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!
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