology and belief that multidisciplinary thinking has the power to catalyze critical insights into our shared futures on this planet and beyond. And so, as biology becomes easier to engineer, the Ginkgo Creative Team sought to open up our foundry to creative collaboration. Thus the Ginkgo Creative Residency—a joint initiative spearheaded and curated by Ginkgo Bioworks and design agency Faber Futures—was born. The Residency provides an experimental platform for creative thinkers to explore both the potential and implications of synthetic biology.
The Ginkgo Creative Residency was born out of Ginkgo's constant search for innovative ways to design with biology and belief that multidisciplinary thinking has the power to catalyze critical insights into our shared futures on this planet and beyond. And so, as biology becomes easier to engineer, the Ginkgo Creative Team sought to open up our foundry to creative collaboration. Thus the Ginkgo Creative Residency—a joint initiative spearheaded and curated by Ginkgo Bioworks and design agency Faber Futures—was born. The Residency provides an experimental platform for creative thinkers to explore both the potential and implications of synthetic biology.
The Ginkgo Creative Residency was born out of Ginkgo's constant search for innovative ways to design with biology and belief that multidisciplinary thinking has the power to catalyze critical insights into our shared futures on this planet and beyond. And so, as biology becomes easier to engineer, the Ginkgo Creative Team sought to open up our foundry to creative collaboration. Thus the Ginkgo Creative Residency—a joint initiative spearheaded and curated by Ginkgo Bioworks and design agency Faber Futures—was born. The Residency provides an experimental platform for creative thinkers to explore both the potential and implications of synthetic biology.
Blurry microscope imagery with overlaid letters representing the four nucleotides of DNA: A's, T's, C's, and G's.

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.

Portrait of a woman with colorful, digitally overlaid biological forms shrouding her face like a mask.
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Interspecies Gossip
Portrait of a woman with colorful, digitally overlaid biological forms shrouding her face like a mask.

Interspecies Gossip by 2020 Creative Residents Monika Seyfried and Cyrus Clarke, who developed Grow Your Own Cloud—an exploration of DNA data storage in plants.

Interspecies Gossip by 2020 Creative Residents Monika Seyfried and Cyrus Clarke, who developed Grow Your Own Cloud—an exploration of DNA data storage in plants.

A collection of Petri dishes filled with the brown and tan remnants of decaying material samples.
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Decay by Design
A collection of Petri dishes filled with the brown and tan remnants of decaying material samples.

Decay by Design by 2019 Creative Resident Andrea Ling, who explored designing for living in a world filled with waste.

Decay by Design by 2019 Creative Resident Andrea Ling, who explored designing for living in a world filled with waste.

A short anthology of various biosensors and their typological shape responsible for sensing.
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Anthology of biosensors and their typological shape
A short anthology of various biosensors and their typological shape responsible for sensing.

Paper Biosensor Sketches by 2018 Creative Resident Yasaman Sheri, who explored prototyping for physical sensing beyond vision.

Paper Biosensor Sketches by 2018 Creative Resident Yasaman Sheri, who explored prototyping for physical sensing beyond vision.

A woman's torso wearing a shear, robe-like top, lightly dyed with a dappled purple pigment.
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Project Coelicolor: Scale, Void, Assemblages
A woman's torso wearing a shear, robe-like top, lightly dyed with a dappled purple pigment.

Project Coelicolor: Scale, Void, Assemblages by inaugural 2017 Ginkgo Creative Resident Natsai Audrey Chieza, who helped found the residency as well as being its first participant. Project Coelicolor explores sustainable textile dying with pigment-producing bacteria.

Project Coelicolor: Scale, Void, Assemblages by inaugural 2017 Ginkgo Creative Resident Natsai Audrey Chieza, who helped found the residency as well as being its first participant. Project Coelicolor explores sustainable textile dying with pigment-producing bacteria.

Additional information

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Additional information

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Additional information

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Follow the Creative Residency on Instagram or check the Residency website for updates about when applications for our 6th resident will open.

Follow the Creative Residency on Instagram or check the Residency website for updates about when applications for our 6th resident will open.

Project credits

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Project Credits

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Project Credits

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The Ginkgo Creative Residency is a joint initiative spearheaded and curated by Ginkgo Bioworks and design agency Faber Futures. Residency Curator & Mentors: Christina Agapakis & Natsai Audrey Chieza; Residency Mentor: Joshua Dunn; Coordinator: Grace Chuang.

The Ginkgo Creative Residency is a joint initiative spearheaded and curated by Ginkgo Bioworks and design agency Faber Futures. Residency Curator & Mentors: Christina Agapakis & Natsai Audrey Chieza; Residency Mentor: Joshua Dunn; Coordinator: Grace Chuang.