Past Premonitions and Future Fossils

Genspace’s 2025 Artists in Residence, Caroline Chou and Lorraine Cruz, are excited to invite you to “Past Premonitions and Future Fossils” - their end-of-residence AIR Share! In presenting their projects, Caroline and Lorraine will bring us into their questioning around interspecies collaboration/interdependence, the liminality between being and becoming, cultural artifacts and what makes culture, the deepening integration/interruption of human made materials into living beings, and the choosing - or not choosing - of a future we want to live in.

Caroline’s project With(in): Cordyceps fungi grow inside insects, altering their hosts’ behavior, killing them, and redistributing nutrients back into the cycle. When cultivated, they are grown in isolation on rice substrate. With(in) imagines Cordyceps militaris’ quest to reunite with their insect partners, a cycle that human intervention and sterile cultivation has interrupted. In an attempt to re-situate Cordyceps within a web of relationships, mycelium in nutrient broth is pumped into the terrarium’s soil. Scientific frameworks are challenged: control is relinquished, contamination is embraced, nothing is in isolation. Through collaboration, complexity, intuition, and interspecies dialogue, life and death can be seen as a cycle of being and becoming, and of bodies within bodies.

Lorraine’s project Living in a Plastisphere investigates how microbial communities that colonize and adapt to plastic, known as plastispheres, mirror human dependence on plastics and reveal how plastic is reshaping ecosystems at both micro and macro scales. The project examines how mycelia and bacteria collaborate to degrade synthetic plastics: fungi such as Pestalotiopsis microspora metabolize plastic in oxygen-limited environments, while bacteria like Ideonella sakaiensis secrete PETase enzymes that break it into monomers. By examining how these organisms collaborate to break down synthetic plastics, the project rethinks cycles of waste and asks how these processes might inspire alternatives to single-use manufacturing and extractive production.

Each artist will give a presentation on their scientific and creative evolutions, philosophies, and artistic interpretations. Presentations will be followed by a discussion with both artists facilitated by Alvaro Azcarraga, BioBAT Art Space’s Director of Operations and one of the 2024 inaugural Genspace Artists in Residence. Afterwards, there will be open social time with both artists to check out their scientific and artistic work set up in the lab. 

Refreshments will be served!

Meet the A.I.R.s!

Caroline Chou is a creative scientist with a multidisciplinary artistic practice centered on fungi-insect relations. Not bound to a particular medium, Caroline’s work is driven by interdisciplinary research and rooted in microbial ecologies and narrative. Inspired by the replenishing and interconnected relationships microbes have with the world around them, she aims to make science accessible through multiple senses and bring community, scientists, and systems of power together in conversation with one another.

carochou.com

IG: @caroachou

Lorraine Cruz (they/them) is a multidisciplinary researcher and designer working across physical and digital media, film, publications, social engagement, and data visualization. Their practice centers critical research and storytelling as tools for worldbuilding, seeking alternatives to extractive industries while speculating on possible futures. They hold a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from New College and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons. Cruz creates spaces and experiences that invite reflection, often confronting audiences with existential questions. They are currently an Artist-in-Residence at Genspace, where they develop biomaterials and experiment with plastic-eating microbes as part of broader research into the plastic crisis and bioremediation.

IG: @cruzzzin

https://lifeloops.world/

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