Biotopy: A Biotic Game and Interactive Installation



Fig. 1:  Biotopy Game Interface


Abstract

Biotopy is a biotic game and interactive installation that speculates a more playful and collective mode of scientific discovery. Connecting bioreactors to game engines, it synthesizes scientific methods with gameplay mechanics. Players are citizen scientists, growing and interacting with microbial cultures to take care of a virtual creature on their computer. Biotopy is a playful interface meditating between the biotic and the digital, generating a novel space for both play and discovery.

Biotopy provokes questions of how biotic agents will live with virtual universes, how scientific discoveries could be facilitated through collective play, and how we might practice a more expansive scientific self.


Biotopy is a collaborative project by Will Freudenheim, Wendi Yan, and Darren Zhu.
R&D also included major contributions by Jessica Shand and Omar Rizwan.



I. Experimental Design

NEW INC Creative Science Dinner 


2024.10.26



Various dimensions

Pioreactors, Unreal game engine running on custom PC, monitors, microbial and environmental samples, 
custom 3D-printed PLA bases
Game development led by Will Freudenheim

NEW INC’s Creative Science Dinner returns for its fourth iteration, this time hosted by NOoSPHERE Arts, a cultural center at the nexus of art, climate, and environmental remediation. Featuring a menu by celebrated chef Chinchakriya Un (Kreung) and projects by NEW INC Creative Science Track Members, this dinner is a reflection on the process of remediating, healing, and reusing the materials and landscapes inherited from an industrial legacy.

For the Creative Science Dinner, Biotopy explores the relationship of human’s long history growing and fermenting culinary microbes, including yeast, koji, and spirulina, as well as with microbes from the environment, including water and soil samples from Newtown Creek.




II. Discussion

Essay in Interplay published by Caldo Worldwide


2024.11.15



Essay by Wendi Yan

 “Speculating An Affective Gaze in Scientific Practice” traces the thinking and making of Biotopy. 

Wendi Yan lays out the three guiding questions for Biotopy:

1) How can we harness crowd curiosity in knowledge production?
2) How do we bring biotic agents into playful interactions?
3) How might we practice a different scientific vision and, in turn, a more expansive scientific self?

Each question points to discussions in a specific topic: citizen science games, human-biology interactions, and scientific objectivity. Biotopy is a node between conceptual threads, which asks what emerges in the middle of the set of axes, spectrums, or contradictions between play and science, the biological and the digital, the objective and subjective.







“Biotopy designs a science fictional experience aiming at cultivating a new sense. Call it an aesthetic sense, an epistemic sense, or something else entirely. Through this new sense, Biotopy re-ontologizes the actors and relations in the epistemic practice of microbiology.”



ACTIVITIES

24.11 Essay published in Interplay, Caldo Worldwide PUBLICATION
24.10.26 NEW INC Creative Science Dinner #4: Rewilding, New York EXHIBITION
24.4.18 Generative Epistemics and Aesthetics, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM TALK
24.3.22 Unfiguring: Experiments in Art and Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA TALK