yuningchen

陈昱凝
Yuning Chen

Biodesign
Feminist STS
More-Than-Human

Ciao! I am Yuning Chen, a PhD candidate between Design Informatics (Edinburgh College of Art) and STIS (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies) at University of Edinburgh.

With a background in environmental science and design engineering, I am fascinated by the practice of designing with living organisms. And more importantly, how working with more-than-human life could challenge anthropocentric perspectives entrenched in our capitalist ecologies.

My practice-based research looks into more-than-human ethics in biodesign and the broader biotechnological practices, with a particular focus on labour justice and practice of resistance.

CV

Project:
Morality Calculus
Morality Calculus Food Theatre
Labour Provenance
Bevergising Spirits of Asilomar
Scents of Asilomar
Microbial Revolt
Carbon Alchemy
Plant Reality Set
Project Habitate
Mobius

Email
Google Scholar
Instagram

Feel free to contact me for collaborations or brainstorming ideas!

Morality Calculus

Morality Calculus is a bioart installation that interrogates the prevalent mechanistic view of life in synthetic biology. Through the creation of hybrid bread fermented with yeast-human cells, the artwork embodies the act of reducing complex lifeforms to mere collections of engineering parts, akin to 'lego bricks.'

The installation poses the questions: If living organisms are perceived as mechanical vessels containing functional genetic components, how do we 'calculate' the moral status of a yeast-human cell? Is it a mere combination of the moral status of source organisms, defined by the ones with higher moral status or affected by the resulting traits they exhibit?

These queries are further complicated by the vast ecology of shadow organisms that have contributed to the cell adhesion experiment for the yeast-human cell, by providing resistance genes, gene-editing enzymes, or serums for culturing media. Often being backgrounded by the effective components they provide, the search for these organisms in the databases has been highly challenging. The hidden labourers shown in the exhibition hint at the multitude of life at stake in the artwork's central question: the moral implications of simplifying complex lifeforms into functional units.

In essence, Morality Calculus invites viewers to confront the ethical dimensions of synthetic biology's mechanistic world-view, provoking discussions on the moral status of engineered lifeforms and the often-overlooked contributions of countless more-than-human labourers to scientific endeavours.

Credit:
Yuning Chen
Elise Cachat

Special Thanks to:
Oron Catts
Ionat Zurr
Tarsh Bates
Ugne Baronaite
Iseabail Farquhar
Alex Arrese-Igor Royuela
Emily Johnston
Larissa Pschetz
Rachel Harkness
Jane Calvert
Mark Kobine
Luca Cocconi

03-05/2024

Bread made of human (HEK 293)-yeast(BJ4365) hybrid cells in petri dish

Installation displaying organisms participated in the hybridisation experiment

Custom made blocks representing human cells and yeast holding molecular hands after being genetically engineered

Installation parts showing origins of enzymes and nutrients used in cell culture

Flourescent bread crumbs (human cells are engineered with Green Flourescent Gene)

Morality Calculus Food Theatre

Alongside the display of the real lab-baked hybrid bread, an food theatre was held to provide a speculative tasting experience for the participants to explore their personal morality calculus. Drawing on Acampora’s Corporal Compassion, the menu is designed to feature a selection of food made by human-microbe hybrid cells, purported to have gone through similar bodily stress. For example, a baugette made by contortionists’ muscle cells hybridised with compressed yeast.

Through selecting, deliberating and finally, ingesting food with fellow participants, the audience was invited to calculate the incalculable – the moral weight of genetic parts from different living beings, and to reflect on the choices they’ve made during the process.

Credit:
Yuning Chen

In collaboration with:
Elise Cachat

Special thanks to:
Rohit Ashok Khot
Zunaira Aman
Keili Koppel
Ari Beckingham
Diane Lac
Larissa Pschetz
Rachel Harkness
Jane Calvert
Mark Kobine
Luca Cocconi

04-05/2024

Labour Provenance

Efforts to integrate living organisms in the design of new technologies are often motivated by prospects of greater sustainability and increased connection with more-than-human worlds. In this project, we critically discuss these motivations by analysing the vast and mostly hidden ecologies of more-than-human organisms implicated in a biodesign lab experiment. Through the lenses of labour theory, we investigate the extent to which organisms’ bodily functions and relationships can be subsumed into capitalist modes of production. In order to help reveal and map out the network of more-than-human contributors to biodesign, we develop a workshop method and a labour provenance analytical framework that identifies five types of more-than-human labourers, stretching from the centre to the periphery of biodesign.

