Updates and additions to the program and schedule will be added here for access on site during the meeting.

"Council of Foods" by Nonhuman Nonsense

The Council of Foods is an interactive digital meeting, where the foods themselves gather to discuss urgent political issues. Each food is represented by an AI model, prompted with different knowledges and ethical guidelines related to the social-ecological issues connected to that specific species. Our council members represent a diverse spectrum of food origins, including the mass-produced, locally grown, genetically modified, processed, heritage varieties etc. 

Meeting times (all in Chapel):

• Sunday 23 Feb 5:00pm

• Sunday 23 Feb 9:00pm

• Monday 24 Feb 4:00pm

• Monday 24 Feb 9:00pm

• Tuesday 25 Feb 4:00pm

• Tuesday 25 Feb 9:00pm

Pigeonwing Dance

“The Choreography of CRISPR”, a dance embodying and illuminating CRISPR DNA editing, was commissioned by the MIT Museum for “Gene Cultures” in 2022.  CRISPR has been compared to “rewriting the book of life” and is often explained in word-processing metaphors.  Choreographer Gabrielle Lamb used its choreographic drama instead as the prompt for movement research with her New York City-based company Pigeonwing Dance. The words used to describe CRISPR – twisting, cutting, inserting, copying, repeating, palindromes, clusters – became the vocabulary of an intricate dance of spiraling and folding patterns.  Life is movement, and movement is life, whether at the cosmic, the human, or the molecular scale. Prior to the performance, Lamb and the dancers give a short talk/demonstration discussing their creative process, its intersections with the sciences, and the importance of improvisation prompts in generating new work. 

At Asilomar Pigeonwing Dance will also perform several site-specific activations in response to conference themes – such as mirror life and the containment/deployment of genetically modified organisms.

Performances:

• Monday 24 Feb 4:00 - 4:15: "Mirror Life" performed outside Heather

• Monday 24 Feb 4:45 - 5:00: "Pandora's Box of Sea Urchins" performed outside Curlew

• Monday 24 Feb 8:00pm: The Arts of Asilomar: Creative Activations and Social Hour

Scents of Asilomar 

What does the Spirit of Asilomar and the future of biotech smell like? 

Scents of Asilomar is a collaborative creative project presented at The Spirit of Asilomar summit 2025, by Tarsh Bates, Devon Ward and Yuning Chen, in which we trouble olfactory interactions between biotechnological practices and more-than-human worldings. We collect and blend odours from diverse biotechnological environments and organisms to imagine, synthesise and co-create multi-species scents, spirits and futures.

Click this link to share your smell stories and help imagine future smells.

Supported by Umeå University and the Future Organisms project, Edinburgh Hub for Responsible Innovation

• Installation in Chapel through Tuesday

IndiGROW

Modern society straddles two worlds: the biotic (alive) and the abiotic (unalive). Biotic life is all around us: the gardens we enjoy, the food we eat, the wood we craft into furniture, and the organisms that form the basis of countless medicines. Yet, Western culture has continually pushed us to perceive the world around us as abiotic and unalive. Now, we sterilize our homes and box urban trees into miles of concrete: even nature, when made comfortable for us, is carefully curated for consumption. The forces of industrialization, capitalism, and consumerism have created distance between us and the living organisms upon which we depend. This disconnection has given rise to an “abiotic society”. This manifests in engineering biology itself, where now more than ever, living things are increasingly manipulated to behave like machines - being made unalive.

For Emergence, we present indigo dyeing as a bridge between the biotic and abiotic. Indigo dye forms the basis of countless dyeing practices from around the world including shibori, uqnatu, adire alabare, gorm ceilteach, cumbi, pha sin, haint blue, and denim jeans. 

• On display in Chapel through Tuesday

Beveragizing the Spirit of Asilomar

The “Spirit of Asilomar” captures observers’ surprise that the particular environment of Asilomar did seem to matter to the work conducted through the 1975 Conference on Recombinant DNA. Holding the conference at a retreat hideaway on the California coast, it seemed, encouraged participants to approach their work differently than had they gathered in windowless rooms at a characterless hotel, or even a university research center. Our creative intervention into what the Spirit of Asilomar smells and tastes like is designed to prompt attention not only to what dimensions of scientific events are remembered as important, and to how we consume histories about them, but also to how wider environments, including other-than-humans, are understood as part of the community who gathers and who influences collective work.

In this project, we will ‘beveragize’ the Spirit of Asilomar. Drawing on ideas of memory, repetition, place, time, smell and taste, we aim to create the ‘Spirit of Asilomar’ in drinkable form. We will serve customized drinks that evoke histories of the spirit of Asilomar through the memorable dimensions of smell and taste. Our aim is not simple commemoration or celebration, but to enable alternative trajectories for biotechnology through cross-disciplinary creation, and the consideration of nonhuman agencies and the taste of place.

Find these drinks at the bar during The Arts of Asilomar: Creative Activations and Social Hour, Monday 27 Feb 8:00pm

NOVA: The Gene Engineers

From WGBH: NOVA explores the history of genetic engineering and the possible risks and benefits of this area of research.

Original broadcast date: 03/16/77

https://archive.org/details/thegeneengineers/thegeneengineersreel1.mov

Playing in Chapel:

• Monday 24 February 4:15pm

• Tuesday 25 February 5:15pm