One Molecule Said Yes to Another (And Life Was Born)

Anna Matsumoto @anna_matsumoto_

Anna Matsumoto is a computer scientist and interaction designer integrating haptic touch into audio-visual technology to unlock richer sensory experiences.

Bhumikorn Kongtaveelert @bahuu.k

Bhumikorn “Bhu” Kongtaveelert (b. 2003, Nakhonsawan, Thailand; he/him) is an installation artist and researcher working with immersive, multi-channel moving-image installations projected onto “screen-sculptures”: soft, often translucent surfaces stretched across rigid frames. His practice explores collective memory and more-than-human agencies embedded in water, natural hazards, global supply chains, and family history, primarily through oral history.

Darren Zhu @darrenzhu

Darren Zhu is a synthetic biologist and metascientist based in San Francisco. He explores the epistemic and aesthetic implications of emerging technologies, particularly as they pertain to scientific discovery and creativity. Through a mix of video essay, interactive installation, and experimental documentary, his creative work plays at the boundary of the natural versus artificial and scientific versus speculative. Darren was a member of Antikythera at the Berggruen Institute, a Creative Science member of NEW INC at the New Museum, and resident at MESH Studio in the Digital Architectures Lab. His work has been supported by the Thiel Foundation, Gates Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, and Protocol Labs. Currently, he is the founder of a new consumer biotech startup, Culture.

Eydn Spector Delgass @trustthecrow

Ian Margo @3_fieldware

Ian Margo is a digital artist and researcher focused on the intersection between language, technology and economy. Working with a wide range of media such as video, software, interface design, experimental essay, generative AI, 3D, blockchain, datamoshing, performance and interactive installations, his practice examines language and its entanglement with material and political processes, with a particular focus on value production, tokenisation and objectification, understanding language and markets as operative media within contexts of visual rupture and intrinsic hyperconnectivity. His practice has been presented through exhibitions, screenings, performances and academic contexts across Europe, Asia and the United States, including institutions, festivals and platforms such as CEDAR (Shanghai), Grey Area Festival (San Francisco), ADAF (Athens Digital Arts Festival), Hangar (Barcelona), Matadero Madrid and NYU Shanghai. He is co-founder of 邊界_RG, an artist-based group focused on machine learning, cognition, memory and interface design. As a researcher, he has published in DIFFRACTIONS and the Institute of Network Cultures. He is currently part of the SYBIL ARC2 residency program in Berlin. Ian recently presented his Ethereum genesis release, d/wb (desert/wet box) in collaboration with Fakewhale. Composed of three interrelated works—wet box, third extension and fieldware—the project explores abstraction as an operative force within artificial intelligence, semiotics and contemporary economies, examining how signs are produced and activated as vectors of value.

Jude Wolf @art.of.jude

Jude Wolf (b. Denver, CO) (he/him) is a queer visual artist based in the Bay Area. His work centers on the entanglement of the natural world and the human figure to examine the body as a porous site of memory. Through distorted limbs grafted with biota, his paintings probe whether wounds are points of entry or exorcism. Jude creates unsettling yet tender dioramas of his mind's ecosystem to resist legibility, the binary body, and simplified trauma narratives.

Kelsey Chen @silkpunkbaby

Kelsey Chen (she/her) is a scholar and a multidisciplinary artist. In her scholarly work, she studies speculative and science fiction grounded in scientific/technical traditions outside of a Western techno-science, focusing on _silkpunk_ and Taoist scientific imaginaries. In her art practice, she is dedicated to trying to picture the true form of things, particularly those which are typically occluded or diffused, working across painting, sculpture, weaving, book-making, and performance.

Mai Kao @kk.shucko

Mai Kao is a producer and DJ based in San Francisco. As kk.Shucko, their sound draws from the luster of the tangible world – gelatin, glass, crystalline needles – to construct imagined biomes within ambient and club music contexts. They have released work on soak, Ommaya Records, and Club Moniker, along with past live sets across the Bay and NYC, including appearances at Light and Sound Design, Osmosis In the Trees, and tiat. Outside of production and live performance, they run EEL Automaton, a radio residency at SutroFM and party series unearthing the hyperreal edges of club ritual.

Miguel Novelo @xmiguelnovelo

Novelo, focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies ☄️, technoshammanic installations 👻, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses🫠. Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. Currently a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

Statement: My art is technoshamanic, combining emerging technologies and indigenous knowledge—translating matter/energy/ghost/machine into access to the non-human perspective. I make systems/rituals/myths. I embrace mistranslations, uncertainty, simulations, and novelty. I depict systems, ins and outs. I create scenarios in which avatars and characters reimagine our perception of the world. Preach, listen, and invoke change. I utilize world-building, emerging media, and humor to generate myth, dialogue, and experience. I long for status-quo earthquakes, work with the unexpected, dance with data, feel ecological grief, and become non-human. In my work, I make machines that allow me to move like a bat, be judged by a pelican, and confess to an asteroid. Using humor, serious play, and absurd interactions as communication tools, I invite the audience to engage in non-human perspectives and speculative futures through nonsense possibilities. I ask the audience to multi-state sights, to challenge static perspectives. I practice interdisciplinary, research-based art through time-based new media, generative digital art, game engines, expanded cinema, participatory performance, interactive sculptures, and poetry. I focus on the intersection of geopolitical and cybernetic spaces—creating bridges between characters, landscape, and experience. My work is inspired by eco-horror storytelling/video game development, biofeedback user interfaces / object-oriented ontologies, geology studies, animal communication, and computer science. I want to become an active shaker in media ecology, create my own language, and make machines that give us access to alternative realities; I strive to make living art, an ever-changing, never-done process.

