Biotopy

Ongoing Project.

Scientific Concept by Darren Zhu
Interaction System by Will Freudenheim
Sound Design by Jessica Shand
Visual Design, Project Organization by Wendi Yan

Biotopy is a philosophical experimentation, a biotic game demo and an art installation that explores bio-digital Symbiocine. It is a Pioreactor-based game engine that seeks to combine concepts from scientific discovery games with biotic games to allow citizen scientists around the world to collect, grow, and interact with different microbial populations. By growing microbial cultures in the bioreactors, players terraform a virtual planet.

As a team with backgrounds in synthetic biology, interactive systems, game design, history of science and procedural music, we have been developing this project to provoke questions of how biotic agents will live with virtual universes, and how scientific discoveries might be facilitated through collective play.

[Wendi, Jess] Demo presentation at the Unfiguring Conference, Harvard University. March 22, 2024.
[Darren] Talk at Santa Fe Institute. April 18, 2024.