More information can be found in the paper I’ve written with Elise Cachat and Larissa Pschetz named Labour Provenance as a lens to Reveal More-Than-Human Ecologies in Biological Design and HCI [Honorable Mention].

Credit:
Yuning Chen
Elise Cachat
Larissa Pschetz

Special Thanks to:
Oron Catts
Ionat Zurr
Tarsh Bates
Ugne Baronaite
Iseabail Farquhar
Alex Arrese-Igor Royuela
Emily Johnston
Larissa Pschetz
Rachel Harkness
Jane Calvert
Luca Cocconi

08-12/2024

Bevergising The Spirits of Asilomar

Manifesting the Spirits of Asilomar is two artistic interventions in the conference of The Spirits of Asilomar and The Future of Biotechnology, which is in part a tribute to the infamous conference about the ethics of recombinant DNA held in Asilomar 50 years ago. The “Spirit of Asilomar” has become emblematic of the self-organised discourse on soical responsibility in science and technology.

Manifesting the Spirits of Asilomar starts from the idea of making these ‘spirits’ experientially tangible, in particular, attending to those spirits that are less visible in the dominant narrative of scientific development, such as the places that hosts the debate, laboratory organisms who bore the risk and sacrifice, women staff who sustained the event, and other marginalised perspectives.

The idea went into two directions. For one, we bevergised these spirits into literal spirits, serving them during the cocktail hour of the conference. For the other, we collected a series of scents carrying fragments of Asilomar’s stories and created a collective disllation during the events itself.

Behind the physicalisation of the spirits, is the effort to mediate situated conversations: What are the lingering spirits of Asilomar today? How do they inhabit the current landscape of synthetic biology? And what is to be sustained or burried in order to move forward?

Credit:
Josh Evans
Erika Szymanski
Yuning Chen

02/2025

Scent of Asilomar

Manifesting the Spirits of Asilomar is two artistic interventions in the conference of The Spirits of Asilomar and The Future of Biotechnology, which is in part a tribute to the infamous conference about the ethics of recombinant DNA held in Asilomar 50 years ago. The “Spirit of Asilomar” has become emblematic of the self-organised discourse on soical responsibility in science and technology.

Manifesting the Spirits of Asilomar starts from the idea of making these ‘spirits’ experientially tangible, in particular, attending to those spirits that are less visible in the dominant narrative of scientific development, such as the places that hosts the debate, laboratory organisms who bore the risk and sacrifice, women staff who sustained the event, and other marginalised perspectives.

The idea went into two directions. For one, we bevergised these spirits into literal spirits, serving them during the cocktail hour of the conference. For the other, we collected a series of scents carrying fragments of Asilomar’s stories and created a collective disllation during the events itself.

Behind the physicalisation of the spirits, is the effort to mediate situated conversations: What are the lingering spirits of Asilomar today? How do they inhabit the current landscape of synthetic biology? And what is to be sustained or burried in order to move forward?

Credit:
Tarsh Bates
Devon Ward
Yuning Chen

02/2025

Microbial Revolt

Microbial Revolt is a workshop designed for biodesigners and biologists to redesign their laboratory tools into tools that support the revolt of the organisms they work with. Inspired by Chindogu, a anti-consumerist design movement from the 90s in Japan that creates useless objects, Microbial Revolt encourages its participants to render their lab tools useless for humans but supportive of the resistance of the organisms. It poses the question of: What if we view organism accidents, failures and contaminations as sites of negotiation for better collaborations or coexistence instead of problems to be silenced or resolved? What if we see frictions as generative sites of more-than-human ethical inqiuries?

