Bay Area artist Kate Nichols synthesizes nanoparticles to mimic structurally colored animals, grows artificial skin from microorganisms, and makes her own paints, following fifteenth-century recipes. The long tradition of painters as material innovators inspired Kate to become the first artist-in-residence in the Alivisatos Lab, a nanoscience laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her artwork has been featured on the cover of the journal Nature, on the TED stage, in the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway, and in The Leonardo Museum’s permanent collection. Kate has been named a TED Fellow, a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, and a Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellow. She was previously a resident at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and at the Vermont Studio Center, where she was a fellow. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, an MA in Visual Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Painting from Kenyon College. Kate lectures nationally and internationally at universities and museums, such as the San Jose Museum of Art, Stanford University, the University of Florida, and Northwestern University.

During the CRISPR (un) commons residency, Kate is creating a series of paintings depicting plant embryos whose genome she has edited using CRISPR-Cas9. The form of these circular paintings recalls the petri dishes in which these embryos grow. Presented horizontally, these paintings also suggest dark pools of water in which indiscernible, body-like forms glow as if lit from within.

“Without knowing the subject of this work, we might imagine we’re looking into our primordial past. (In fact, the series takes its title from the opening lines of Ovid’s creation story.) Yet, told that we are beholding the products of CRISPR, we instead imagine that we’re peering in the future—at which point, these paintings begin to function like the divination pools of old, reflecting back to us our innermost desires and fears.

The press presents CRISPR as new and futuristic, but the bacterial defense system it comes from is ancient. Moreover, the creative powers CRISPR promises are the stuff of our oldest stories—the prospect of transcending our corruptible flesh, and of participating in the creation of life (and the life-like.) These paintings speak to this longer view, and, in doing so, give us the sense that we are witnessing something at once very old—and very much in the act of becoming.”

- Kate Nichols, 2019

Andy Cavatorta is an artist and sculptor working with physical sound and robotics. His creative practice integrates emerging technologies with traditional crafts to discover new ways of locating meaning with sound. A graduate of the MIT Media Lab, he has over two decades of software engineering experience and most recently has collaborated with leading-edge recording artists such as Björk and Matthew Herbert.
Andy’s latest exhibits include MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), TED, and The Royal Opera House. He has been featured in documentaries by National Geographic and Vice, and is a recipient of the Lincoln prize.

During the CRISPR (un) commons residency Andy is collaborating with Alison Irvine to explore the emergence and potential applications of genetic engineering technologies as well as their ethical and social implications. In Other Mother, the team considers how CRISPR-Cas9 connects something as fundamentally human as the concept of memory to the simplest of single-celled organisms, and how recurrent neural networks might reinterpret these data inputs to shed light on what it means to be human.

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, curator, and artist working at the intersections of digital art, computational media, and biotechnology.

Dorothy’s writing has appeared in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. In 2017, her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture.
Dorothy currently serves as co-curator for REFRESH (a curatorial collective in partnership with Eyebeam), program manager for the Processing Foundation, and host for the podcast PRNT SCRN produced by Art Practical.
A San Francisco native, Dorothy received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and is currently a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is pursuing her doctorate.

During the CRISPR (un) commons residency, Dorothy is creating an interactive media piece inspired by hypertext fiction. Press 1 to Be Connected posits interactive voice response systems (phone trees) as narrative interface for a speculative fiction work that explores themes of agency, knowledge production (and dissemination), and systems of care. Participants will follow branching and intersecting storylines through character interactions, conceptions, and beliefs around CRISPR-Cas9 and gene editing -- all drawing on the artist’s interactions with scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute.

Alison Irvine is a performance artist and biologist. She is the founding organizer of the Biodesign Challenge — a global competition and educational program that pairs art and science students to envision the future of biotechnology. Alison has written articles on the intersection of art, science, and social justice for Popular Science Magazine, The Center for Genetics and Society, and Imagine Science Films.
A graduate of Eugene Lang College at the New School for Liberal Arts, Alison has studied political theater at The Freie Universität in Berlin and received the Hunt Fellowship for her theatrical work on the emergence of new biotechnologies and their implications in the context of social and economic inequities.
During the CRISPR (un) commons residency Alison is collaborating with Andy Cavatorta to explore the emergence and potential applications of genetic engineering technologies as well as their ethical and social implications. In Other Mother, the team considers how CRISPR-Cas9 connects something as fundamentally human as the concept of memory to the simplest of single-celled organisms, and how recurrent neural networks might reinterpret these data inputs to shed light on what it means to be human.

The Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) is a non-profit, academic partnership between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco that supports collaborative research projects across the Bay Area. The IGI’s mission is to develop and deploy genome engineering to cure disease, ensure food security, and sustain the environment for current and future generations. As pioneers in genome editing, functional genomics, and other cutting-edge technologies, IGI scientists continuously push the boundaries of science. The IGI is also committed to advancing public understanding of genome engineering and providing resources for the broader community.

Sheng-Ying Pao leads teams in Asia and the US around the development of technology-enabled art and interdisciplinary innovation. Her work has won several major awards, including the iF Design Award, the Red Dot Design Award, the MIT TechX Innovation Prize, and London Design Museum’s “best design of the year” designation. Sheng-Ying received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab where she was named MIT Cisco Fellow for two consecutive years and selected as the first MIT PhD Arts Scholar.

During the CRISPR (un) commons residency, Sheng-Ying is developing CRISPaper: paper made from CRISPR-altered crops. CRISPaper revisits the ancient craft of paper-making in light of current bioengineering techniques such as Baby Boom 1 (BBM1), which is being introduced to meiosis-disabled rice egg cells in order to make the asexual reproduction of rice possible. In CRISPaper, a modern innovation from western laboratories encounters traditional eastern culture and a discovery first disclosed via academic ``paper``-publishing reveals itself, embodied, through the poetic art of paper-crafting.

“As the technology in CRISPR-altered crops currently aims for sustainable agriculture for the developing world, what does sustainable really mean in life or in daily materials as fragile as paper that ultimately come to an end?”

-Sheng-Ying Pao, 2019