Samuel Minev-Benzecry @samyminev

Film photographer and undergraduate at Stanford from Manaus, Brazilian Amazonia, Samuel aims to capture the rawness of life in the Anthropocene in the places where its wounds are wide open. Beyond film photography, Samuel has interests in language preservation, food systems, and environmental history. His most recent work, PARDES (2026), is centered on cattle carcasses found in BR-319, a mostly unpaved highway in Northern Brazil at the center of environmental controversies for the potential for deforestation it brings to the Amazon region.

Siddharth Doshi

Siddharth is a materials scientists who explores how we can create new sensory experiences through materials design. He grew up In Sydney, Australia and lives in Pasadena CA, where he is a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. He did his PhD at Stanford, where he worked on materials that can change their visual appearance, or cesia, by drawing inspiration from octopus skin.

Stephanie Zhang @emergentvessels

Stephanie Zhang is an artist, scientist, and researcher whose work explores how order emerges from chaos. Rooted in complex dynamical systems and phenomenology, her practice deconstructs and reconstitutes material reality to give rise to emergent forms of life. In her lab-studio, she 3D-bioprints self-assembling living sculptures using novel bioinks composed of fungal and cellular matter— working with life as medium. Her work becomes a ritual of transfiguration: cracking open material reality to let something other assemble through it.

Statement: What does it mean to create with life itself as a medium? These sculptures are experiments in transfiguring life — each piece grown from engineered cellular bioinks, tracing the hidden architectures of vascular networks. Vascularization exemplifies the universal physical laws that govern life: order arising from chaos. Life is a dissipative structure, a local instantiation of order contributing to global entropy. These vessels are not static; they are processes, emergence made visible, revealing the aliveness underlying all phenomena. In these forms, one encounters both intimacy and vastness. They bear witness to the interconnectedness of existence and ask: what is the basic unit of aliveness? How does life organize itself? What is left behind -- and what is gained -- when phenomena shift between mediums? Emergent Vessels is an invitation to witness, to inhabit, and to feel the spaces between matter and energy, art and science, system and life.

Wendi Yan @wendiyan

Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to probe and play with the artifice of knowledge. She holds an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University and a M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. She was an inaugural member of the Steve Jobs Archive Fellowship (2023), the Grand Prix recipient of the 6th VH Award by Hyundai Motor Group (2025), and the inaugural resident at A24 Labs (2026). Her work has been exhibited at international institutions including HEK (Basel), Ujazdowski Castle CCA (Warsaw) and Hyundai Motorstudio (Beijing).

X.S. Hou @_vi_xs_

www.x-s.work b. Beijing; X.S. has exhibited at Offline Gallery, Plexus Projects, Fourth World Festival, and _p_a_l_l_a_s. Their work has been featured in Artnet, ArtNews, Whitehot Magazine, and more.

Zoë Kyn Rehnborg @protozo.e

Statement: My practice is first and foremost an act of attention — a sustained look at microbial worlds we inhabit but rarely notice. Informed by my background in biology, my work explores the ecological and existential dimensions of decay, with a particular focus on microorganisms as agents of transformation in both natural systems and human narratives. I work with organic materials such as soil, mycelium, wood, and beeswax to create sculptural forms that engage with the intertwined processes of decomposition and regeneration. Central to my recent practice is scoby, the biofilm that forms in the fermentation of kombucha. Illuminated from within, my scoby sculptures cast light on the structures and textures of microbial architecture, enabling an encounter with the microbial world not as something invisible or abstract, but as something luminous, intricate, and worthy of reverence. Through sculpture, I explore how biological cycles reframe identity, loss, and interconnectedness across human and more-than-human worlds. In this, fungi and bacteria are my trusted guides and collaborators — simultaneously memento mori and memento vivere, reminders of life's transience and celebrations of its continuity. My practice is a devotional act: a love letter to the microbial world, and an invitation to attend to the unseen systems that shape our lives.

Stephanie Zhang @emergentvessels

Stephanie Zhang is an artist, scientist, and researcher whose work explores how order emerges from chaos. Rooted in complex dynamical systems and phenomenology, her practice deconstructs and reconstitutes material reality to give rise to emergent forms of life. In her lab-studio, she 3D-bioprints self-assembling living sculptures using novel bioinks composed of fungal and cellular matter— working with life as medium. Her work becomes a ritual of transfiguration: cracking open material reality to let something other assemble through it.

Statement: What does it mean to create with life itself as a medium? These sculptures are experiments in transfiguring life — each piece grown from engineered cellular bioinks, tracing the hidden architectures of vascular networks. Vascularization exemplifies the universal physical laws that govern life: order arising from chaos. Life is a dissipative structure, a local instantiation of order contributing to global entropy. These vessels are not static; they are processes, emergence made visible, revealing the aliveness underlying all phenomena. In these forms, one encounters both intimacy and vastness. They bear witness to the interconnectedness of existence and ask: what is the basic unit of aliveness? How does life organize itself? What is left behind -- and what is gained -- when phenomena shift between mediums? Emergent Vessels is an invitation to witness, to inhabit, and to feel the spaces between matter and energy, art and science, system and life.