More information can be seen in the publication:

Yuning Chen and Larissa Pschetz. 2024. Microbial Revolt: Redefining biolab tools and practices for more-than-human care ecologies. CHI '24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641981

Credit:
Yuning Chen

Special Thanks to:
Jiwei Zhou
Raphael Kim
Larissa Pschetz
Rachel Harkness
Jane Calvert
Luca Cocconi

2023-2024

Carbon Alchemy

Carbon Alchemy is an interactive sci-art installation that communicates the latest research on valorising renewable carbon sources from the atmosphere through means of synthetic biology. By breathing your CO2 into the machinary, you can see a generative visual representation of the potential product that could be produced by this hybrid living circuit.

Through engineering E-coli's metabolic pathways, a group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute has discovered a way to work with these engineered organisms to feed on CO2-derived formate as the sole carbon source to produce valuable compounds that can replace petrochemicals (such as monomers for bioplastics, artificial protein meals, and solvents for paints and lacquer).

For more information, please read more at
Kim, S., Lindner, S.N., Asian, S. et al. Growth of E. coli on formate and methanol via the reductive glycine pathway. Nat Chem Biol 16, 538-545 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-020-0473-5

Credit:
Yuning Chen
Jenny Bakker
Michael Cheung
Weihaw Huang

Special Thanks to:
Stephen Devlin
Luca Cocconi

2022

Plant Reality Set

Plant Reality Set is a set of wearables designed to take people into the reality of a plant’s sensory world. Wearing the set, you can taste the light, feel the electric stimulation caused by the wind, and hear the underground water acoustics sensed by plant roots.

The sensory translation process is intentionally designed with the principle of meaningful analogies instead of phenomenological translation. This entails not just taking people to plant’s perceptual reality but also translating these realities in ways that are analogically similar to human meanings. For example, light becomes a taste-based experience: for plants, light is an energy source -- much like food is for us. As such, the different taste delivered through the tongue wearable is mapped to the varying contrbution of light spectrums to photosynthetic, as sensed through the finger wearables.

Ultimately, plant reality set is an attempt to tap into the layer of reality inhabited by plants, and to explore displacing anthropocentric worldview through shifting our sensory milieu. Since different species feels one fragment of the world’s fullness, I am immensely fascinated by being able to learn from other species’ umwelten.

More information can be found at https://2021.rca.ac.uk/students/yuning-chan/

Credit:
Yuning Chen
Lamp Lee
Naomi Nakayama

Special Thanks to:
Ning Zhou
Karen Halliday

2021

Project Habitate

Project Habitate is a biomimetic wearable designed to transform humans into temporary habitats for lichen species threatened with secondary extinction following the decline of ash trees across temperate climates in Europe. By mimicking the ash tree’s bark—its distinctive texture, light permeability, porosity, and pH—we developed a material capable of sustaining these often-overlooked species during the ecological gap left by ash tree loss.

Shaping this material into wearable forms harnesses human mobility: as people walk outdoors, they help disperse lichen spores through the air, supporting their reproduction. In doing so, Project Habitate proposes a new model of participatory conservation—one where humans actively perform ecosystem services themselves, reframing a term traditionally used only to describe nonhuman contributions to ecosystems.

Credit:
Yuning Chen
Yishan Qin
Tom Hartley

In collaboration with:
Ruth Mitchell
Christopher Ellis
Katie Petty Saphon
Richard Edwards
Chris Cheeseman
Benjamin F. Maier
Robert Ewers
Shiying Zheng

Video Assistance:
Andrew Mulholland
Amy Mather
Patrick Smith
Loretta Smith

2020

Mobius

During my masters, everyone needs to make a chair in five weeks that represents their design propositions, the course is called Superform. I made Mobius, a transformable chair that invites explorations of various resting positions through physical interactions. This suits me a lot as I am a very restless person. As an interdisciplinary designer, I also deeply value epistemic flexibility. I am always quite fascinated by Esher, and through this chair, I want to explore the spatial shaping potency of one circular line.

Credit:
Yuning Chen

Special thanks to:
RCA metal and wood workshop staffz
章鱼(photography)

2018